I covered it in beautiful paper from Cave Paper, and I cut neat flaps for the inside walls to fit around the dividers:

And then realized I should have thought about how much material I had left. See, I wanted the whole box to be covered in the same paper, but I only had about enough left to cover the lid and a few of the inside walls.

I glued up the lid insert next



It's hollow on the inside. The lid will stay on with magnets, so the inset had to be deep enough to secure the magnets, but I didn't want to laminate five or six sheets of board together because it would make the lid strangely heavy. This way, the lid will have a bit of heft, but not too much.

I glued that to a lid piece, and then mucked around with other materials to line the bottom and walls on the inside of the box tray. I used a rust-colored Iris book cloth for the bottom, because the color seemed to go well enough. I layered the crackle flax paper on the divider walls, to cover the raw edges of cloth fabric (except for along the outside of the box, by necessity). I was then completely out of crackle paper, so I used the black sparkle flax to line the tops of the dividers.

And voila! The final box:

This is only about 60 cards, to demonstrate that the dividers are spaced far enough apart.  All I need to do now is glue on a bottom (when I order more material to make the bottom covered in the crackle paper) and glue the MTG colors in the inset circles on the outside of the box... and probably glue another piece to the lid that has a circle inset, because there are five colors in MTG, not four, and I forgot to cut an inset in the lid. Whoops.

Next time, I'll over-estimate materials, instead of under-estimating. Even though the Cave Paper is expensive, it's worth over-estimating so I can get it right. The proper way to cover the divider walls would have been to fold one piece of the crackle paper over each divider, so there would be no raw edges of paper or cloth along the side for the cards to bump, so the walls would be nice and smooth. Then, instead of a cloth bottom, I would have probably used the sparkle black, to mirror the inset lid.  Although, I'm fairly pleased with the rust color.

In other news, here are some hardback books I made in Binding II this semester:

This is neat. Via Green Chair Press via Book Patrol via Infographics Only.

By the way, Susan Angebranndt's blog and website, Green Chair Press  is absolutely wonderful. She posts a lot of book arts related links, and she writes about her printing and book experiments. 

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The cats declined to join us.

"Are you serious?"

We searched high and low among the headstones and fake flowers. It was quite pretty, and, unsurprisingly, rather warm.

We found this little guy taking refuge under a tree, but his conversation was a bit two-dimensional (ah hah hah).

Thanks, Conte: A Journal of Narrative Writing, for kindly nominating my poem for Pushcart consideration! I've never been a nominee before.  I should probably acquire one of those t-shirts. T-shirt or no, I'm ridiculously flattered.

Speaking of Pushcarts, snarky boyfriend says I shouldn't nominate BWR contributors for Pushcarts because I'd be hurting my chances of winning. Snark or no, a Pushcart for a BWR contributor is a Pushcart for me in my heart -- seriously. If you're curious, I've posted our list of nominees for 2012 here. If you love me you'll be hoping for any of these six writers to win as much as you're hoping for me.

Speaking of writing, I've narrowly managed to fail NaNoWriMo: Poetry Edition, which is my dear friend Lindsay's version of NaNoWriMo (I just followed along) in which we wrote a poem a day for the month of November -- instead of 1500 words a day or some such nonsense. Now, we've both managed to write toward larger projects, or rather, we've both found that the poems we've written are linked. So we've ended up writing the better part of a book of poetry each. 

I say I failed narrowly because I think I'm two or three poems behind... and suddenly I find it's December 1. Whoops. I'll be writing the last few tonight and tomorrow... 

...in between reading The Master and Margarita, reading Sisaphus Rex in the graveyard, twirling around in my first ModCloth purchase, playing Magic, playing Settlers of Catan, reading galleys for BWR 39.2, tomorrow's galley meeting for 39.2, making apple cider caramels, playing freeze tag, snuggling with my cats... you know, all of these important writerly things.