Shadowbox Pictures For Fall Decorations and Gifts

If you've been following my Linda's Blog posts about family Christmas gifts you know that I just LOVE giving handmade gifts for the holiday season. And, you probably know that I love enclosing my punch needle and cross-stitch gifts in shadowboxes.

These days my younger brother is helping me make my shadowboxes as he has an unbelievable workshop with every tool you can imagine in it. There's no set-up time as every tool has its place. You just walk over and use it. How great is that? As someone who hates set-up time I love it.

In any event, before my brother set up his workshop I had a wonderful idea for creating some painted and stenciled shadowboxes that I could give as gifts during the upcoming holiday season.

I had a ton of rub-on stencils that I had bought during one of my many shopping trips and wanted to utilize them in some fashion. So, I thought that maybe a small painted wooden shadowbox with a stenciled picture might be nice and asked hubby what he thought.

Well, he thought it was a good idea so we set about making a bunch of 5"x5" shadowboxes and some 6"x9" shadowboxes. I think we made 28 in total for all four seasons. I was going to give some as gifts and use some as seasonal decorations.

So, we drew up a little plan that hubby could use for cutting the wood. We had decided that we would use 1/2"x1" pine wood for the sides and 1/2" thick pine boards for the centers. The sides would be painted and the centers would be stenciled and painted.

Hubby decided to use his router to create a 1/2" channel in the frames for the center blocks to rest on. We would use tiny brads to fasten the frames together and then fasten the center blocks to the frames.

I wanted to paint the frames different colors then the center blocks so hubby made the frames first and then I painted them. When all the frames were done I painted the center blocks and then we fastened the center blocks to the frames.

After the shadowboxes were painted and put together I added my rub-on stencils. I applied a brush on varnish to seal the wood and create a nice finish for the stencils.

Of course, since I never do anything in moderation they took us a few days from start to finish to complete them. However, when they were all done we were both pleased with the results.

Shown throughout this post are some of the painted and stenciled shadowbox pictures we made for the Fall, Halloween and Thanksgiving. The stencils shown were all from Provo Craft First Impressions.