Rolodex holder

I have now posted a lot of Rolodex cards over the last month, and I am a little embarassed to admit that I used to store them all together in a Yogi Tea Classic cardbord box for teabags. All of my Rolos, the knes for my Tangle index and the cards send to me by other artists. The box smells nice thiugh, like cinnamon. But it was time for something new and I waited until I could not stop myself any longer. I went into a shoe store and asked them for a tiny empty shoe box, the kind they sell babies first shoes in. I took it home and started to think about how to build the rails for the Rolos, I wanted them to fit not too snug so I could still flip them easily enough. What I ended up using were 2 pairs of glued together swizzle sticks (I love that word) and some folded card, like so...

Yes, I also went ahead and made my own index cards from coloured card.

And because the box itself did look a bit boring I decided to move out of my comfort zone and use some papers and ribbon I had in my stash and fancy it up a bit with a huge bow...

and back...

Don't ask what the paper collection is, I bought it at a reduced price and it has lots of decoupage pages. I have never done decoupage but since this is a Valentines day set I might use them for Valentines day...

As you can see all my index cards fit in nicely, but something was still missing (see that ugly white box at the lower bottom?). I started asking myself how on earth would I ever really be able to decide on which patterns to use in my tangles? With the sheer amount I tend to play it safe and do some very nice ones over and over and over again. So I decided to make myself a random tangle pattern generator...

And fit it into that ugly free space at the bottom of the box...

That is the main part of the Rolodex card holder done, but what to do with the lid? A few month back I had altered a little book for an awesome girl in Texas (you know who you are ;) ) and I had practised on an old pocket diary. Now I had the problem that the old obsolete diary had become too interesting to just chuck it out and now finally its day had come. I mounted it onto the top of my shoe box lid, stuck some more fancy paper and ribbon around it, and even fixated the pages with part of the roll that held the ribbon. Now I can display new cards on the top and rotate them around on a regular basis.

I might work in a few more embellishments around the edge of the altered diary, but I still have not found the right object to put there. Maybe if I find a nice twig in the garden......