With Easter coming up this weekend, I wanted to take a minute to show the people I work with how much I appreciate them. Of course, I have a ton of craft paper, so I thought it would be cool to make mini Easter baskets with candy in them.
I started with a 12x12 piece of paper. I didn't want the baskets to be too big, so I knew I wasn't going to need the whole sheet for one basket. Not wanting to waste any paper or make more scraps, I decided to cut the paper into four 6x6 squares and make my pattern based on this size.
I played around making boxes with a few different dimensions and finally settled on a base of 3 inches with sides of 1 1/4 inches. This made the basket wide enough to hold a few small things with sides just high enough to show the paper's pattern and keep everything from falling out. To reinforce the edges, I left a 1/4 inch border on each side that I could fold over the top. That allowed me to use the whole sheet of paper without wasting anything.
When making paper boxes, you need to score the paper to make it easier to fold. For this project, I scored the paper face down at 1/4 inch and 1 1/2 inches on each side. Here's the pattern below. The gray lines show where the score marks are and the red shows where the cuts should be made.
The next step is to cut along the score marks to make the tabs that hold the box together. At first, I was just going to make boxes, but I discovered when the tabs were cut at an angle, it made it so I could slide the edges out a tiny bit so the box looked more like a basket. You can see what this looks like later on in the post.
Now it was time to fold the baskets and glue the sides together. If you want the corners to angle out and make the basket shape, you should glue the tabs to the side and pull them out just a little before the glue dries.
Here's what the corners look like when finished. I hope that makes sense now :)
Like I said before, I left a 1/4 inch border around the edges so I could fold it over the top of each side. This made the edges sturdier so the basket could hold things better. You could skip that step if you wanted and make the sides 1 1/2 inches rather than 1 1/4.
To finish it off, I cut thin strips from some scrap papers that were 8 inches long. Then, I glued them to each side of the basket to make a handle.
Altogether, I made 28 baskets out of 7 sheets of scrapbook paper which allowed me to use several different paper pattens. It took about 5 hours for me to put them all together, but I think it was worth it for my little gifts to have personal touch. To save a little time, I batched the steps rather than making the baskets one at a time. That means I cut all of the papers, then scored them all, then cut them, and so on.
The finished product turned out pretty cute, especially when stuffed with a little bit of Easter grass a few trinkets. The size was perfect for holding fun size candies and two Easter egg surprises. My co-workers really seemed to enjoy them, and I hope they showed how much I appreciate them all!
I first started making boxes kind of like this after watching some videos by the Posh Paper Lady on YouTube. If you like this sort of thing, you should definitely check out her channel: The Posh Paper Lady
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