Welcome to the gazillionth installment of Make A Thing,  where we make handmade gifts for people. Or ourselves. Or our cats. Mostly our cats.

Header by Rory Midhani

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It’s Week Two of Hansen and my big Style Thief/Make a Thing swap! I hope you enjoyed Hansen stealing Joseph Gordon Levitt’s style! Last week I taught you all about washi tape. Some might call last week Washi Tape Boxes 101. This week I’ll continue that lesson as we move into Advanced Washi Tape Boxes.

In addition to everything else in the world, I’m pretty hooked on Graze.com. Graze is a company that sends you four delicious snacks every other week in these great little boxes. The problem is that the boxes start to feel wasteful as you recycle them every week. Indeed, getting weekly snacks seemed like a much better idea before all these boxes started to pile up.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting a small compartmented jewelry box for my day-to-day stuff. I have a big jewelry box for all my gear, but I wanted a way to have the essentials right on my vanity.

So what’s a girl to do with a need for a box and tons of boxes?! Washi tape a spray paint ugly boxes until they’re functional and aesthetically pleasing jewelry boxes. You could also use these boxes to hold trinkets, cufflinks or your four favorite bow ties or your D&D dice.

This is a Graze box! (via graze.com)

If you don’t have a suspicious build up of Graze boxes, you can also use any type of flap-top box. For the inside, where I’ve use the individual containers, you could use old plastic tupperware or the plastic liners that come in individually wrapped snacks.

Trinket/Jewelry Box

Supplies Needed:
+ Washi Tape
+ Cardboard flaptop box
+ Small plastic containers
+ X-Acto knife
+ Gold spray paint
+ Foam (optional)

Level of Difficulty: Harder than ordering Graze boxes, but easier than keeping yourself from devouring your entire Graze box in one sitting.

Pick a flap-top box. Pull all the interior stuff out of your box (interior framing, snack boxes, whatever) and pull off any exterior stickers or labels.

Cut the side wings off the box. You don’t have to do this, but I wanted my box to have the flap go over the front instead of the back.

Cover the top with washi tape. Use a tape where you can line up thepattern. The tape will probably have to overlap to make the design, so get comfortable with the idea that the tap with have lighter and darker stripes where the tape overlaps. If you don’t like this you can buy tape where the pattern lines up when strips of tape are directly next to each other.

If you don’t care about the inside of the box, just fold the tape over the edges. If you do care about the inside of the box, flip the lid flat on a cutting board and exacto knife the excess tape off along the edges from the underside.

Cover the outside of the bottom of the box with washi tape. Add exterior accents as you see fit. For the tape along the bottom I just stuck it underneath because I didn’t care how the bottom of the box looked. You can carefully cover the bottom, aligning the edges using your exacto knife, if this is something you care about.

Cover the inside of the box with washi tape. I extended the colors around from the outside, but you can also use totally different fun colors on the inside. I also left the very base of the inside the way it was because Graze boxes have these pretty pictures on the inside of them.

Go outside and spray paint the little plastic containers gold. If your box has interior dividers that you want to use (like a Graze box) also spray these gold. If your box doesn’t have dividers you might want to make some by tracing around your little containers on cardboard and using an exacto knife to cut out the right shape.  Let the paint dry for at least 30 minutes or it will be coming off on to your things forever.

If you want you can cut foam out to stick in the little containers. I did because I wanted to be able to stick earrings right in the tray without them sloshing around.

If you cut up little cubes you can stick them in so that rings have a place to sit securely.

Put it all together!Congrats, you now have an adorable box to stash all sorts of small pretty things. If you’d prefer, you can skip the subcontainers and spray paint the entire inside gold for a lovely gift or storage box. Or just washi tape a ton of boxes and stack them up and stare at them. The choices are really endless.

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