building a penguin box

i know penguin things are trendy now, but my sister has been in love with penguins since- i'm sorry, i do not recall a time when she did not love penguins. clearly since her existence on this planet is finite the span of time in which she has loved penguins cannot accurately be described as "forever", but let's just say it is not a passing fad with her.

my mother has been wrapping all her gifts for every holiday in wrapping paper that features penguins for more years than i can count, and now that penguin wrappings are trendy my mom can stock up even though she already has enough penguin wrapping paper to last for ten years or so.

and no, that is not an exaggeration. it would be less alarming if it were an exaggeration.

so anyway, i saw a thing on the interwebs in which a guy made a penguin gift box for his wife and i thought: hey, i could do that.

so i set to work building a penguin box.

pretty early on in the process, though, i realized that unlike that guy's wife, my sister was going to want that penguin box to  open without harming the penguin, because she was going to want to make that puppy a permanent part of her collection, so i had to make it with some kind of door that could be closed and opened and still support the gift inside, which was kind of heavy.

the gift, actually, while perfectly well received, was somewhat anticlimactic to the gift box, which is a risk you take when you spend six hours building a special box to hold the gift because your sister will REALLY like a penguin box.

so here's the slideshow of the box construction.






and it also explains what i was doing on the porch with the black spraypaint.

it does not, however, explain why black spraypaint is a regular part of my christmas, but maybe i will tell you about that later.