Making Boxes from The Gift Box Book

Remember the craft projects you did when you were a kid? Wouldn't it be nice to revisit some of them?

Well, that's exactly what I did recently when I made some boxes from The Gift Box Book...

I had this book when I was at primary school, and I loved it! So many pretty boxes to cut out and make and then use to store the sort of teeny "treasures" that only a kid could think counted as treasure.

I thought this book and all the boxes were long gone (if I ever thought of them at all) until last year when I rediscovered it at the bottom of a big box of crafty supplies. I had totally planned to make the remaining three boxes that weekend.... but life must have got in the way as the months went by and the book sat gathering dust on a shelf in my studio.

So, a few weekends ago, I finally got round to making the final boxes: finally finishing a crafty "to do" which has been on my list for over a year but also kinda since I was a kid (over 20 years ago!)

It turns out that making boxes is just as much fun as when I was small, though this time round I won't be using them for storing things like marbles and old coins and interesting looking rocks :)

This plain-shaped patterned box will probably be the most useful...

... but my favourite is definitely this fancy box!

I love the attention to detail on these boxes - even the bottom of the box has a pattern on it:

Sadly it turns out that in the twenty years since I last made boxes from this book, I have not greatly improved my crafty and/or organisational skills because I managed to lose one of the box pieces in between cutting them out and sticking the box together.  So, this ship box remains unfinished. Boo. 

 

I'd totally blamed younger me for this. "Oh, the top piece must have been on another page of the book that I didn't keep!" Nope, it's totally recent-me's fault - you can spot the missing piece in the photos I took of the pages last year. Note to self: don't throw away all the scraps from your projects until you've actually finished it and know for certain that the scraps are actually all scraps!!

P.S. Fancy making your own boxes? Awesomely,The Gift Box Book is still in print 30 years after it was first published. It's available from Amazon UK, Amazon USA and the Book Depository. Please note, the Amazon and Book Depository links in this post are affiliate links.