Ten Two Studios

I just love making little matchbox shrines, and really wanted to come up with a simple way to pass on the joy of creating them. I designed the matchbox shrine sheets available here at Ten Two Studios to make it easy to create a beautiful shrine quickly.

To make your matchboxe shrine, you’ll need:

• A Matchbox Shrine sheet, available for purchase at Ten Two Studios in the matchbox section. I used the Home Sweet Home sheet for this lesson. Each sheet makes three matchbox shrine.

• Matchboxes, also available in the matchbox section. The shrine sheets are sized for these matchboxes.
• A piece of chipboard, to back the frame portion of the shrines.
• A glue stick, and E600 or other thick glue.
• Sharp detail scissors, and a craft knife and ruler.
• Chalk inkpads, if you wish.
• Little bits and bobs to put inside your finished shrines.

Roughly cut the front frame sections from the sheet. Don’t get too detailed with your cutting just yet, and don’t worry about removing the center section with the signs—we’ll get to those in a minute.

Glue the front frames onto chipboard with a glue stick. If you’d also like to have a nice, clean finish on the back side of your finished shrines, you might want to glue a piece of coordinating paper to the back of the chipboard now. I didn’t, and you’ll see what happened to mine later.

When the glue is dry, cut out the frames on the outer edges, using sharp detail scissors. Use a craft knife and ruler to remove the center opening with the signs on it. Set the signs aside for now.

I’m not the best precision cutter in the world, so I ended up with a few little white spots here and there. I used a coordinating chalk inkpad to edge the frames, artfully covering up my white spots. One of my teachers once told me “if you can’t fix it, feature it”—so, if I can’t cut perfectly, I can add a little toning to make the ragged cutting look like it’s part of the design.

Set the frame aside for a moment.

Remove the inner tray from a matchbox, and set it aside. Cut the center front of the box open. Don’t worry about measuring—just eyeball the center, and slice it open.

Wer’re going to turn those two new front sections into wings that will hold the front frame in place. Fold the two front sections outward, and kinda mash them toward the back to convince them to stay folded.

Your matchbox should now look like this one, with a square back and sides, and wings pointed outward. This is what will get glued onto the back of the frame in the next step—and that means the back of your shrine will be this lovely red and blue print. Not pretty! At this point, you might opt to cover the printed box with the same paper you used to back your frames. You might also opt to simply peel the printed layer off the box. Or, like me, you might not take this ugliness into account until later, when it’s inconvenient to fix it…

Apply glue to the wing portions of the matchbox, and apply the box to the frame, centering it top to bottom and side to side on the opening. Once you have it roughly positioned, slide the tray into place inside the box, to make sure you’ll have room for it to fit later.

Set the shrine down, and let the glue dry. I sort of slid the trays out halfway, to let them hold the box in shape, but prevent them from sticking in the shrine permanently.

When the glue is dry, trim any excess wings away from the frame. Look—you have a framed shrine box. That was pretty simple!

Now, lets work on the tray a bit. Slide it out of the shrine box, and center it on the background paper piece. Fold the sides up so they’re slightly smaller than the box.

Your perfectly folded background should tuck right into the bottom of the tray. If it’s not small enough, adjust your folds a bit.

Unfold the background paper, and you’ll see that your folds made a square at each of the corners. Clip across one side of each of the squares to create tabs.

Flatten the background paper, apply glue to the whole back, then fold it back into a tray shape. Press the background into the matchbox tray, smoothing the bottom, then the sides. The paper will extend up above the tray a bit.

Trim the background paper edges to fit the height of the tray.

If you have white bits showing after you trim, here’s another chance to use your chalk inkpads to tone them away.

Slide the finished tray into the shrine box. If you wish, you can apply glue to the back of the tray now to hold it into the shrine. I usually don’t glue the trays in place until the very end, so I can keep changing my mind.

Now, it’s time to start decorating. First, cut out one of the signs, and apply it to the frame. I put mine beneath the opening, but if you want yours somewhere else, that’s fine. When the glue is try, you can use a tiny hole punch or awl to poke holes through all the layers, and insert brads on either side.

I cut a matching heart shape, and applied it to the roof area of each of my three shrines.

This shrine was decorated with swirls of gold glitter glue, and edged with it, too. Inside, I glued a tiny glass bottle filled with gold heart confetti, a rolled piece of tan and gold paper tied with gold floss, and a gold bead. All are glued in place with E6000, my favorite hold it in place right away glue.

This shrine was decorated with paper flowers and green glitter glue. Inside are two glass bottles filled with mustard seed and oregano, and a tiny clock button.

I found that the more stuff I put in the shrines, and the heavier the tray became, the more likely it was that it would slide out. If your trays try to fall out, just slide them out of the way a bit, and apply a little glue to the back of the matchbox, then slide the tray back in place.

When all the glue is dry, it’s time to finish off the back. Ugh, remember how I didn’t deal with this earlier? Well, now I have shrines that are lovely on the front, and ugly on the back. I ended up picking at the printed layer of the matchbox, and peeling it off.

The sheet comes with nice back labels, which can be glued in place to give a nice finished look. I guess this doesn’t look so bad after all!

Here’s a closer view of what a finished shrine looks like without much additional decoration. I just added two heart-shaped brads to hold the sign in place below the niche.