French Country Tool Caddy

I love this Tool Caddy. This is the third one I've made, but the first I've done a blog post on. It's so practical and the perfect size for just about any tool you want to have on hand and use frequently.

I take the very first one I made to the Make and Take classes I teach. It has all the basic things I need to use as I'm doing a demo or workshop. Kind of a 'go bag' for me.
It has a Halloween theme, so I decided I'd make another one that was less holiday oriented in papers that I loved to look at.
And some of my favorite G45 papers of all time are probably the French Country papers. I really like working with red, black, cream and gold,  this line has those is abundance - they are warm and rich and have some beautiful images.

Plus, sunflowers!

I started off with the Tool Caddy Kit.

I painted the inside of the side walls black and cut paper for the two interior walls and for each side of the handle piece. (incidentally, the paper I used for the handle is the flip side of Olde Curiosity Shoppe's Optical Oddities)

Glued the papers on......

I dry-fitted the interior pieces to make sure they fit well, and then glued them together.

After everything dried, I gave the handle, interior striped walls and the black painted inside walls a coat of varnish. I'm going to be using this frequently and I wanted to make sure that it would hold up to lots of handling.
I used Liquitex Matte Varnish.

 When the varnish was completely dry, I glued the four wall in place and tied some twine around the pieces to keep them tight and give the glue time to set. Big rubber bands work too, I just had twine within easy grabbing distance.

After the caddy dried, I cut paper to fit the outside walls and glued it in place. Then I used both a gold ink and a brown ink in layers around all the edges and corners. I like the mellow look it gives to the piece.

Then collaging happens!
I cut the pieces out that I wanted to use on the front and back of my caddy and played around with the arrangements until I thought they looked right.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the striped paper into the main images to bring cohesion to the piece, so I settled on a small strip to use at the base in front of the girl picking poppies, but behind the sunflowers to make them feel more in the foreground.

The sunflowers went on.....

They look pretty!
The last thing I did was applied another coat of matte varnish to the entire outside of the piece. That way you can rest assured your caddy will be around for a long time.

SUPPLIES:
Tool Caddy

Additional Supplies
Matte Varnish
Graphic 45 Papers

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