If you don’t remember ever seeing an arts and crafts tutorial on my blog, that makes two of us. I actually created a new category for it. Sad, but true.

Arts and crafts projects are not my forte, however I was quite pleased with how these gift boxes turned out for a mother/daughter retreat that I participated in with my two oldest daughters last weekend. I hope you can follow what I did and that it might be useful for you, too.

I apologize in advance for my obsession with shooting in f/1.8; if I could go lower, you might not be able to tell what’s in the pictures. 🙂

Here are my supplies, all purchased at Walmart in the arts and crafts/scrapbooking area: plain cardboard boxes; Tacky Glue; white acrylic paint; Martha Stewart scrapbooking paper; daisy decals; gold, metallic pen. You’ll also need scissors and a paint brush.

First, I painted the lids white.

Aren’t the scalloped edges cute?

Next, I drew pencil marks and cut on the paper until I had a usable template for folding around the lower part of the box. In the third picture, you can see the final shape.

Do not do what I did and squirt glue all over the paper before tracing and making a template, thereby causing your husband to quickly toss another sheet underneath and start outlining, covering his hands with glue in the process.

Coat the paper with glue and cover the boxes nice and smooth. The lids will fit snug with the additional thickness of the paper.

I gave the lids a second coat of paint after they dried, and then added these self-adhesive daisies to the top of each box.

Aren’t these papers divine?

I wrote their names on top with a gold, metallic pen. I ran out of time, or I would have written them a little fancier. You could also use letter decals; I just couldn’t find ones that I liked and that matched the papers.

The whole process took some time (notice the lighting change between first and last steps?), but was well worth it. I feel like the girls appreciated these useful little treasures.

This post was added to Do It Yourself Day at A Soft Place to Land.