Punch Monkey Valentine Box

My son’s daycare class asked each family to decorate a box for Valentine’s day.  I figured I’d just cover a shoebox with some paper and have Seth attach some stickers to it.  But, a few of the families have already turned in their boxes and I got a peek at them today.  There were several who had done some cute things in lieu of the plain sticker-laden boxes of my childhood.  It got me thinking that perhaps I should step it up a notch….after all, I have a craft studio full of supplies.  So I came up with this design to hold his Valentines….

The box is one of our old metal punch kit boxes.  I purchased several awhile back and since they were just gathering dust, I put one to good use.  I started by cutting a hole in the center of the plastic lid with a pair of scissors.  I didn’t worry about making the opening straight and square as I knew I would be covering the top.  Next, I adhered a piece of textured Chocolate Chip Cardstock (with a cut out in the middle and rounded corners) to the top of the lid using Sticky Strip.

The punched monkey face was adapted from a design I saw on Flowerbug’s Inkspot blog.  Instead of a scallop circle face, I used a plain circle cut with our Circle Scissors Plus.  The look was a little more masculine and I could make the face somewhat proportional in size to the box.

The face was attached to the box with a piece of cardstock sticking up from the back center of the box.  The arms were created with strips of cardstock wrapping around the box.  I used sticky strip at the tips of the arms to hold the curved cardstock in place.

I had Seth stamp the letters of his name on white cardstock and I punched those out with a square punch and had him adhere them to the box top.  Next, we teamed up to punch hearts using the Heart to Heart punch and adhered those to the box front & top.  Definitely more work than the plain, sticker-laden box, but my sweet 5-year old loves it and can’t wait to take it to school.  Plus we spent some quality time together, so that makes it even more worthwhile!

Note: I apologize for the less-than-stellar photos.  I had to take these under low light conditions tonight.  I’ll try to get some photos tomorrow in better light.  Blog edit 2/12/10: I replaced most of the photos with better quality pictures and included one of Seth with our creation.