This Christmas, like many Americans, we are trying to still give gifts that mean something while working on a smaller budget. At a craft fair not long ago, I saw a woman who had made all kinds of nicely decorated journals and little photo books and such. I had also seen someone else decorate the jumbo clips you see below and use them as note holders or photo holders. We decided to combine the two and try it with those little cubes of paper.
We got our cubes and clips through an office supply store. The decorative paper we found at a resale shop. You can use any kind of scrapbooking or decorative paper. Here are the basic supplies we needed:
Now, I am NOT a crafty person. I came up with the idea, I left it up to the kids to figure out the process! Ms 15 yo took up the challenge and figured out how to wrap the paper around the cube as well as what the dimensions of each paper needed to be.
She decided to cut a large square to cover the bottom and two longer pieces to wrap around the sides. The exact dimensions here won't matter because it would depend on the size of your cube (or whatever else you are planning on covering).
Using a lot of hot glue (another thing I have little patience for), she glued the bottom piece onto the bottom :) and wrapped the overlap up the sides. In order to do that, however, she had to cut a diagonal slit in the overlap of the paper.
Next, she glued the two long pieces around the sides, overlapping both of them. As you can see here, the paper extends up over the top of the cube.
Here she cut out a part of the paper for the little slot in the cube and then folded over the excess and glued it down inside, thus giving the edges a nice covering, too.
She then cut the appropriate slits in the corners of the top excess paper and folded over the excess and glued it around the top edges of the cube to give this a nice finish, too.
After the cube is finished, you can add any kind of embellishments that you would like. We first glued on a flower...
and then some ribbon.
Here is the finished product with the paper back inside the cube.
Next, she measured and cut out the same paper for the jumbo sized clip.
Getting that hot glue gun out again, she glued the paper to the clip.
We found coordinating embellishments to make a nice matching set.
And there you have it - an easy (I know, easy for me to say, I didn't do any of it :) inexpensive and nice Christmas gift.
If those of us in this household who aren't overly crafty can do this, so can you!
