Through the years I've cycled through various crafty, projecty type hobbies - refinishing furniture, carving rubber stamps and making artist trading cards with the images, and painting rocks to name a few. Lately, I've gotten into upcycling thanks to the inspiration of my bestie (at whose instigation I got into some of the other activities). She has created some marvelous containers from old luggage that I hope she'll share on her blog when she has a moment to breathe.
1. So, I began with updating a 1960s train case by mod-podging some cool fabric left from recovering a small stool into the bottom and making a fabric cover to hide the hinge. To add a little umph to the outside, I added a strip of fabric around the metal edge at the top of the main container. These old cases are far more practical than other things we've tried for actual travel.
2. Next, I wanted a cool way to store and display my small collection of jewelry. Liz and I found this cabinet, that was originally white and rather dingy looking, at a vintage store on the Oregon coast.
3. The latest is an adorable train case I picked up at the annual antique show in our local Ocean Shores convention center. I stripped out the old lining, then after finding the perfect fabric, I studied what Liz had done in her cases and got to work.
I made tagboard templates for the rounded edges of the sides of both top and bottom to cut the fabric the right shape and size. For the lid, I covered a piece of tagboard with the fabric before gluing it in and covering the whole with mod-podge. For a finished look, I folded and glued the edges of the fabric prior to mod-podging them in.
The underside of the handle attachment caused the tagboard to curve so that it took carefully arranged heavy things to get it to adhere properly.
Now, it sits happily on my bathroom counter displaying those items I use every day (or at least the ones that look cool in the case!).
