Eat Cake Frosting

A box I made for my sister for her birthday this month! It’s a Writer’s Box, which is a thing I just made up. My sister is a writer too, so I thought she might like this. And she did!

Here is what’s in it:

1) The top of the box, which is an old wooden cigar box I bought at a local tobacco store and decorated.

2) The inside, which has a number of things and is covered in old pages from a book that was being thrown away at my local library. It’s a book about american plays.

3) Three small glass vials with inspirational (ie silly) advice for writers rolled up and stuck inside.

4) A small corked bottle with little tiny scraps of cut-up pages inside. The tied-on label says “Book Seeds: Plant Your Own Pulitzer!”

5) A handmade envelope, tied up with a black ribbon. Inside is a secret note.

6) The bottom of the box has three compartments made of paper-decorated cardboard, with little brass rings for opening and bits of velcro for holding them closed. They are labelled “small ideas”, “medium ideas” and “big ideas.” This is the small ideas compartment, opened to show the little matchbook notebooks I made.

7) The “big ideas” compartment, opened to show a hidden key and the decorated moleskine notebook inside it.

8) The “medium ideas” compartment, opened to show the medium-sized little decorated notebook.

9) The matchbook notebooks I made for tiny, on-the-go ideas. I got a bunch of grocery store matchbooks (they gave me a whole box for free!), took out the matches, put in little pads of blank paper, painted the covers and sewed pink buttons on them for decoration.

The stringed playing card on the inside of the lid was from Sleep No More, a theater production I saw in New York. They give these playing cards as tickets. I kept mine but found someone else’s on the floor while I was inside the show, and this is the one I found.