Shelves and Shadowboxes

Ze hubby has been on a real nesting kick recently, what with putting up picture frames and buying shelves. He's painting our shoe cabinet right now and wants to learn carpentry. Soooo I can't help but be swept away with his fervor that I decided to do a project that I wanted to do a couple of years ago haha.

I read about shadowboxes in YoungHouseLove and I knew I wanted to do that with our ring bowl. I searched high and low for shadowboxes and salespeople seem to not have heard of one everrr. Fortunately, I saw these deep picture frames in SM North and I realized, hey, they could be shadowboxes or maybe they really are shadowboxes.

So I first cleaned our ring bowl from Paloma's Nest. This is one of my favorite details from the wedding. We almost did not have one because they don't ship to the Philippines anymore. Fortunately, my friend in the US asked me what we wanted and I immediately forwarded her the link to the website. I threaded two camera charms that I found in Etsy. The nest-like stuff came with the bowl and I just spread it behind. I didn't glue anything because it was already a snug fit with the nest. I'm actually worried it might break because it was a bit snug, so I'm crossing my fingers with this one. I hid some silica gel in there so the charms won't rust.

For the second shadowbox, I decided to display a photo and some stuff from our Japan honeymoon. I'm a pack rat so I had these hidden somewhere. I placed a rubber ninja thingamajig that we got from a souvenir store, a bullet train ticket from Osaka to Kyoto, a ticket to the Himeji Castle, a charm from one of the temples, the photo strip from a booth in Mt. Fuji and a bookmark from the Golden Pavilion. It's so cute I want to shadowbox everything now!

I used washi tape to stick everything in place - (1) keeping with the Japan theme and (2) because washi tape is sticky enough but doesn't leave residue when you take it out after. The rubber ninja thing was heavy so I glue-taped one corner.

So here's how the shelf looks today. Ring bowl shadowbox, MDF letters from Etsy, Japan shadowbox, wire bicycle from Beijing, Yashica camera and wedding magazines.

 

I think I need more shelves and shadowboxes in my life.