Arts and Crafts Sunday

 For a while, I've been thinking about ways that I might convert an Altoids tin into a kind of reliquary or shrine or portable diptych.  Serendipitously, when I last visited my folks, I discovered my Mom had about five hundred of the things -- she gladly donated five to me (my Dad was probably sorry that she donated only five...).

 I did some Internet research on portable altars, and lots of folks sand down and use paint stripper to prep their tins for a repaint job.  I suppose I should see if anyone pounds out the embossed "Altoids" legend, but so far folks have just dealt with the paint -- except for the one woman who encased her tin in Sculpey clay.

 Since I wasn't planning on taking my piece anywhere particularly wet, I opted for a paper liner on the inside.  For extra credit, I could maybe papier-mâché the lid, but this was more of a concept piece than anything.

The most fussy steps were figuring out the sizes of the lid and the box, which are a tenth of an inch different, so I could cut out a paper liner for them.  The compass came in very handy crafting the curved corners.  In theory, now that I have the measurements, I could use InkScape to cut out the two liner papers... I do wonder, however, how much fiddling I'd have to do have the measurements accurately come out on the Silhouette plotter-cutter.  That's another project...

 I figured I do a moon on the lid, and cut out a dark sky liner.  It felt a little pedestrian, but looking through various scrap paper shapes I had left over from previous paper art projects, it seemed obligatory that the sun be on the other side.

 The proportions of the shapes were in scale.  I wasn't sure what to do with the sun, which seemed a little lonely.  So I added some hills.  Bending strips of curve-cut green paper gave the hills some dimensionality.

So I gave the moon some hills, too.  The trickiest part was placing the sun and the moon to avoid a pareidolic face. 

At first I felt "terribly arty," and absurdly pleased with my own cleverness.  And then I realized this particular Altoids Diptych is dangerously close to Country Cute.

Oh well.

What works best in this particular example is the way the hills pop out of the box and are on both sides of the hinge.  Some other things I might try to add different levels would be making some Mucha-esque arches (the kind adorned with a frame of circles) in front of a Sarah Bernhardt figure.  In some of the Internet examples, folks had strung small beads or charms along the inside; it might be fun to try to work in an LED.   And if I were feeling intensely clever, I might figure out how construct and install a pop-up sundial...