Sizzix – Tim Holtz Curio Box – It’s A Big Fat No From Me!

As you know I love a shadow box/diorama so when I saw the Sizzix Tim Holtz Curio Box die  I was very excited. I shopped round for the best deal and a considered purchase was made,  I rarely buy dies these days, so you can work out just how excited I was.  All I had to do was wait for it to arrive while planning the wonderful things I could make.

However, it’s hard to say, but after giving this die what I consider to be a really good go, I think it’s destined for eBay, I just can’t get on with it.  Perhaps I am picky, but as soon as I  put my first box together, I immediately found that the top and bottom didn’t fit as snuggly together as I had hoped, in fact the fit, in my eyes, was downright baggy, so I tried again, using a thicker card only to get the same result and if I glued the sides of the base to the inside of the lid it simply created a misshapen box. Aghhhhh, what to do?

I looked on YouTube to find other crafters tutorials in order to try and find out what I was doing wrong. I found a couple who had also had the same results as me, which they had overcome with some degree of fiddlefart, like filling the gaps with other small pieces of card (????).  I suspected it might be a case of using two different thicknesses of card, which a  blog tutorial I found later appeared to confirm, so not wishing to give up without a fight, I duly purchased a pack Sizzix Matboard and a pack of Distress Mixed Media Heavystock as recommended, if not a little begrudgingly.

I also wrote to Sizzix to find answers, their representative pointed me to their own YouTube demo, however they used and recommended the same weight of card for the top and bottom, which, as I went on to tell them, doesn’t give the precise and professional fit I would expect.  In the demo they didn’t even show the back of the finished project, in fact they used what appeared to be a different unglued bottom from the glued one they showed at the beginning …….. I am still waiting for their reply.

When the two packs of card arrived, I girded my loins for another attempt. I think I followed the blog tutorial pretty well, covering the card on both sides with decorative papers before cutting out the base and lid.  Yes, the two fit more snuggly, but the gaps still got to me ……..  was it me?  In the end I simply covered the back with a separate  piece of paper …… but I was not a happy bunny.

I had expected to make up the box, bish, bash, bosh, so that I could get on with the really good stuff of filling and decorating it, I never anticipated messing about with different weights of card or having to cover said card with other papers, only to then find it’s not the sort of finish I had hoped for, perhaps I am too impatient, too exacting  or perhaps simply not a mixed media sort of a gal …… but this die just aint for me, it’s just toooooooooo much fiddlefart!!!

Any suggestions, as always very gratefully received.