How to make gift boxes from recycled material http://handygoddess.com The Handy Goddess shows how to make eco friendly gift boxes from recycled material in this diy home crafts project demonstration.

Video Transcription

She is happy. She is at home. And she is here to empower you. She is the Handy Goddess. Check it out! Is this not cute? Look at this little box I have. And you know I got this from this woman. Her name is Linda Varela and she has this cute little shop called The Artisan’s Lair and I bought a few gifts and she put them in these lovely boxes that she made and she showed me how to make them so I am going to share that with you. So, all we need are some things that we need to recycle. I mean, how many times do we have many Christmas cards left at the end of the year or even old calendars work really great, too. So, I am going to show you how we can make these boxes. So first, let us take our card or our calendar like I am going to use here and we are going to make sure that one of the calendar sections, whatever we want on the bottom is a quarter of an inch smaller on just two sides. Okay. So, I will put and trim this down, quarter of an inch on two sides like that, you can just estimate this, perfect! We are going to put this to the side. We have our calendar. Okay. So what I want you to do is take a ruler, alright? And we are going to draw a big X across the calendar or card. And then the trick is you really have to have a square to make this work easily. So here we go and one more line, perfect! Okay. Next, take one of the corners. Fold it up into the center. Okay? Then you are going to fold that one more time up into the flap folds across that line. It is a good idea to burnish this edge with the end of a pen, works great. Then we can unfold it. And we are going to do that to all four sides. And burnish your edges down. So this is going to be the crease. This will belong to bottom of the box. Okay. At this point, what I want you to do now is, okay, take a look, we got a box in the center of this and we need to do is cut here and cut here. So we are cutting up to the box on just two sides of this. Okay? So, it is going to be okay to make it if we draw a line like this and like this and then again on the other side. Alright! So here, we have our four sections where we simply cut up to our center box. And this is actually quite easy to see when you are doing it because you are just following the crease line that we have already in the paper. Okay. So now, we have it like this. These two pieces are coming in. And now what I want you to do on the opposite sides is fold this over so it looks like this, okay? And then, just like to put the box together. You are to lift up those sides and tuck those flaps together and then this just, kind of fold right over. And it locks it in place. It is very cool. And we will do the other side. Okay. So we take the loose flaps. Fold them in. Take this, fold it on top, tuck it under and it now locks in place like that. Look, see? How perfect? And then maybe you can just stick a piece of tape there. And that will hold it so charily. Okay. So now, we have the top of our box. And now we can make the bottom just the same way. And remember, this one was just a quarter of an inch smaller so it will easily fit snuggly underneath this one. So, here I am working on my bottom of the box. But there is one thing I want to show you. This is the only way you are going to get messed up is if you do this thing; so, at this point, I want you to fold in these two triangles like that, right? See? Well, only way you are going to make a mistake is if you fold up the other way because there is just no way that you can that you can prop this thing up and you are going to wonder, you are going to think “What was that? What did I do wrong?” It is this. You have to take your first two flaps from—look and think of the big triangles. We have two big triangles on the right. Fold those in and then everything just come into itself as a box and it is really quite simple. So there you go. And, if you want printed instructions on how to do these cute little boxes, you can go to Linda’s website and I will have that link at the end of this video. So there you go. And you can see the bottom fit snuggly into the top and we have a perfect gift box. Is not this cute? And it was all made from recycled materials and recycled calendars, Christmas cards, whatever. Oh, and this one I made out of my recycled art cards. Is it not adorable? The possibilities are limitless. So, have a lot of fun.