My daughter attended the same pirate-themed birthday party as Chica recently. One of the gifts we bought the guest of honor was a tube full of plastic pirate figures. I went to wrap them in the pirate wrapping paper I had and noticed that the box I was about to use was too nice and cute to just wrap normally. The creative side of my brain started to kick in and before I knew it, I was gluing sand!

I wanted the box to actually be part of the gift. I had a small, plain white box available but you could just as easily use a sturdy shoe box or any other small box with a removable lid. Make sure the cardboard isn’t too flimsy, though, so that it will hold up well. I decorated this like a pirate scene with materials that I already had in my craft room. First, I wrapped the lid in the pirate wrapping paper. Then, I put a piece of ocean themed scrapbook paper in the lid to hide all of the tape and jagged edges of the wrapping paper. I painted the outside of the bottom of the box in black glossy paint and placed pirate themed stickers all over the outside (Fig.1).

On the inside, I used the top half of the ocean scrapbook paper to line the two sides and the back. I painted the inside “top” of the box a sky blue color. Now, I had a little diorama like scene (Fig.2). A large pirate ship sticker from the same set went onto the backdrop and I spray glued some sand to the side of the box acting as the bottom of the scene. To make sure the sand stayed put, I coated it afterwards with some clear spray varnish (Fig.3).

The completed box sets the stage for lots of imaginative play (Fig.4). The added bonus for mom and dad is that it also contains all of those small pirate pieces so no one ends up stepping on them or sucking them up into a vacuum cleaner. You can easily adapt this idea to any type of plastic figures, such as a castle scene for knights and dragons, a wild west scene for cowboys and Indians, an underwater reef for fishes or a outer space scene for astronauts and spaceships.