Country Garden Gift Boxes (for Craftwork Cards)

Here are four gift boxes, with self-designed construction, featuring the new, and fabulous, Country Garden papers from Craftwork Cards. They are embellished with Card Candi from the same range, as well as paper bows from the offcuts. A smidge of Liquid Pearls here and there, and hey presto, a lovely project. And they got even more air time during the Craftwork Cards Birthday Bonus on Create & Craft on 15th/16th April – thank you Julie!

Full instructions and links to the templates are available at the Craftwork Cards Blog, here.

 

Pearlised custom patterned card

The design challenge over at WOW! Embossing Powder blog this month is ‘monochromatic’ and featuring their fabulous pearlescent powders. This is what I came up with, and if you’d like to find out how I made the pearlescent background card/gift box lid pop over and read my post.

 

More ATCs and a Gift Box

I’ve been busy melting powders today… the last of my ATCs for this weekend’s swap with the Wow! Embossing Powder Design Team are complete! As normal, the photo doesn’t quite do them justice 🙁

And the last of my creations to be made in time for the trade show at the NEC is this lovely gift box – it’s just 5 cm square at the base and made from a sheet of A4 coloured card. The stamps are all from Wow! Embossing Powder, as is the fabulous no-messing-about-with-antistatic-bags white embossing powder.

Self-closing box instructions

Following several requests (well, at least one!), here are instructions for making my self-closing box using the printable template on my Template page.

Either print or trace the outlines from the template onto a sheet of A4 card (at least 160gsm recommended)
Cut round the solid lines
Using a scoring blade in your personal cutter, or an embossing tool or other scoring technique of your choice, score the dotted lines
Crease all the scored lines, folding upwards. Add a strip of double sided tape to the underside of the tab (red strip in photo)
Stick down the tab to the inside (printed) side of the last (right hand) section of the box, to make a pentagonal cylinder
The tags tuck under one another to close the box – you should end up with a nice swirl. To unlock, just pull one of the hooks from the rest. By doing the same top and bottom, you can create a horizontal box like the centre of a Christmas Cracker
If you want a vertical standing box, try tucking the hooks toward the inside of the box – this is tricky and fiddly, but gives this smooth bottom closure
And this is what it would look like on the inside.
Hope this helps! If you want a video version of this, then I’ll point you toward my Amazon wish list so you can get me the webcam I’d like to set up video tutorials 🙂

New ‘Templates’ section

In readiness for my next Wow! Embossing Powders project, I’ve added a new section to my blog to hold a library of templates that I have used over the years. The first to appear are a self-closing box and base that I designed to be made from a sheet of A4 in acetate, though it would work well enough in card too. Please have a peek, using the link on the toolbar under the blog title, and let me know if I need to add any assembly instructions!