Napkin organizer

It's been a while since I started with decoupage, but it has been a start that every crafter knows (and fears): buying every "cute" napkin I could find and lots of wooden things, too, because I had a thousand ideas on how to use them - only to realize I forgot most of them even before I brought my stuff home. For the ones that remained, I had either no time or... oh well...
Long story short told, I ended up lots of napkins and no proper place to store them. A cardboard box turned out to be a solution for a while, but it made it almost impossible to have the motifs on hand and keep track on what I actually owned. 
A while ago however, those wooden napkin boxes caught my eye and - as you can magine - I realized I'd absolutely need to buy a couple of them. If I would paint and cover them with napkins, the'd make a nicely organized napkin storage. 
Still, I couldn't make myself to realize the idea right away, and they shared the fate of my napkin stash for quite some time. 

In the end, I picked a couple of napkins that would fit into my organizer-project: motifs not too huge as I didn't want to cover the entire box, and not too small as I still wanted them to be recognisable at first glance.

As I had 5 boxes, I divided my napkins into 5 themes and tried to find a matching cover-napkin for each box. Among the right-size motifs, I picked the herbal one for cuisine-themed napkins, the rose one for flowers, the African one for exotic and animal motifs, the maritime one for summer napkins, and the one with hearts for the romantic stuff.

Once I was through with arranging and fixing the outside, I painted the inside with a colour that would match te outside motif and theme of each box. However, I decided not to use polish on the colour itself to prevent the napkins from sticking to the inside of the boxes. 

And with the exception of one heart that was somehow torn during the process of decoupage, the rest turned out pretty well.  

Next to all the work, the project had a good effect on my crafting stash, too: to make sure all of my napkins would fit it the new organizer, I had to sort out some of them. I decided to get rid of napkins that I'd never use for decoupage and passed them on to mom to use them in the kitchen. Colourful napkins for mom, more space for me, and most important of all: no more napkin mess in my crafting corner :)

A little contribution to the May collection of Create in Austria - artwork created by Austrians and/or in Austria.

challenges: 
- 613 avenue create: ATG with optional twist "create a container"
- a bit more time to craft:  ATG
- alphabet challengeblog: D for decoupage
- cardmania: colourful life
- city crafter: you can do it (napkin decoupage)
- crafting with an attitude: ATG
- crafty calendar: flowers
- crafty catz: ATG with optional twist "5 of something" (5 boxes)
- crafty sentiments: ATG
- creative moments: ATG
- cute card thursday: ATG
- deep ocean: ATG
- friendship challenge: ATG
- fussy and fancy: ATG
- inspiration destination: ATG
- love to craft: ATG 
- pennys papertake: ATG
- scrapping4fun: ATG
- through the craftroom door: ATG
- wortartwednesday: ATG