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I hadn’t done any serious cartonnage for quite some time. So when we made a box yesterday we kind of winged it, and while I was working with the board and the linen I remembered the cartonnage lessons and what we should have done — instead of what we were doing at that moment. We managed to make an acceptable box, but we took notes to ensure the next one will be better!

I glued the five sides of the box together and then glued strips of linen on the edges — both on the inside and the outside — to reinforce them.

We used a nice chocolate-brown linen on the edges and on the outside bottom of the box. For the four sides we dipped into our (large!) collection of Japanese washi paper: this is a design based on temari balls (balls made of colourful thread wrapped around a core of cotton), with golden accents. The design is kind of muted — compared to some of the other paper we have.

The box fits nicely in an Ikea Kallax case! We have three large Kallax units to partition off different parts of the open space in our house. I really like it: it keeps the space “open” but it also serves as a partition — and it adds storage! But not everything we would store in there is fit to display proudly on the shelves. We got some baskets from Ikea, but we want to make some boxes like these ourselves. We have a large collection of super nice Japanese washi paper that we hardly ever get to use — most of it is a lot more colourful than this. So we get to store our stuff more neatly and add some colour accents at the same time!