Card Gift Box

This is a great way to make a very personalized gift box in which to present a stack of homemade cards to a special someone.  Or, you could use it as a lightweight gift box to hold any treasure – as a gift for any occasion!

It uses Designer Specialty Paper for the top of the box and regular card stock for the bottom.

The secret to making the box work – in other words, making sure the lid will fit over the bottom! – is to make the lid a little bigger than the bottom.  Uhm….duh?

This box will hold 10 A2 cards and their envelopes.  Now, if you have really THICK cards – because you’ve done some mixed media and have a lot embellishments on your cards, you may get fewer than 10.  So, just something to keep in mind!

Here’s how it’s done.  It’s both easy AND peasy!

1.  Choose your DSP for the lid.  Cut a piece that’s 8 9/16″ x 9 13/16″.  Then, using the scoring tool on your Stampin’ Trimmer OR your Simply Scored, score a line 2″ from the edge on all 4 sides.

Bad picture – sorry, it’s hard to see the score lines.  But there really ARE 4 of them!  All of them are 2″ from their respective edge.

2.  Select a complementary card stock for the bottom of your box.  Cut your piece to be 8 1/2″ x 9 3/4″.  Then repeat the score lines – on all 4 sides, at 2″ from each edge.

That’s a little better.  You can see the 4 score lines!

3.  Fold and gently burnish each of the score lines on the top and the bottom pieces.  FYI – the folds are more cooperative if you fold AWAY from the side of the paper where you ran your score tool.  In other words, fold AWAY from the EMbossed side of the score line and TOWARD the DEbossed side.  It seems counterintuitive to me, but it works!

4.  Make 4 cuts on the bottom and the top.  One cut per corner, making sure you cut the same spot on both corners.

You can see I cut on the score line that corresponds to the longest side and only cut in as far and the intersection of the two score lines.  These cuts will form your corners.

5.  Use Multi-Purpose Liquid Glue on the outside of the corners to adhere the box together.  Let’s see if the pictures help…

So in the picture above – you can see the glue on the snowflake side of the DSP.  Those will be on the INSIDE of the box when you fold all the pieces up and together.  Here’s how it looks on the bottom….

6.  Fold the ends up and adhere them to the corners where you’ve applied the glue.  Take a minute to be sure everything is lined up while the glue is still workable.  Do this on the bottom and on the top.  Duh….

Here’s what it looks like:

In this example, I’ve used the 2015 Holiday Catalog DSP called Season of Cheer for the top and Night of Navy card stock for the bottom.  You can see the finished result and how I embellished it….here!

Hope you have fun making wonderful boxes to hold your crafty treasures! 🙂

UPDATE:  What if you’re not making A2 sized cards?  Well, you can adjust the measurements to make a box at whatever size you need.

Take the finished size of your envelope.

Add 1/2″ to the length and the width.

Add 4 ” to the resulting numbers (that will give you the same 2″ box height!)

The result of that math is the size of the card stock for the bottom of your box.

Add 1/8″ to that measurement, and that’s the size of your paper for the top of the box.

Score at 2″ from each side, and continue with the instructions above.  The only thing that may look different is how much overlap the ends of your box will have.  Smaller boxes will have more overlap!

Here’s an example:

Card/envelope 3″ square.

3″ + 1/2″ + 4″ = 7 1/2″ square.  This is the size of the card stock for the bottom.

7 1/2″ + 1/8″ = 7 5/8″ square.  This is the size of the card stock/paper for the top.

Score/fold at 2″ all the way around.

For this size box, the small flaps on the end overlap about 1/4″.  But they’re covered on the outside by the larger flap! 🙂