When, in the previous FoF, I showed you the RSN online course Mr Mabel got me for Christmas, it reminded me that I hadn’t actually let you know how I far I’d got with the RSN online course I succumbed to last summer: box making. Well, I finished it! (Don’t look so surprised…)

My one and only update on this project (other than showing you the kit when it arrived) consisted of some of the card parts covered in yellow fabric using sticky tape, and one of the false floor supports attached using ladder stitch. In a bid to improve the neatness of my ladder stitching, as well as the curved needle that came with the kit I tried two different ones from my stash (one larger & thinner, one the same thickness but smaller), but it didn’t seem to have much of an effect. The kit needle was marginally more comfortable to use than the others, so I stuck with that as I attached the other false floor supports.

The next step was attaching the parts that form the inner box. First two sides, then the bottom (which I started to attach the wrong way round – the inner box has all the messy sides on the outside and the nice covered sides on the inside, which got me muddled; fortunately I noticed in time). Fitting those first parts together is very fiddly, as they all flap about and you need about three hands to keep everything in position while sewing them to each other. Fastening the sewing thread on in the corners was tricky, too: the needle gets sticky from the tape underneath the fabric and sometimes the corners come undone when pulling the needle through! But with a lot of patience I eventually had the inner box assembled.

Finally I got to the flowered fabric! This time, because I wanted to try both techniques shown in the course videos, I chose to lace the fabric around the card pieces instead of using sticky tape. Using my mellor (a laying tool or really big blunt needle would work as well) to tighten up the stitches helped to get the fabric nice and taut, but once again I found it very difficult to get it folded round the card on the grain.

In between the lacing and subsequent assembling I felt I needed the occasional change, so I worked on the embroidery that would decorate the top of the lid. It is the word Threads in stem stitch, embellished with a little sprig of greenery using lazy daisies. In the original it is done entirely in dark green, but because that looked a little bit dull I added some highlights in bright yellow to echo the inside of the box.

Once all the bits for the outer box had been laced, it was on to assembly. As with the inner box, you start with two sides and then add the bottom. Then the process differs, because you assemble the rest of the outer box around the inner box. They are meant to be such a snug fit that if you completed the outer box first, you wouldn’t be able to get the inner box inside it.

Well, it was snug all right. Whether because I had wrapped the yellow fabric around the card too bulkily, or whether my sewing together hadn’t been quite accurate enough, it was a squash to attach the remaining two sides. Still, I got the thing together fairly tidily, in spite of cat hair trying to inveigle itself into the seams. I was particularly pleased with the look of the bottom, with all the bits fitting rather neatly together!

But that was not the end of it – the tops of the inner and outer box had to be ladder stitched together all round. For extra strength I used shorter stitches near the corners, as they seemed a bit strained, but otherwise I tried to get the stitches as equal as possible. As you can see that didn’t always work; if I’d been really committed I suppose I would have unpicked and re-stitched, but by then I had done such an awful lot of ladder stitching that I didn’t.

Then came the false floor, which included the new challenge of incorporating ribbon tabs with which to lift it out of the box. These tabs were first held in place with some double sided tape, and then more securely attached by ladder stitching through them when sewing both halves of the floor together. And then it was time to see whether the floor fitted. Fortunately it did .

Time to put the lid together. More ladder stitching! The smaller inner lid and the larger outer lid are attached wrong sides together (forming a lip which holds the lid on securely), and the embroidery (laced over padded card) is sewn onto the top of the outer lid. I tried to place everything as symmetrically as possible, but I’m sure there is a bit of variation in the width of the various borders. Still, people are unlikely to take a tape measure out when I show them the box…

And here it is, the completed box; lid on, lid off, floor in, floor out, and with cat.

So what’s the final verdict? About the course – great fun, good informative videos, and a well-presented kit. About the box? Well, let’s say I’m not unhappy with it . Measured against the Diploma assessment criteria a fellow RSN student kindly let me have a look at, it’s rubbish. The fabric grain is all over the place, the sticky tape came undone too quickly and frequent re-pulling caused fraying and grubbiness, and it was such a squash getting the inner box sewn into the outer one that the card bent a little in one place, making the fabric go slightly slack (fortunately right in a corner and not very noticeable in the finished box). There is some not-quite-exact placement of the support bits, uneven ladder stitches, and visible stitching on the exposed part of one of the corners of the lid. On the other hand, the stitching definitely got better over time, and I have got a sturdy and quite attractive box. On the whole it was a great learning process, but oh boy was it a good decision not to go for the complicated curved box I was so tempted by!

Well, I’ve started. In between tulips and leaves (and a dragon – more of that some other time) I’ve taken time out to work on the kit that came with the RSN Introduction to Box Making course. The pre-cut mountboard pieces (and oh my goodness am I glad they are pre-cut; Heather Lewis’ book puts a lot of emphasis on how accurate the cutting has to be, a challenge I am happy to postpone) are to be covered with fabric using two methods: lacing (expected) and double-sided sticky tape (very much not expected). The latter method feels remarkably like cheating, but as fellow C&D students pointed out on our FB group, the tape is not what holds the box together; it just attaches the fabric to the card for long enough to be able to sew the various parts together. If after sewing things together the sticky tape stops sticking or even disintegrates entirely, it doesn’t matter. It is only if the fabric has embroidery on it that lacing is a better option because of the added weight.

As I want to practice both methods I’ve decided to stick the yellow fabric (which will cover all the inner bits) and lace the patterned green fabric (for the outer bits). And I started with four of the larger yellow pieces, trimming and pinching corners but still not getting them quite as neat as I’d like (Marlous – her of the Stitching Sheep – suggested an additonal small piece of tape to aid corner neatness which I will try next time).

Things I learnt from those four pieces: 1) don’t cut the fabric too large, it leaves flappy unattached bits at the back; 2) even though you’ve pulled the fabric taut, sometimes there are small bulges along the edge, but when using sticky tape you can reposition these; and 3) it is very, very tricky to get the fabric folded around the card on the grain! One of the difficulties is that when you have stuck down two opposing sides and you move on to the other two, their corners are already fixed so when you pull to get the fabric taut you only pull the middle, leading to the grain curving rather than sitting tidily and neatly on the edge of the card. My trusty fellow students on the FB group, especially those who have already done the Creative Box module of the Diploma, suggested starting with the shorter sides rather than the longer ones as I had done, so I’ll try that next time, together with pulling the first two sides out towards the corners (i.e. along the edge of the card) as well as out at right angles to the card.

Now I was planning to take this course at a leisurely, not to say glacial, pace. Cover a few bits of card, put them away, cover a few more a couple of days or a week later, and then when all 19 bits are covered start assembling. But Marlous advised a cover-and-stitch approach because the sticky tape does allow the fabric to relax after a while (lacing presumably not so much). Having read Heather’s book about box making I knew that generally you start by attaching two sides and a bottom; I’d covered two long sides plus the bottom and top, so just cover a short side and get started, right? Wrong. This particular box has a false floor, and the supports for it have to be attached to the insides first. So I quickly covered one of the long supports (too quickly – I pulled the fabric too much one way, resulting in a fraying corner; tchk!), measured out 2mm from the bottom and sides of the larger piece to pinpoint the position of the support, and set about attaching them to each other. Fortunately the frayed corner could be put right at the bottom where it will eventually be snuggled up against two other corners so the fraying can be neatly tucked away.

All sewing together on boxes like these is done using slip stitch, also known as ladder stitch – I prefer the latter name because it is so descriptive of what the stitch looks like before you pull it together (shown below mitring a corner on my RSN Jacobean piece). As I mentioned above, on a basic box you start by sewing two sides together, but on this one the first thing is to attach the false floor supports to the four interior sides of the box. This means attaching one bit flat on top of another, and I suspect this is more challenging than stitching two edges together at right angles – at least I hope it is, because I found it quite challenging to get neat! Generally I am quite good at ladder stitch, but on this first piece the stitching is much more visible than I had expected/intended/hoped, even though I tried to get my stitches as low on the support edge as possible, and as far in on the main fabric as possible. Oh well, as long as I see improvement on the next three supports, I’ll be satisfied – this is after all my very first attempt at this particular discipline, and as I always impress on my own students, if everyone produced a perfect piece the very first time they had a go, what would happen to the teachers ?

The videos that form the main part of the course are very informative and helpful, but I do find that I miss not having written instructions. To some extend Heather’s box making book fills that gap, but that doesn’t, of course, mention this particular box. However, underneath every video there is a summary of what is covered in it, and I’ve copied and pasted that into a document, tidied it up and printed it out, so that as I am stitching away I can have a quick look at what I’m supposed to do next and how to do it without having to fire up the laptop. Most of those next steps will be yellow and not very exciting to look at – apologies for some rather monochrome updates! But I hope to get on to the floral fabric in the not too distant future.

I get the RSN newsletter. It tells me about exhibitions which I rarely if ever manage to go to, the Certificate & Diploma programme which I’m already on, the Degree and Future Tutors programmes which I will never do, and, slightly more dangerous, new classes and kits. Generally I am well able to resist both the kits (because I know the size of the pile of kits in my craft room) and the classes (because they are either at Hampton Court Palace which is impractical, or online which I don’t like), so I can safely take an interest in all the things the RSN do and organise without being overly tempted. But in the latest newsletter there was a link to a new self-paced course – online, true, but with the various instruction videos watched at your own convenience, as often as you like, at whatever pace you like. Almost like learning from a book, which has long been one of my favourite ways of tackling a new skill, but with the added bonus of having things demonstrated by a tutor over and over again if you need it. And unlike most of the other self-paced courses which I’d idly had a look at before, this one covered something which I have never had a go at before: box making.

Oddly enough I’d been thinking about box making only a little earlier because one of my fellow C & D students (Marlous, known as the Stitching Sheep) had posted a picture of her project for the Diploma Box Making module. And so this new course was definitely tempting. It got complicated when I went on the RSN website to find it, only to come across another box which immediately took my fancy and which was available as a kit. The curves, the tassle, the little goldwork bird on top – so much more attractive than the nice-but-plain box of the course. But also, very obviously, much much more advanced. Did I really want to risk getting what is without question a very expensive kit only to mess it up and end up with a wonky box?

I contacted the designer to ask her about the level of skill needed, and found out that although this particular RSN-themed version of the box was exclusive to the RSN, she was hoping to make the box available with a different theme (colour scheme, decoration) on her own website next year. Plenty of time for me to order and read through box-making course tutor Heather Lewis’ excellent book on the subject, do the beginners’ course and have a go at the curved box some time next year (or the year after – no rush), and so on to the Box Making module of the Diploma if I ever get that far.

So I signed up for the Introduction to Box Making, and had a look at the first couple of videos which go through the materials and the course programme. Very informative and interesting, so I watched the one about two ways of covering the box pieces in fabric as well. Two days later both the book shown above and the course kit arrived – I hadn’t expected them to get here so quickly but it meant I could leaf through the book and have a leisurely look at the kit materials over the weekend. My very first look at the kit materials was a bit more rushed, as the box it arrived in was quite worryingly battered and our friendly postwoman waited patiently for me to open it and see if anything had been damaged so I could refuse to accept the parcel if that was the case.

Fortunately all was well, except for a slight crease on the surface of one of the cut pieces of card, but as it wasn’t actually bent I don’t think it will be a problem. Mind you, I didn’t see the crease immediately as all the bits and pieces in the box came wrapped, either in a cardboard tube, a padded envelope or some pretty purple tissue paper, and I’d only checked to see those wrappings looked reasonably intact; well, I didn’t want to keep our kind postie waiting any longer than was necessary!

Then came the fun of properly unwrapping. The cardboard tube contained the two coloured fabrics for the inside and outside of the box, and white fabric with the word Threads printed on it for the embroidered lid, as well as some yellow ribbon. The padded envelope held the cut mountboard parts, one of them with the aforementioned crease. The purple tissue paper revealed double-sided sticky tape (yes, one of the methods for attaching fabric to the mountboard is sticky tape!), two tiny curved needles, embroidery needles, buttonhole thread, two colours of sewing thread and a skein of stranded cotton. There was also a welcome letter in the thin envelope with the picture of the box on it.

All in all a satisfying collection of bits and bobs, but where to store them for the moment? I decided that the fabric would best be kept in the tube they came in, and all the other elements turned out to fit very nicely into the small purple bag that once held my RSN Certificate Welcome Pack; very appropriate .

Tempting though it is to have a go Right Away, there is Canvaswork to be done first. Several of my classes have been cancelled, either because too few people signed up for a particular session or because of rail strikes. Disappointing, but on the other hand I hadn’t managed to do much in the way of homework, so it may be just as well to have more time in which to get a reasonable amount done and have something substantial to discuss with the tutor. Since my last update here I have managed a small roof, a small bush and a medium-sized tulip – not much, perhaps, but it’s progress!