Green Craft: From Chocolate Box to Guest Book

So we have an upcoming family birthday celebration and I was asked to bring a guest book. Doesn’t everyone automatically think of an empty chocolate box as a guest book?

For this project you will need:

• Recycled cardboard box
• Scrapbook papers
• Strong adhesives ( I used double sided carpet tape)
• Embellishments ( I used vinyl scraps, some corkboard cutouts I picked up for $.97, washi tape, and a key sticker)
• Paper for your pages 

I opened up my box and immediately saw a book in the two main panels and cut them as follows:

The spine was from a scrap piece the same length as the two sides. I covered each of the cover pieces with scrapbook paper from my stash. Sealed the paper with Mod Podge.
Since I’m a borderline hoarder, I save scraps of everything and had some gold glitter vinyl leftover from a previous project. I decided to use this as “book cloth” to cover the spine.  Applied the carpet tape to the underside of the vinyl , then lay the spine piece in the middle, the two cover pieces on each side and then folded the top and bottom of the vinyl. Since I was using up scraps I couldn’t cut my vinyl piece long enough so that when folded over, it met in the middle but I had enough to cut another piece to fill the gap.

Fold over and this is the front of my guest book before embellishing. I added the washi tape and cork accents ( they were on clearance @ JoAnn) , a metal key sticker, and then College Boy reminded me: “What’s a guest book without a pen” so I made one. 

Well I didn’t make a pen but I embellished one. Just a plain stick ink pen covered with a scrap of paper from my book. Mod Podged it on, added a strip of washi tape and then hot glued some paper flowers (you can find bunches of these in bridal aisle) on the top. Left the wire stems on and just wrapped them around the pen.

For the interior, I cut regular copy paper to size , clamped it together with binder clips and coated one of the short sides with PVA glue. Glue to a chipboard panel cut the same size to make a pad and then glue the "pad to the back cover. 

Green Craft: Turn A Cheese Box Into A Gift Box

I recently shared this project over at the Expressions Vinyl blog but wanted to share it here with all of my readers.

I know I'm not the only one who looks at something for its crafty possibilities before recycling or putting it in the trash. I've seen some other crafty peeps use these cheese boxes and had been saving one to play with. 

I used my box to trace two circles onto the scrapbook paper you see in the background, cut them out and then applied them to the box using Mod Podge. 

While that was drying, I went to work on what would be the focal point of my box. I alternate between my Silhouette Cameo and my Cricut Expression, both of which I love to use to cut vinyl. I used the Cricut for this.

I used the Damask Décor cartridge and a taupe vinyl scrap and cut out my image ( #30).

Here’s the vinyl all cut out and placed on the top of the box. I liked it well enough at that point but never being one to leave anything alone, I went to my embellishment stash and decided on a paper flower and some chocolate colored self adhesive pearls.

The whole thing took maybe an hour and most of that was drying time for the Mod Podge.  Simple, inexpensive, uses what you might already have on hand. Now I just have to finish the gift that is going inside the gift box!

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