The holiday season is approaching, and even though I am totally not ready for holiday music and lights yet, I have gotten my wrap on a little early. Well sort of… You see, I love to organize. That love has led me to have a problem with containers. It’s an addiction really. One that will not allow me to throw away boxes, especially cute ones. I have tons of these cute boxes from my monthly Birchbox subscription and a couple of old iPad boxes that we screaming to be repurposed.
I decided that the best way to give these babies a makeover was to cover them in paper. But I really don’t want to look at reindeer patterns all year long, so I broke out my computer and used Adobe Illustrator to make some fun prints on my own.
The prints took me about an hour to make, and then I printed them out on 11″ x 17″ high quality photo paper. Each piece will cover 2 Birchbox tops, so if you don’t have a wide format printer, the standard 8.5″ x 11″ will do just fine. However the iPad boxes need the larger sheet.
Then it was time to get to wrapping! the first thing I did was apply double-sided scrap booking tape to the top.
Then I put the paper face down on a clean and flat surface, and placed the box top upside down and centered.
Next I cut 4 slits into the paper in line with the longest side.
This allowed me to fold up the side, wrap around the corner and secure with tape.
I repeated this on the other side and most of the box was covered. As you can see, there was a lot of extra space near the edge of the box, and the edge of the paper was no where near straight.
I decided before I started that I didn’t want to attempt to wrap around the edges of the box. The photo paper is much too thick, and these boxes were going to be used for storage and needed to open easily. So I broke out some washi tape that I bought on a whim one day at Target, but had never actually used. If you don’t know what washi tape is, be amazed by all the ways you can use it by checking this out. The final step was just to wrap the tape around the edge of the box to cover what was still exposed.
The original plan was to to do the top and bottom of the boxes, but after I saw the Birchbox with just the top covered, I knew that less was more.
This was a really simple project and each box took only 20 mins to complete. Maybe I will wrap all of my holiday gifts this way. Well, maybe just the people I really like.
Do you repurpose any items that usually get thrown away? Do you have a container addiction like I do?
