Musical Shadow Box!

So my husband Anthony loves music and instruments. This year for our 2^nd year wedding anniversary he bought me a lap harp to help with my anxiety. He bought and even made me music for it. He made songs I like useable on the lap harp and he even took one of my poems from one of my stories and is still working on giving it music and turning it into a song that can be played on my lap harp!!! So knowing music means a lot to him, he plays piano, harmonica and ukulele and had done violin before I knew I wanted to make him a music inspired shadow box. Plus he has been wanting to get a violin lately so since I couldn’t afford that I decided to make this one inspired by one!

So at first I intended to do a 4x6 one but decided for what I wanted I had better to go up to a 5x7. So I bought 5x7 frames in a blue and gold wood etched look. I washed one of the glass panes and set it aside. I took the prongs from the top and middle frames and then I took Aleene’s tacky glue and glued the middle and back frames together. Taking wet Q-Tips I wiped away excess glue that seeped out the edges. Well at this point I realized I had made a whoopsie by taking the prongs from all 3 frames and hadn’t realized it so I had to buy hinges and make it a front opening shadow box and I think its better this way

Taking the brass hinges I lined the frames up and made marks on where I wanted it to go. Taking my electric screwdriver I made holes and screwed the screws in carefully. Since the front frame was hot glued in and now opened it left not so good of a look because of the hot glue in the corners so I decided to do something similar to my dads butterfly shadowbox, I used in this case colorful musical notes in each corner covering the majority of the hot glue. I then lined up the back of the frame with the scrap book paper so the violin is shown along with other phrases which is beautiful and traced and cut it out and hot glued to the back of the frame. Once that was down since the prongs were gone and couldn’t hold the back of the frame I had to hot glue the frame backing in place to back frame.

Using small cut pieces of fastener dots I put the tiny pieces on the back of the small violin figurine I had bought from Michaels. I put the violin and bow attached to the paper but so they can be removed and handled. The last element was that I needed a handle to open the frame as I had used fastener dots inside to keep the door shut instead of using magnets as I had for some of my other front opening shadow boxes. So using a small square block piece from a mini Jenga game I got from Dollar Tree I decided to paint it to resemble a piano. I used a white satin acrylic paint and painted the whole thing white and then using satin silver acrylic paint I made the lines to show the keys and then used black satin acrylic paint to paint on the black keys and to go around the outside of the block to give dimension.

I then took the mini stand figurine that holds music and attached a cut out sticker that resembles a music book and since the stand wont fit inside the shadow box I made it to stand outside when closed or open and honestly its more beautiful that way. 

I have to say this is one of my favorite shadow boxes!

• 5x7 Blue and Gold Wood Etched Frames- $1 each at Dollar Tree
• Violin / Musical Scrapbook Paper- $1 at a local scrapbook store
• Music Book with Notes Sticker- $0.97 for the pack it came in at Wal-Mart
• Fastener Dots- $1 for pack of 20 at Dollar Tree
• Piano Handle- Tower block $1 at Dollar Tree for the pack of over 36 in the set. 
• White, Black and Grey Satin Acrylic Paints- a few dollars at Michaels and Wal-Mart
• Violin and Stand Figurines- $4 or so dollars using my 40% coupon but is originally $6.99 at Michaels
• Brass Hinges- $1.68 or so at Wal-Mart they were a medium size but not sure what the package said there actual size was