House Swarming!

Hello!  What's the buzz? :)  My name is Michele aka Dancingarden on the cricut messageboard.

So my craft table is trashed, and this project is why. :)
This month the focus is on the Sentimentals cartridge. I thought at first I'd do a scrapbook page, as that is my main choice of projects, but I kept looking at this beehive and bee and couldn't come up with a page idea, but I did come up with a gift box idea.

The box is my 6 sided iris-lidded box that I designed last winter on my Gypsy, and offered up in this post on my blog. The downloadable gypsy file for the box is on that post as well as instructions for assembly of the box; so I won't go into detail about making the box base.  I love this box even though it isn't perfect, and I'm glad I'd created it because a hexagon box was perfect for a bee themed project. :)

So first I cut my box out in brown cardstock. (all cardstock and printed cardstock for this project is DCWV)

I apologize for the quality of the pictures of my gypsy screen. This is a view of the filigree cut that is layered over the box. It's actually the beehive filigree layer welded together a few times with another little scroll-y thing to fill in the spaces. Here's what it looks like cut out.

I ran the filigree through my 5" xyron and adhered it to the box. You can see the beehive shape a lot better below. On the gypsy, the filigree runs off the page. I did that ntentionally; partly because I had trouble seeing the box edge through the filigree layer to see how close to the edge I was. And partly because I was lazy and figured it would be easy to just snip off the excess filigree, which I did. You'll notice I did not allow the filigree to run over the tab that is used to adhere the box together.

Once the filigree was attached, I assembled the box as directed on my blog's box post. As I mentioned in that post, you have the option of the top closing with the iris concaved or with it sticking up. For my beehive box, I chose the top sticking up.

I created a small shaped card from the beehive on my gypsy. It is attached with tiny rectangles, and one beehive is flipped so that the front and back will match when they are folded together. Here's the gypsy screen of the little card.

After cutting out the card, I decided to try something I hadn't done before. Some time ago I had bought one of those mini marker holders and a marker set but I hadn't used them yet. I took the card off and flipped it white side up on the mat. Then on my gypsy I wrote out a sentiment message for the inside of the card, and had my cricut write the message with the mini marker. It worked okay. My positioning of the card wasn't quite exact but it was still okay. I do think I'd rather have the gel pen holder and the gel pens though. Here's the sentiment on my G:

You can see the inside of the card below.
After assembling the card and bee layers, I stickled them all (filigree only) with Cinnamon Stickles. Once they were dry, I wound some craft wire into springs and attached them to the backs of the bees and the back of the card.

I tied the card onto the box with ribbon, and I'm done!

This box is perfect for a candle or other small gift. I plan to buy a beeswax candle to go in the box. :)

Please visit this post on my blog to download JUST the box cut file and view assembly instructions.

Or, please go to this link to download the entire cut file for this project: box, bees, card and all.

Thank you for looking and I hope you enjoyed seeing this project!

Michele (aka dancingarden)