Transforming the jewelry box

While hunting around on YouTube for things to watch, I stumbled on people taking small travel jewelry boxes and turning them into travel sewing kits. They pretty much had me at “kit.” I adore making kits. I’ve made fire-starting kits, knit kits, and sewing kits. Maybe more, I forget. Anyway, this first video sent me to Amazon and I ordered the Landici travel jewelry box.

Naturally, the first thing I did was rip the guts out of this nice, new jewelry box:

Then I needed some kind of box board to line the bottom of the box. Something like a cereal box. Unfortunately, I had already used my only cereal box for another project (the naked, half-full bag of cereal is sitting in a cupboard in the kitchen). Then I remembered the box came in a box! So I traced around the jewelry box and trimmed it down to fit in the bottom. Fabric was next and I picked the perfect piece:

Let me say, if you decide to try this project, don’t use Gorilla Glue to try and glue down the fabric to the box board liner. It doesn’t work. Hot glue would work but you can only glue little sections at a time. (Ask me how I know.) I would imagine a glue stick would work the best but I didn’t have one.

Be careful when ripping the guts out of your jewelry box because you can easily rip parts you don’t want damaged. In the picture above, you can see three clips holding a piece clamped to the back of the box. I ripped it by mistake and had to do a cover-up. The last pic is my completed travel embroidery kit. The box turned out to be a bigger than I was planning but it’s so much easier to find things when I need them than in the cloth bag/pouch I was using.

I love little, unexpected projects like this. And if the project involves a kit, well, it’s all to the better. If you make one, I’d love to see it!