Through the Wardrobe

I love Narnia.  I've been wanting to do a Narnia-themed project for quite awhile but wasn't sure what or how.  This project has taken months of researching and planning.  I decided I wanted to do the Wardrobe with Lantern Waste on the other side.  I had a wooden cigar box that would work perfectly if I could find all of the elements I was gonna need.  I started by first tearing off all the stickers and painting a few coats of dark brown on the outside and inside the lid.  I painted the inside of the box white.  I had looked at quite a few wardrobe designs on line and I really liked the actual one used in the movie with all of the carvings, but that was going to be hard to find or do.

I had some cool sun design stickers that sort of looked like they were carved and inlaid with turquoise.  I also had some mirrored paper that I modpodged to the lid and added flattened gold bead caps to the corners as mirror holders.  

Voila!

I used a piece of actual wood paper on the inside of the door and left it 'unfinished' (ie didn't paint it dark brown) because some closet doors aren't finished on the inside.  In a perfect world, I would have had furcoats, or at least partial fur coats, hanging on the inside but I didn't.  Then I found a vintage lion image in my Victorian decoupage design book, and put him on the inside cover.  I like the fact that the image is turned in the direction of the scene.

What mostly held up this project was trying to find decent paper for the background.  I needed winter woods and none of the craft stores had anything like that.  I was in JoAnn Fabrics and was really bummed because it was the last store I could find and they had nothing either.  As I walked towards the front of the store, I passed the paper napkins/tablecloths display and spotted these birch design napkins.  Yes, that will actually work really well.   After one of the napkins was trimmed and adhered to the back and sides, I had to put a styrofoam strip for the lamp to stand on because it didn't look good down at the bottom.  It needed to be up a little higher.  I found the lamp at Walmart...it's battery operated and had a 2nd one but I cut the wire off it so that I could just have one.  I had to cut a notch into the cigar box so that the wire could fit without getting crushed. The wire is run behind the styrofoam, through the notch and the battery pack is glued onto the back of the wardrobe.  After I stuck the lamp to the top of the styrofoam, I painted some of the bits white and added glitter glue to the white, to make it look like it snowed. I didn't use white paint or glitter on the branches because I thought that would be too much. Next came the addition of twigs I got out of my yard.  Finally, I stuck the fluffy stuffing onto the styrofoam to hide it.  By the way, I found out that you need specific styrofoam glue.  E6000 seemed to start melting it and everything I read online basically said there's no way around it.