Witchcraft on a Shoestring: Upcycled Storage Boxes

Looking for a really attractive but cheap way of storing all your witchy bits? Jane Mortimer writes about an upcycling project:

I’m currently organising all my different coloured candles into boxes, joss sticks into tubes etc etc. Instead of writing labels for the boxes, I print tiny pictures of the contents and stick them on the end of the box. The joss stick tubes speak for themselves.  

Wrapping paper is excellent for covering shoe boxes, Slimfast tins and other foody tubs. I didn’t realise how many joss sticks I had till I stuffed them into four tins. Once the packets are open, they can look a bit scruffy, so I made lids for the tubes by repeating the process with another can. If the lower can is stuffed full, the upper one will sit snugly on it, but if not, then you might need to glue a circle of thin card round the inside of the lower one, with about 1cm protruding from the top, to hold the lid straight.  A circle of matching paper turns the exposed bottom into a top. We can’t have any bottoms exposed, can we!

This is a good time of year to go hunting for cheap wrapping paper in the shops, and there will always be a couple of new starry designs, some of them quite shiny and glittery. To make this even more of an upycycling project, you could reuse paper that was wrapping presses at birthdays, Halloween or Yule. Not all the paper on the little boxes is starry. Lush puts things in nice seasonal little bags, and the paper can be reused to cover small boxes.

In the foreground of the picture at the top there are some matchboxes in various sizes with examples of what I store in them – 00 gauge people and little traffic cones for sympathetic magic spells, rusty coffin nails for finding out if someone’s a bad lot (bang one into one of their footprints, and if they develop a limp, they’re a wrong ‘un), and all sorts of tiny stuff. Witches can collect an awful lot of tiny things that need organising. 

I’ve still got two scruffy tins to make tops for, when I’ve emptied two more tall Slimfast cans.

Previous related posts:
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2021/10/wheel-of-year-crafts-preserving-autumn.html
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2021/06/witchcraft-on-shoestring-journals-books.html
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2021/04/socks-lockdown-end-wont-be-end-to.html
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2020/10/craft-making-candles-using-mini-jelly.html

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