in this tutorial I'm going to demonstrate how to make a riding chest out of cigar boxes the first thing you want to do is collect some cigar boxes I say use the paper kind because they're the easiest to find and the cheapest and they're also the easiest to modify we're going to be doing some modifications to these they do not have to be the same size as you can see I have two different stacks here where I've ordered them in the order of size so don't worry about having to have boxes that are all the same it will work out and it makes it kind of more interesting anyway I think in terms of number of boxes that you want to use it's really up to you probably at least two but I have I'm going to have two samples here that where I'm going to use four on one and five on the other now the top box is going to be the only box where you're going to be able to open the lid obviously because we'll be attaching these boxes to each other and so we're going to have to make some modifications to the other boxes so that you can still get inside them and so I'm going to walk through how to create some different openings in the Box I'll show you how to create some drop down front so that you can get inside and then cutting out areas where you can have a drawer and then in the sample at the other side here you'll notice that the bottom box is much deeper than the rest of the boxes so I'll show you how to create just a little flap lid that you can open up on the top so that you can access the boxes the best way to approach this project I think is to work on each box that's going to be part of the chest independently and get it finished and then the very last thing will be to glue all the boxes together the first thing I'm going to cover in terms of what you can do to your box so that you can get access to the box once it is all assembled is a drop down front and to create a drop down front what you want to do is to remove the front panel of the box now this is probably held in place by staples now if you've got a really old box it might be held together by nails so what you want to do is remove those staples and they will be the heads of these staples will be on the sides of the box I think you might can see the holes where the staples were here probably two on the side each side and then there will probably be two or three on the bottom so the first step is to sand away the parts of the box where there's going to be a staple or a nail and I think you can see that these nails are still these staples are still in place on this one you're going to want to stand that away the paper way get to expose where those are you can just use just some sandpaper if you've got a dremel which is what I use that made it really fast to expose those particular those the staples that are holding it in place and what I would do is just like remove the side ones first and you'll need a tool I was just using a pair of tweezers you just need some kind of flat tool where you can get underneath those staples and just pull them up and then you know you can use some kind of pliers just to completely pull them out but actually before you do that you probably want to make a cut with an exacto knife because paper is also holding this together you want to just make a cut on the front to cut away the paper that's in the way and then remove your staples on the side I've already removed them on this side and if you find it a little difficult once you remove the staples - or you get ready to remove the staples once you expose it you can know you can probably wiggle the front panel a little bit and that can kind of help you see where they are and help you remove it and now then I have this side off and I remove the bottoms again if you'll want to cut a line with your exacto knife and cut some of that away the paper way and then just go ahead and remove the staples on this side and you can see here the staples that are in there and now you've removed your front panel now you're also going to course want to remove any kind of excess paper that's hanging off the panel and that's true for your whole box you're going to pain or paper and I did a combination of painting and papering you'll want to remove or sand down any kind of rough edges of your box or peel off the excess paper um now once you have that off and I've already done that with this box here and you can see I've done some work to clean it up we're really just going to hinge this right back in place now the hinges this is the toughest toughest thing I had was finding hinges that would work and the problem was because you're going to hinge this lid back and/or this front panel back and the thickness of cigar box panels you have to have one that when you put the hinge on the panel like this that you don't cover up the holes and most of the smaller hinges that I found it would cover up the holes or you know if I found one that would work it was very expensive so these hinges although a little bit large were cheap and alva stamps is going to carry these and probably no matter how thick your your panel is on your cigar box you're still going to have those holes exposed when you hinge this panel back into the box now the other consideration on this panel is the hinge is going to create some bulk so it's going to lift your front panel up just a little bit so the next thing you're going to want to do to prep this is to come in with a ruler and an exacto knife and in my case for my box and using these hinges I removed approximately a sixteenth of an inch from the panel the front panel and you know it's just like with cutting chipboard you're going to come in here and very slowly cut across it until you get further and further down into the wood of the panel until you shave that off and then you can stand it and pretty it up and now when you add the hinges to that front panel and even though these are big and you can put one in the middle I think I'm going to use two instead of one once you put that back on your lid is still going to go down flush with your box because remember you're going to have boxes on top of this you want this all to be flush again and then we'll be adding a hinging or a clasp here to keep it closed because you don't want that flopping out we'll be adding that on to the middle of this you probably can't see that but I'll show you that later um so that's basically what you need to do to prep this box today I'm going to show you the work that I've done on the the boxes that have the drop down front and first I want to talk about the fact that I painted the surface and I paper anywhere that you're going to be able to see the those parts of the boxes or the chests when it's all put together and and then of course I've used some decorative paper paper in certain parts but one of the things that you need to be conscious of is what however you're going to cover your box make sure that you understand what kind of thickness is going to add to your box because you want it to still be able to close and you want it to still close when you close these front drop down lids and I talked earlier about how you need to shave some off of this to accommodate the fact that you were going to have hinges and that was going to lift that panel up but if you're going to put a bunch of bulky stuff on here or lots of layers of paint or whatever you might be doing you would want to be sure that you accommodate for that and maybe you even take a little bit more off so that your box will still shut I painted this a burgundy paint which I made from mixing two different paints I didn't have that color so I started with a lighter burgundy and added some black and created the paint for everything I made a large quantity to make sure that I wouldn't run out and then I could get the color exactly the same as what I painted everything else now on the front here you see I've attached the hinges and I've used Brad's to do that and then inside you can see the other side of the hinge and you'll notice that I mounted it on the inside of the box not the bottom of the box and that is because the bulk from this would lift up this this part of the box in the front and when you went to put all the boxes together your box would be slanting so if you put your hinges on the inside then you won't create a whole bunch of bulk in the back and then you see here the Brad's go through to the bottom and the prongs are bent and then that won't create too much bulk when I when I bend these down really good before I glue this to the next box they will they won't give you the problems the hinges would I also want you to notice in the front I have a knob and these are set of nerves that come there Tim Holtz knobs and they're all different and they do have screw to mount them um if you can do that I would do it with the screw because then it's going to be secured and if you're using this over time it won't come off the only problem is the screw is not long enough to go through everything between the paper and the front and this thick thing here it just couldn't go through so I drilled a hole that was the size of the screw a little ways down until the screw could go all the way through in the front is just a tiny hole for it to fit through if you're not able to do that you can glue this on I would use e6000 glue and be sure that you glue if you put paper on the front glue the paper with the e6000 glue to because you might find that the handles to the knob sticks to the paper but then the paper doesn't stick to this because it doesn't have as good a bond as the e6000 glue would give you so you may find that it you this stays on the paper but it pulls off the paper pulls off so that's what I would suggest there one of the things I'm doing with this particular box is I added a row of match boxes and that will give you all these little drawers and it just so happened the match boxes I had were the perfect size to fit all the way across now you have to have them all the way across you could just have a shanell them and that way part of your box has drawers and part of your box has an area to slide things in and out if you'll notice here the boxes I have added two beads with a head pin and you've seen me talk about this before I would I would stick the head pin through and loop it in the back so that this doesn't pull out or if you're using some kind of brad or something to attach a handle you know that's good you put it all the way through if you glue it I don't know it may it may after pulling this a lot it may come off so that's always good and of course you want to glue these in before you glue this together or glue this to the next box and you'll notice I have glued it on the lid of the box not on the bottom of the box and that is if you've glued it on the bottom you wouldn't be able to pull the drawers out because of this the front end because of the hinges since the hinges are on the inside so that's what I would suggest is that you just glue all this in in the top and then if you if it's a deeper box then you'll have more room and you can put stuff underneath there too and I think in fact in this box I do have a little room in there if you have a super deep box then you can go with using the kitchen size match boxes or any other box that you might happen to have and then I'm going to show you this one this is done the same way the only difference here is that you can see now that I have covered the the Brad the inside Brad these inside Brad pieces I put a panel a paper and it covers all that up and pretties it all up and then you can see also that I'm in the process of adding some little latches there glueing right now I'm putting on a T 6000 and then I'm going to put some little bitty nails into the lid of this to hold that in place and then there'll be another piece down here and you'll see all this one it's finished and really these things on mine that with these hinges they're pretty stiff so you wouldn't have to do that I just kind of like having all the hardware and it just looks really cute so that's why I'm adding that and these little things are very skinny so they are skinny enough to fit on this and Eero area here on the box lid and then then on the front and then I've also added some candles here and these handles have two points where you can put Brad's in them and so just like the hinges up I added these to the side of the box and put my Brad's through it open them up and then you don't see them inside this box all of that is hidden and then of course I'm papering the front and the top of it and really I'm just covering those things on the box that you're going to see after everything is put together because as I mentioned before you don't want to create too much bulk now if you're going to do the match boxes I would suggest that to create a stop I would put something behind the boxes because as you pull these out and then put them back in they might slide too far back or fall back into the box and it's harder to get into the box once this is all put together I just use two pieces of large or a heavy chipboard and just glued them down to the top of this you won't see it because everything will be back behind the match boxes but that way it'll act does that stop and keep those from going all the way through this next box is going to be the bottom of the chest and of course just like the other boxes other than the one on the top there will be no way to get into it and then there's an additional complication in that I want to put feet on this box so I want to put feet on the chest which I think makes it look neater and more like a chest and I'm going to be using these feet which are really nice and sturdy actually I'll flip that over so you can see these have a ledge on them so these will really be great to support the whole weight of the chest so another option for what you can do to access a box and you could do this for any of the boxes in your stack but this also solves a problem with the issue of the feet is that you can simply cut part of the panel away instead of the whole panel and then I also will leave you space to attach your feet and not block the opening of the box so removing this panel is a little bit different because you don't want to get rid of all of the panel and basically instead of removing the the staples on the side of the box you're just going to remove the staples that are on the bottom of the box now and you're also going to cut away part of the part of the front panel now what I would suggest because this cutting you want things to be really nice and stable while you're doing this is that you leave the staples in the bottom of the box until you're done with the cutting so the first thing that I did was I'm going to use another cigar box as my drawer and so this one ended up fitting perfectly inside the box so I went ahead and marked where the box would set and marked cut lines then I came in I put my box upside down like this or on its side and I had to have it propped up and everything to keep it in place and I came in with a metal ruler and a exacto knife and just cut those lines out and I just cut to the base of the box now most of these boxes the panel other than the staples it's just held on with paper so I cut these these section i cut along these marked lines here and then I use the exacto knife just to cut along the bottom to remove the paper and then I was able to just lift this out and the staples you can see you're still in there so the next step is I would of course turn the box over i've already sanded to expose where those staples are and actually pull those staples out their only purpose on this box was to hold that panel in place now if you get your box and you find out that you end up with a piece of the front panel after you cut it away then you can always just leave the staples in place and then come in with a tool to snip off the part of the staple that you don't need but I think most of you're going to find that all those staples do is hold this in place and you'll still have this front edge on the box so now once I remove that I can I can use that as a opening to pull this box in and out now with this box you know you can do one of two things you can either take the lid off which these lids are usually just attached with paper so you just score along these lines and this thing will come right off or you can go ahead and leave the lid in and I'll be adding a knob to this and you can pull the whole box out and then open it up so whichever way you want to go with that would work now we have the box that has the drawer and this is the bottom box and you can see again I've painted I'm doing some papering you won't see this really well when this lid is closed but I still get it kind of pretty if you look down in there and you actually remove the drawer and then you can see here I have the drawer and I've done some decorative stuff inside here and of course I have another one of the knobs and then you see back here and I've got this piece of chipboard and that acts as a stop for the drawer so when you're pushing the drawer in since this box doesn't go all the way to the back I decided to put this piece of chipboard here it's actually two thick pieces of chipboard in the back here to act as a stop so it won't sink all the way in and then just a little supporting T because it's hard to glue this in place and keep it in place with this coming in and out another thing I also did is I decoupage on top of our modge podge do I should say on top of this just some nap modge podge just to make this slicker and to protect the paper so that as you pull this drawer inside and out that it doesn't tear that up because over time it might do that and I also like decoupage inside of boxes like this one and then you'll see in the top box I did the same thing I did my collage work my paper work and then I use the modge podge to seal it all and to make it smooth so that you know if I put stuff in here it didn't tear the paper up now you can see I've been decorating the very top box which is pretty simple it stays just like it like it would be as a cigar box and I with these boxes of course you got lots of room for all kinds of image is in decoration I've used a bunch of the paper in here the paper I'm using is called stationaries I think stationaries which had a really pretty color scheme to go with what I was doing and then the images I'm using what you see here and then I've added some more here these images are all from my new collage sheets called letters from the past and I have to collage sheets with the images and then also a digital image set which includes everything that you see on the collage sheets plus a whole bunch more images I think there's about a hundred images in all so all the images that you see me using this is where they've come from another thing I want to mention to you is that if you want to do a different theme of course you can I mean I set it up as a writing as a writing test but this could be anything it could be a jewelry box it could be just a treasure box or something to store your your favorite artwork or whatever you want to do but if you want to keep your boxes looking like cigar boxes you will be damaging obviously we talked about you know making all these cuts and openings but you will be damaging all of the edging here the cigar box edging on my blog I have a whole bunch of freebies I have a couple of different sheets I think there's maybe three or four sheets of the of the cigar box edgings that you can print and I also have the suburban so the cigar box labels and whatnot so if you need to repair your box or replace your edgings or something like that you can download these for free and I would recommend printing them on a glossy paper in a thin paper because it will make it easier to wrap it around all the edges and what I use is called presentation paper or brochure paper and you can find it online and you can find it in office supply stores but it's if it comes in the matte version which is actually what I like to print my images on this is a heavy heavy matte paper that I print this on and this is the same thing but it's in a bit Zach lossy version and is a lighter weight so if you're going to do that I would like to say I would recommend printing it on this thin paper so it's easier for you to put it back on the box I want to talk a little bit about the hardware that I used I decided to go with since this advantage an antiquey looking I wanted to go with an antique bronze look and the challenge always is the hardware that you choose to use or that works out is all different and this wasn't a project was no exception as you can see this is the original color of several of the things that I decided to use which are already the antique bronze whips it was great but the hinges were not and the feet were not so I had gold hinges I had silver feet so I needed to make everything look like this and will show you how I did that you know if you look at metal pieces there's usually like a two-tone look whether it's gold or copper or antique bronze like this where you've got that darker look in the crevices and then you've got the bronze look on the top and the way I achieve that is I used a product that is actually made for metal in this case since this was something that was I assumed would be used then I wanted to use something where the paint would not rub off I have used acrylic paint in the past but it's usually if it's an art thing and it's really not going to be handle much otherwise I like to use this the patina this is made by Ranger and I used the Onyx and then I also use the antique bronze and the way I get the two-tone look is to first paint and I do this no matter what metallic color on going for if it's copper or gold or or whatever or silver or anything I paint the object first with the black so that's what I did with the patina black these things have little balls in them that you used to mix them up and then I come in with whatever the metallic color is and then I just apply it to them just very carefully lightly touch everything and not completely covering everything up and leaving a little bit of the black showing through this stuff dries really quickly and it kind of has an enamel look except for the the metallics like this one it looks more like metal but like the black has a very enamel look so if you this comes in all kinds of colors so basically I go in and I just continue to apply the paint very lightly and if you want to you can come in and rub some of that off if you decide that you have too much on if you do it very quickly you can tap it and remove some of the paint but just don't cover all of it and you'll start to get that two-tone look where you've got the darker color in the recesses and the lighter color are the metallic color on the top so I did the same thing for everything even the Brad's everything that was not the color this color I went through the same process now on the Dresden that I used I did the same thing so I I have gold I want it to be this color so instead though I did go and use acrylic paint so first I painted it with the black and then I came in and use something called a luminary I think that's how you say it blue Minari it is just like this paint it's basically the same color except for it's it works well on paper and will give you that metallic look so instead of painting it I took my finger and just rubbed it lightly on top of the first with the black completely paint then come in with my finger and just brush on top of the of The Dresden just just putting the paint on the highlighted areas and then you get the effect that you see here on the top of the box you can see that's all that Dresden painted and then gone over with the luminar and this is old brass and you can see I've done that too with these little Dresden pieces as well now when you finish with your boxes and you think you've done what you need to do at least in terms of the hardware and the decorating inside of course you can still once you put this together if you want to add things around the outside you can still do that then you're going to want to glue each box together so they all stay together I'll also mention too that before you glue this together I add the feet to this box before adding all the rest of this so just attach them all together glue them I'm going to use e6000 glue to put mine on you can see - if you've got areas where you're going to see the top of the next box you're going to want to cover that with paper and I used Mod Podge on that too I pretty much modge podge except for these panels around the box and the front and all everything else that was kind of like a surface like this or decorative like this or inside the boxes where I thought it might get worn I much punch all that stuff and then the last thing I want to talk to you about i stacked mine here so that the flush in the back but you don't have to do that if you want it to Center this one you could do that it's kind of whatever you want to do um the other thing I want to mention it comes into play when you put the boxes together because you have made openings in the front where this comes down this is the support for your lid and I will show you with this other box what I mean so here I've got a box where I cut the front out now with the box that I sit on top of it is smaller and doesn't doesn't span the edge of this box it's going to push this lid down so if your box on the top is smaller than the box below it and you have made an opening which you will because that's the only way to get in you need to put something inside the box to support it so you know I would put like a piece of chipboard or something inside here so that when you close the box no matter what's on top of it it can't push it down now if you have a situation like here between these two boxes these two boxes are the same size so I didn't have to put any supports inside here because when I glue this box to this box it the this box is going to hold the lid of this the bottom box below it it's going to hold it in place when I open the door so you you really don't need to worry a about putting some kind of support you can if you want to but just remember that if the boxes on the top are smaller it's a good chance they will be that they will actually push this lid down when you open up your opening so uh that's it if you go to my blog I'll have a lot more pictures and information you can download those freebies on the cigar box edgings and labels you can get more information on my collage sheets which are carry by alpha stamps as well as alpha stamps is carrying the papers and almost I think almost everything that I used here there may be one exception or so but pretty much everything I used of course the finding the cigar boxes that's you're on your own on that one so I hope you've enjoyed it and that you have fun creating a matchbox or a matchbox cigar box just you