AH-HA Recycling Moment

Lately I have been struggling to find BOXES.   Most of the boxes I need are for shipping small items that I have sold in my ETSY store.  The big and medium sized cardboard boxes are easy to find in the recycle bin or even free from a variety of stores about town.  Even some of my friends keep me in mind when they come across boxes, especially small ones.   But it still seems that I am having to hunt for little, little boxes!  

Right now, I am needing boxes that are about 4 inches cubed -- not many boxes around that are that small...

I finally figured out I need to make my own (buying them just costs more that I am willing to pay).

Of course I get these ideas when there is little or no recycled cardboard for a project, so I just had to empty the current morning cereal box into a plastic container and cut into the box to make what I needed.

So I opened up the cereal box - nice and flat.

Drew the lines with my big acrylic rotary cutting ruler. Measure twice, cut once - thats why you see that extra drawn line, with the crosshatch marks -- that is the wrong line to follow...

cut out the soon to be little box -- I just translated the design from regular boxes you find anywhere and used my own measurements.

A touch of glue on the one "tab" to create the square, then a piece of masking tape to help hold it.

I scored all my drawn lines with the scoring or embossing tool I had bought at least twenty years ago when I thought I might be interested in Scrapbooking.

And there it is!  The perfect sized box for protecting and then shipping off some of the egg coddlers that are in my shop....

Now, I have to find 15 more cereal boxes and get busy drawing, cutting and folding.

Probably useful for some of the gifts that will need boxing and wrapping at Christmas?  Do you think?

Have a great Saturday!  Maybe just the day to get out there and rake up a few leaves and then yell at the kids for spreading them out again!?