Disney Explosion Box

At the request of a good friend, I set out to create a spectacular Disney-themed explosion box for her to use when gifting some theme park passes this Christmas.

 

I neglected to take pictures of a lot of things along the way, and these are by no means detailed instructions, but here' the basic gist of it:

I started out my box using the SVGCuts.com Small Snowflake Box from the Winter Gazebo kit. To turn it into an explosion box, I cut the pieces called 'bottom sides' into 6 panels. I left the tabs at the bottom for gluing, but the panel on the right has a side tab that is not needed, so I cut it off as well. When all was done, I had six panels that looked like this:

Next I cut out the pieces called 'bottom' - two hexagons - and set about gluing my 6 panels to the largest bottom piece, one on each of the six sides.. I used the leftover hexagon bottom to cover up the glued tabs and finish it off neatly.

I used my Cricut Disney cartridge to cut out the various characters and decorated the panels with an embossed background, the characters and some bling to weight down the flaps.  Mickey and Minnie are mounted on some acetate strips, so they move around and look like they're really jumping for joy! The flap with Mickey's hand is a pull-out pocket where I added a message about going to Disney.

I added a sliceform tree that I found a pattern for online. It required a lot of tweaking, but I got it to work out for me. I stuck it on a doily 'tree skirt' with some hot glue and added some mini presents to finish off the inside.

For the exterior, I created some decorative panels in red to go around the outside panels and added white ovals to the two front panels to look like Mickey's pants buttons.

I made the plain box lid (in the extras folder) and decorated it with some festive greenery (from a Cricut cartridge) on the outside and then hid a little surprise for one of the recipients (also a Star Wars fan) on the inside of the lid.

The idea for the Mickey ears came from Sharalyn Morgan's blog post called Minnie Ears for Crystal. 

I used the SVGCuts.com Baseball Cap file from the Fun and Games kit to get this started.  I made my ears slightly different than Sharalyns in that I omitted the bow, put the ears in different placement due to how I wanted the box to face, and then I glittered the ears themselves and then sealed them with some Mod Podge so the glitter wouldn't get all over EVERYTHING!

Once the ears were all put together, I glued the baseball cap top (with ears) to the baseball cap base with some hot glue around the inside of the box.  The ears are what is going to be used to open the explosion box, so I needed it to stay together.

After the baseball cap/ears box was one glued unit, I then glued that to the top of the snowflake box lid:

 to get this:

Clear as mud, right?!!  Anyway, I think you get the idea. All you do now is lift up on the ears and the box 'explodes' open.

I'm told this project was a huge hit Christmas morning and I'm so very glad. It was a fun challenge to create this and come up with different ideas for how to make it special.

Thanks for stopping by!