Make Your Own Travel Make Up Palette

by VioletLeBeaux | Nov 15, 2010 | Beauty, Beauty-Tutorials, Craft, Storage/Utility-Tutorials, Travel In Style, Tutorial

I’ve been really loving experimenting with make up and mixing my own colours and things lately so I thought it was about time to make something to keep them all in! You all know how much I love customised stuff so this post is all about how I made my very own make up travel palette!

Celeste forwarded me this video tutorial she found on making one and while I thought his method was clever I didn’t have most of those items so I decided to start from scratch and just do it my own way ^_^

I think there are a lot things that could be improved with how this one turned out but this is basically a base idea and I am planning to to use the techniques I learned in making this one to make an even better version which I will of course post too!

This is my finished product:

To make the box to keep it all in I use a cut up cardboard box. You need to decide how big you want your finished product to be and decide how many pans of make up you want in there. I decided 6 and measured it out.

Ignore the bits of glue and felt on the cardboard because it used to be a ring box ^_^ Anyway this is what the pieces of my box look like, you can see how it will fit together eventually with the hinged lid…

So tape it all together

You want to leave the hinge tape a little loose so it can swing easily:

Now it’s time to cover the whole thing in fabric using your glue gun to stick it. I used felt because that’s all I had left in my stash. Next time I think I will use something else on the outside but again use felt on the inside.There is no need to cover the bottom of the inside part on the right as that’s where the make up will go ^_^

Notice that on the inside of the lid I cut slashes going from one side to the other, I also only glued it around the outside. The reason for this is that you can use the strips to hold important things such as make up brushes, applicators, false lashes or glue 😀 Very useful!!

Next I glued a ribbon in place on the spine so it could be tied around and hold the hold thing closed with a bow.

Now let’s make the palette to go inside the thing!

I had this old palette that cost me like $4 a long time ago. I didn’t really like any of the colours anymore so it seemed like good craft fodder ^_^

I broke it open and removed all the little trays using pliers. Be careful because they can be sharp!

I put all of the powders into containers in case I ever wanted to mix them later and washed the metal trays so I ended up with this:

Next I cut a piece of cardboard that was the correct size to fit in my box thingy and glued the trays into place ^_^

Now while we’re here at the palette part you should cut out a piece of felt a couple of centimeters bigger than the cardboard. Unfortunately I didn’t get photos of this part but you need to cut holes that are big enough to fit the metals trays snuggly. Basically what you’re doing is making a nice little cover to make it all look pretty and so the trays don’t look so far out of place sticking up so much. So in my case I cut 6 holes… if that makes sense! Don’t glue it on yet though, we’ll fill the trays first.

Now time to mix up the powders 😀

As a mixing bowl I used the metal bits from empty tea light candles. They are perfect because you don’t have to clean them when you change colours, just throw them out! Also if you make too much you can actually just press the extra powder into them and keep for next time 😀 Just make sure that you clean them well and get rid of any old wax!!

To press your powder you will need the kind of gel hand sanitizer with alcohol so it will evaporate to make it all sticky again.

Put your powder into the candle and add one squirt of sanitizer. Mix it very very well until it forms a paste:

Tip the paste into the metal tray and squish it down with the stick:

Using a piece of paper towel press all of the liquid out with your finger. Be careful to make it nice and flat and smoosh as much liquid out as you can. You can use this same technique to fix cracked/broken eyeshadows, pressed powder, blush and the like, very handy to know!

Taadaa let it dry and that’s it! Repeat with any other colours you want to put in there ^_^

Now I wanted to include a lip colour too so I took some lip sticks I didn’t 100% like the colours of and mixed my own ^_^

First thing I did was add some shimmer dust to my mixing bowl.

Then I cut off pieces of each of the lippies and added them…

Using the pliers I held my pliers over a lit candle to melt the colours together. I mixed it together properly and poured into the tray. To get a nice clean finish on the top I use a lighter to *VERY CAREFULLY* melt the top so it was perfect!

I ended up going with 4 eye shadows, 1 shimmer and 1 lip colour so this is what my finished colours looked like:

After that the last and yet somehow hardest step is to fit the felt piece over the top of the palette so you can glue it in place and wrap around to the back.

You should have a nice pretty little tray to go in your box like this:

The best part of this is that because it fits so snugly there is no need to glue it in place so in theory you could have one master box and put in a different palette depending on the make up you wanted to wear that day! At least that’s what I’m planning to do ^_^

Closed it looks like this:

So all in all I think this was a really good experiment! while it didn’t turn out perfectly, I can see what I want to improve for next time and I can’t wait to give it another go 😀

What do you guys think? Have you ever done something like this before?