Do you want to surprise your kids with the unusual packaging of New Year's surprises? Read the recommendations below, and you can easily make a beautiful DIY chest for gifts. The children will really like that Santa Claus brought them such a fabulous chest. Create an atmosphere of magic at home or at a children's party.
How to choose the size of the product
DIY Christmas chest can be made as a souvenir, for example, in the form of a keychain or magnet, as well as directly in the form of a functional thing designed for packing or storing gifts from Santa Claus. In such a chest, the size of an ordinary gift box, it is easy to pack sweets, small toys and put it under the Christmas tree at home for your baby. If you need a variant of interior decoration for a festive event in a kindergarten, school or other organization, you will have to work hard and make a product the size of a box.
Tools and materials
To make chests of cardboard with your own hands, you will need the following:
- cardboard;
- template;
- drawing instruments (pencil, ruler, eraser, square, compasses);
- scissors or a knife (depending on the size of the manufactured object);
- glue or thread with an awl to connect the elements;
- decor (textured paper, fabric, braid, lace, sequins, beads, beads, etc.).
As you can see, everything you need for work can be found at home!
How to make a magic chest do it yourself template
If you have a finished product, for example, packaging from a sweet gift, you can use it as a blank.
To do this, paste the seams and lay out the cardboard chest to a flat part. Lay the stencil on cardboard and draw a circle around it. If you need to make a chest with your own hands of a smaller or larger size, it is enough to proportionally change the size of your circuit. Another way is to find the template on the Internet, print to the desired scale and also draw a circle.
Whatever version of the template you choose, the steps for creating the chest itself will be as follows:
- So, here is a contour blank that you transferred in any way to cardboard for a chest. Cut it with a knife or scissors.
- Draw along the fold lines with a sharp but non-cutting object, such as a knitting needle or a non-writing ballpoint pen, or make small indentations or cuts as a dotted line. This step will allow you to gently bend thick cardboard without any jamming of material.
- Fold the flat reamer into a three-dimensional structure and glue all the seams.
- The next step will be decoration. By the way, some elements should be attached before assembly, for example, fabric, if you are going to tighten the chest with it.
How to draw a scan yourself
If you decide to make a chest with your own hands, but there is no template, you can create it completely yourself. In fact, the object is a rectangular box with a hinged lid, the end parts of which are made in the form of semicircles. To do this, you will need to draw on the cardboard a rectangle of the bottom of the required size, and on each side another along the rectangle that will form the walls of the product. Remember to make bonding allowances. If it is difficult for you to fully imagine a chest in the form of a flat diagram, take a regular box and turn it around. Use it as a sample of the bottom of the product.
How to make a cover
If you decide to make a box of Santa Claus with your own hands, having drawn a pattern yourself, you will have to work a little over the lid of the product.
For the first time, you can create it as a separate part, which is glued to the base box. Work like this:
- Draw two halves of a circle of a diameter that matches the width of the lid (or base-box).
- Draw a larger diameter circle around the workpieces. These will be gluing allowances.
- Cut the resulting two semicircles and cut along the allowances and bend them.
- Draw a rectangle with a width equal to the long side of the base-box. The length will be determined a little more difficult: you need to measure the perimeter of the arc of the resulting semicircle (without allowances) and add to them the distance to the gluing with the base (back) and the allowance for the front so that the lid is closed with an overlap.
- Draw another rectangle equal to the size of the bottom. Do not forget about bonding allowances.
- Cut out all prepared parts.
- Glue the elements into a three-dimensional structure and attach to the base.
How to make a chest do it yourself without glue
If you don’t understand at all how to assemble a voluminous box from a flat circuit, where to make allowances, and there is no ready-made template, you can use this method of work, where glue is needed only for decorating the product.
Work as follows:
- Draw two identical rectangles for the base of the box and the lid.
- Make two identical parts of the sides of the base (the walls of the chest).
- Make two semicircles for the cover, as well as a large rectangle for making an arched surface. Determine the dimensions yourself, depending on what kind of chest you are making.
- Cut out all the workpieces. Decorate them with fabric, paint or design paper at this stage.
- Make holes along the sides of the parts that will be connected with the neighboring ones with an awl or a large needle at a distance of several millimeters from the edge so that the workpiece does not tear (the distance from the edge depends on the thickness of the cardboard). The adjacent parts should have the same number of holes at an equal distance.
- Take the threads to match the future chest or contrasting and use a crochet hook or needle to connect the parts of the product. The same can be done even with decorative braid or a narrow satin ribbon, only the holes will need to be made of a larger diameter.
In this way, even the one who is difficult to understand in the construction of drawings of boxes can make a chest of Santa Claus with his own hands. The only drawback of this method is that it will take a lot of time to make holes around the perimeter of the workpieces and stitch them or bind with threads.
Product decoration
So, you saw that you can make chests of cardboard with your own hands in different ways, while if you are not using a decorative base material, it is easy to cover it with a cloth or beautiful paper. If the product is glued, then decoration can be performed both before this stage and at the end of the work.
If you make a Christmas chest with your own hands by stitching the elements, you need to tighten the fabric first to pierce the holes in all layers at once. In addition to fabric and paper, such decoration methods are suitable:
- glue a sequin pattern around the perimeter of the sides;
- put a picture of beads in the form of frosty monograms;
- use decoupage technique instead of wrapping with fabric;
- apply volumetric decorations from satin ribbons, quilling elements, artificial snow, applications in the form of snowflakes and other thematic objects.
As you can see, a DIY Christmas chest can be made in many ways. Choose your favorite design and decor. Create spectacular accessories for the holiday!