Monday made: Displaying little treasures

I've had these Ikea Bas shadow boxes lying around for a long time (the hubby will tell you that I tend to keep all sorts of stuff for future craft projects.  The key word is "future", since it never seems to come!).  So I dug them out just recently, and decided that I would finally use them to house little "treasures" in Junior J's room.  I liked how this treasure wall looked over at Lovely Design, but thought I would use patterned paper instead of fabric for the backing of the boxes.

To get various suitable designs for the backing, I went and raided my (rather large) wrapping paper stash, but only found one design that I liked (the blue polka dotted one, which was from Paperchase at Borders).  I didn't want to use scrapbook paper since its so darn expensive, so I ended up printing some patterns on A4 white paper (which is something you could also do if you need a small piece of wrapping paper for a gift, but are too lazy to go and buy a huge piece!).

I got my patterns from 2 sources:
:: Lovely Design, where blogger Sharilyn has uploaded some really beautiful designs!  (I used the Nov and Dec 2009 patterns.)
:: Ava7 Patterns, which actually is a site providing tiled website backgrounds, but they allow you to download the design as a larger jpg file... and I really loved their patterns!

So after you have your backing, all you need to do is to cut it to size, and stick it to the back of the shadowbox with double-sided tape... or if you're lazy like me, you could just cut the backing to the exact width of the wooden backing of the box, but leave about 1 cm allowance on the top and bottom of the paper.  This way, you can just fold the paper over the top and bottom of the wooden backing, and stuff the wooden backing into the frame, and if you have done it carefully, the paper should sit flush with the wooden backing!  This way, you save on tape and can easily remove the patterned paper and change it when you want a new look...

And the next part is the fun part... you go hunting for treasures with your little one, and fill those boxes up!  We had this set of Matryoshka dolls (read more about them here) which was a gift from a Christmas party, and I thought they were really pretty... However, the insides of the dolls were really roughly hewn and had loads of splinters, so Junior J couldn't play with them, so they were just the thing for display!  (Do let me know where I can find these in Singapore, cos I've been trying to find them to no avail!)  However, only 4 of the 5 dolls fitted into the box...

Then I thought it would be nice to follow the "largest-to-smallest" theme and arrange the other treasures by size too!  I used pinecones picked up from a trip to Australia (we had some from NZ too, but those were way too big, with one larger than Junior J's head!)...

And seashells that I used to collect when I was young...

So here you have it... Displays of little treasures, which you could swop whenever your little one has new finds to display!  You could put them in a two by two arrangement...

Or stack them up one above the other to form a tower!

Or just hang them up in a random order!

Some other tips:
1. Don't use blue tack to stick your paper backings, since the oily stuff from the blue tack seeps into the paper with time, and will leave an oily patch there.
2. If you are using shadowboxes similar to these, you might want to stick down your items using blue tack (in an unobtrusive area at the bottom) to ensure they don't get messed up when you are fitting the backing in.  Junior J saw the boxes and gave the one with pinecones an exploratory shake, hence one has toppled!
3. You could use any frame that has a certain amount of depth to it (since these boxes are no longer sold!), like the Ribba frames sold in Ikea.

How do you display your little treasures?