Tomorrow we celebrate the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi!  Children, and adults alike, find St. Francis easy to love especially because of his love for animals.  Since I have had a few extra wooden boxes on hand I decided to make a small treasure box for our son.  He loves all God’s creation and I thought I would try out my new wood burner in the process. 

Supplies Needed:

• Small wooden box  (mine was from Michaels)
• Wood burning tool (a similar one)
• small photocopied image
• pencil
• ball point pen
• acrylic paints

*The book shown in this blog post can be found on Amazon. 

Step One:  Use a pencil and shade over the back side of your image.  I placed my paper up in the window (as a lightbox) so I could see where I needed to be shading.  The pencil lead will act as your “carbon paper” for tracing the image onto the box.

Step Two:  Place your image into position on the box with the pencil shaded side down to the wood.  Carefully hold the image in place while you trace the outlines needed with your ball point pen.  Remove paper when complete and discard.

Step Three:  Insert the proper tip and heat up your wood burner.  I tested the burner slightly on the bottom of the box to get a feel of how it would work in my hand.

Step Four:  Burn the outlines you marked on the box in pencil.  This is not for perfectionists.  You can obviously see where the wood burnt more easily in some areas than others.  But for a first time craft I was very pleased with the overall look!  Be sure and unplug the wood burning tool as soon as you are done!!!

Step Five:  Water down your acrylic paint.  Technically you do not have to water down your paint.  But if you want to see the beauty of the wood burning it helps to use more of a watercolor effect to see your pyrography.

Look closely at the consistency of the paint on the right side (under the brush.)  That is what you need it to look like for painting this project.

I also added an inscription inside of the box.  Because I’m a sap like that.  😉

And you are done!  I think that ALL kids love treasure boxes and this will be a fun keepsake item for any child to keep their rosary, saint cards, medals… anything related to the Catholic faith in!

How do you plan to mark the feast day of Saint Francis this year?