Homemade Companion Cube Wishing Well

I posted about making a custom Companion Cube for our wishing well. Well, we finally got it done (except there are pink lines that I realised we forgot - oh well)!

I spent a lot of time looking around for a cube shaped box to save us the effort of making it ourselves out of cardboard, because I don't trust my ability to cut 6 perfect squares, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have managed to stand up on its own if I made it. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be to find a cube shaped box. I tried Myer and David Jones, all the craft stores I know of, the post office, Daiso, The Reject shop, Kikki K, basically anywhere I could think of that sold gift boxes, or parcel boxes. There were a lot of rectangular ones though! We happened to pass an Ikea as we were visiting our celebrant, and I thought, why not give it a shot? We managed to find an almost cube, it's 32 x 35 x 32cm, but that's close enough for me.

The materials

• Tjena box (from Ikea) - we would have preferred a white one, but this, or darker coloured ones were all we found
• White paint
• Black paint
• Magenta paint (or red, doesn't matter, it's used to make the pink paint for the heart)
• Paint brushes (we had a wide one for the white coat of paint, and a thinner one for the actual colours
• Pencil (not in the photo)
• Scissors (or stanley knife)
• Palette (for the paint, but you can use plastic cups or containers or whatever)
• Cardboard (didn't end up needing it, because the box came with cardboard)
• Clothes that you don't care about getting paint on
• Newspaper or something to put on the ground, so you don't end up painting your house
• A large round thing to trace around (optional - not needed if you can draw a circle freehand)
• A smaller round thing to trace around (optional - not needed if you can draw a circle freehand)
• A heart shaped thing to trace around (optional - not needed if you can draw a heart freehand)

Instructions

Assemble the box.

Coat with white paint (doesn't have to be perfect, but you want a decent layer so the green doesn't show through) - make sure to do this in a well ventilated area!

Draw a large circle on your cardboard (I used a dinner plate). This will be your stencil later. Cut the circle out.

Draw a smaller circle inside the circle you cut out (I dun goofed this part, and should have drawn the smaller circle first, but I drew and cut out the heart first).

 

Might be a bit hard to see with this image, but you want to use your stencils to outline the parts of the box with pencil. Large circle, then small circle inside that, then the heart inside that.

It should look something like this:

Using the cardboard, make some squares on the corner that overlap the larger circle (don't draw into the circle though, draw your line up to the circle). Trace with pencil. Make sure the lines line up on each of the sides. Use existing lines to line up where to place the cardboard.

Using the cardboard again as a ruler (or a real ruler if you have one), draw another line in parallel from the ones you just drew.

In the end, you want something like this:

Mix a bit of the black paint into some of the white paint to make the light grey paint. Paint the sections as in this image:

It's not perfect, but given our artistic ability, I'm happy with how it turned out! How are the guests going to get their gifts inside? Well, I guess they'll just have to think with portals.