A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was in a crafts store, and there, in all its glory, was a decorative, animated TV for the holiday.
I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I wanted it! However, it was a fairly large size, and we simply don't have room to store it 11 months of the year. So I had to bid it goodbye.
Then, I realized, I could make a smaller, more simplistic retro TV. Better yet, because my design is in the form of a printable template, I can make one of these retro TVs for every occasion.
Of course, I got busy with the holidays, so I didn't finish up my retro TV diorama until now. Here is my final creation:
I started by printing the retro TV box template (now available to purchase from KB and Friends' Etsy shop). I use a guillotine cutter to cut out the long, straight edges of the box, and, for the angled corners, I just use scissors. I used stick glue to glue the corners of the box together.
The assembled box measures 4.75" wide by 4.5" high by 1.5" deep.
I happened to have some K&Company and Paper Studio scrapbook embellishments on hand. And I cut the colorful gift boxes out from a tag in our Retro Christmas Scrapbook Embellishments kit. The background with the blue sky and snow-covered pine trees was something I already had from an old book.
For a three-dimensional look, I used foam mounting tape to adhere the embellishments to the inside bottom of the box.
The bun feet came from a bag of Fab Lab Crafts wooden candle cups. I tried to stain them using an ink pad that I had on hand, but the brown wasn't the right color so I ended up painting them with acrylic paint.
he hardest thing to make in this project was the rabbit-ears antenna. I finally settled on using a thin dowel, cut down to size, a round wooden piece that I had on hand and two wooden beads for the top.
I drilled a couple of holes in the round wooden piece.
Let's just say that getting the E6000 glue to hold the dowels at just the right angle was a challenge. I ended up using silver metallic acrylic paint on the antenna.
Finally, I got out a string of Mayberry Street Miniatures holiday lights that I never used in a previous project and strung them across my retro television.
I am really happy with my new little retro TV. It's something I'm sure to "watch" all of the time.