I promised my boyfriend a box to hold nearly 800 of his Magic the Gathering Cards... for Christmas... 2012. I managed to complete (or nearly complete) the box... three days ago. To be fair, it was no small undertaking. I had to take a sheet of Davey board, slice it up just so, and glue it up to look like this:

I covered it in beautiful paper from Cave Paper, and I cut neat flaps for the inside walls to fit around the dividers:

And then I glued them all down...

And then realized I should have thought about how much material I had left. See, I wanted the whole box to be covered in the same paper, but I only had about enough left to cover the lid and a few of the inside walls.

I glued up the lid insert next

It's hollow on the inside. The lid will stay on with magnets, so the inset had to be deep enough to secure the magnets, but I didn't want to laminate five or six sheets of board together because it would make the lid strangely heavy. This way, the lid will have a bit of heft, but not too much.

I covered the inset with black gelatin-sized flax paper, also from Cave Paper. The sparkly bits are mica! It looks pretty enough to hang on a wall as is:

I glued that to a lid piece, and then mucked around with other materials to line the bottom and walls on the inside of the box tray. I used a rust-colored Iris book cloth for the bottom, because the color seemed to go well enough. I layered the crackle flax paper on the divider walls, to cover the raw edges of cloth fabric (except for along the outside of the box, by necessity). I was then completely out of crackle paper, so I used the black sparkle flax to line the tops of the dividers.

And voila! The final box:

And on the inside...

This is only about 60 cards, to demonstrate that the dividers are spaced far enough apart. All I need to do now is glue on a bottom (when I order more material to make the bottom covered in the crackle paper) and glue the MTG colors in the inset circles on the outside of the box... and probably glue another piece to the lid that has a circle inset, because there are five colors in MTG, not four, and I forgot to cut an inset in the lid. Whoops.

Next time, I'll over-estimate materials, instead of under-estimating. Even though the Cave Paper is expensive, it's worth over-estimating so I can get it right. The proper way to cover the divider walls would have been to fold one piece of the crackle paper over each divider, so there would be no raw edges of paper or cloth along the side for the cards to bump, so the walls would be nice and smooth. Then, instead of a cloth bottom, I would have probably used the sparkle black, to mirror the inset lid. Although, I'm fairly pleased with the rust color.

In other news, here are some hardback books I made in Binding II this semester:

You know, real books.

Here is a shortbread cookie in the shape of a cat:

I have a cold, so I figured if I am going to drink a lot of tea, I might as well eat some buttery biscuits with it.

My friend Uhle, who was in my Binding II class, and who is from Germany, gave me this wonderful feminist magazine from Germany that happens to share my name!

Also, I made challah. A couple weeks ago now, but I miss it so much I dream about it at night. I should make more. You know, when I'm not sick.

In other news, I signed up for way too many credits of things in the fall. You know, my thesis year. I'll be binding, printing, thesising, teaching for the first time!!! and TAing a book arts class, and taking some pedagogy classes. Hopefully I will also eat challah french toast and sleep in occasionally, too. You know, in December.