Final Fantasy Chest

This was an epic project which turned into a collaboration with my parents, to produce a Final Fantasy-styled chest for my brother's birthday present. It was inspired by him geeking out over his friend being bought one of the official FFVII merchandise potions. I couldn't afford that, so I did this.

You have no idea how hard it is to get hold of decently potion-esque bottles until you try. My first attempt ended up with my holding five antique bottles all marked "poison"! Since I was trying to arrange matters so my brother could drink the contents of the bottles if the notion took him, I had to send those back and try again. God bless Ebay.

Anyway. My mother took the smaller of two white chests, stripped off the strapping, and sanded off all the white to restain the wood and spray the strapping gold. My father made the wood shavings to be used as packaging. I bought all the other materials, sewed the Phoenix Down purse (from first principles: I am NOT a seamstress!), tied the feathers, stained card to use as labels and wrote out the labels, wrapped silver wire around the bottles as best I could (you people who do wire-wrapped jewellery are saints), and mixed the food colouring with water for the final result.