Ta Da! The Amelia Earhart Shrine

Here it is! This is with the doors closed. This little box I got at a thrift store last year. It was a total piece of crap, covered in ugly brown contact paper, looked like maybe it had been used a Barbie clothes closet, because it has a little bar inside where you could hang little clothes. But it was wood, and wood is always salvagable. So I stripped the vinyl-y paper off it, painted it with gesso, painted it blue, then did a wash with a darker blue so it's not a flat color. I took the doors off and worked on those separately,praying I would be able to reattach them--they're kind of warped and I didn't write down which hinge went where.

Here you see on the left door a recognizable image of Amelia in her flight goggles. I carved this rubber stamp based on an old photo. She also used to wear a string of pearls with her flightsuit, so I outlined the door in pearls. The right door is supposed to look vaguely like plane propellors. I thought about going to the toy store and buying some party favor planes and using those but then I decided that because I have so much STUFF, I would challenge myself to use only what I had on hand to create what I needed. So, the propellor thingies are bottle caps with flip tops from injection bottles (from our IVF days) glued on top, then I cut out vaguely propellor-shaped bits from some copper tags I had. And hot glued it all together. Oh, and then they are all a wee bit different, with some added bit of hardware thrown in. I stained them with alcohol ink and then bits of coppery paint. I found a wing nut for the left door handle and some other handle-y thing for the right door. There's also another wing nut on the top with a bottle cap, a washer, and something else, all painted copper, just a little flight sculpture.