Desk Tidy (or, I live in hope of a tidy desk)

Why is it 'tidy' and not 'tidier'?  Just saying.

I posted pictures of this item on my Facebook, and a few friends said I should blog it, so here it is...

My friend Alison gave me an empty whisky box recently.  The box wasn't very big (it had held 3 quarter bottles) and had a lid that opened on the slant.  Nice and sturdy too.  

The slanted lid gave me the idea for a desk tidy, so I cut the lid off and intended to stick it to the base as it was. But then I got the idea that I could make an extra compartment between the 2 pieces and so I extended the sides with a 3/4 inch slice of foam board.  I could've made it wider, but this was just the right width to accommodate my craft knives and pokey tools etc, without them falling over.  I also added 3 pieces of greyboard on the base.  Okay,  I could have used one piece of board for the base, but was using up some gash! This was painted black with acrylic paint. 

I also used some foam board to make a couple of dividers in the tallest compartment and some greyboard for dividers for the new middle one.

After a coat of black acrylic paint around all the edges I cut pieces of paper to fit each surface, inked the edges with black soot distress ink (Tim Holtz) and stuck those on with Scotch quick dry glue.  I covered the tall dividers in the same way and glued them in place.  The papers I used are from Graphic 45 and are a mixture from their French Country, Typography and Steampunk Spells collections.  I love that they use the same colour pallets in the various collections so you can mix and match.

I covered up the rough edges where I'd cut the Lid apart with some Tim holtz tissue tape,  patterned like a black measuring tape.

That's about it, not a difficult project and took me only a few hours, including coffee breaks.  The only other thing I did was poke and glue a couple of Tim Holtz memo pins through the side of the top compartment, into the foam dividers. This not only strengthened the divider but the ring of the memo pin is a handy place to hold my tiny detail scissors and skinny ink drippers which would otherwise fall over.  

Ta dah! As they say.