Exploding Boxes;Place Setting Ideas for the Holidays;

Welcome Back

Today I would like to share a tutorial for an exploding box. It’s still a paper craft project for those of you getting worried! These make wonderful place settings for holiday parties and are a great alternative to crackers for those of us with limited dexterity.

The finished box will look like this;

 

You Will Need

• Exploding Box Templates. I created templates for 3cm and 6cm Boxes with full instructions. The PDF’s were kindly added to the Stamping Mad Forum site. The link will take you to the post on the forum. From there you can download the PDF’s for the boxes of your choice.  You will need to download these to follow this project
• A4 card stock that will go through your printer.
• A printer
• Steel Ruler
• Craft knife
• Scissors
• Cutting mat
• Scoring tool

You can use plain or pre printed patterned cardstock. If you only have plain paper use craft CD’s to create the patterned paper that will suit your finished project.

The template has been designed to fit within an A4 sheet. For the 3cm box, print one A5 background from Artylicious CD, the box and it’s lid will fit within it. The 6cm box with the lid and inserts will require 2 sheets of A4 backgrounds from the CD.

Method

• Open the PDF of the size of box you wish to make.
• Read through the instructions on the screen.
• Print your background designs on to your chosen card, then allow the ink to dry. Put the card back into the printer and print the box template directly onto the card.
• Follow the instructions within the PDF for how to cut, fold and assemble your Exploding box and it’s lid.
• Add additional images as toppers to your basic box, and embellish you box to your chosen theme.

Ideas for your box

I am using these one’s as place settings for our Christmas table. These are also ideal for anyone with dexterity problems who can’t manage crackers Due to RSI I cannot pull a cracker, so it will be nice to be able to join in with these instead. I’m sure there are shops that sell paper hats and you can print your own jokes if you really want to use these as alternatives to crackers. You could add a special small gift or the confectionary of your choice to the smaller inner box. If you want to add a larger gift, don’t add the inner box, this will leave you more room inside the box.

If you made this box in different styles of card, it could easily be adapted for;

Birthdays, Weddings, Christenings, Baby showers. It is a perfect size for place settings and enables you to tailor your chosen gift to the person you are giving it to. Try printing on pearlescent card for a really impressive result.

Links

Here are a just a few suppliers who produce CD’s of papers and toppers, that you can use to create your background papers.

• Graphicus  I used their Season’s Greeting’s CD from their Artylicious range to create the sample shown in this tutorial.  Artylicious is a truly wonderful range of artwork that is even better when you see it in real life.
• Joanna Sheen  Joanna has a wide range of CD’s on all kinds of topics, they all include background papers, as well as toppers.
• Crafters Companion  All kinds of images on a variety of CD’s

I would like to thank

Many thanks to Helen on the Stamping Mad forum for posting the PDFs for me.

Stamping Mad Forum  A friendly and welcoming forum for crafters of all levels, do come and have a look round.

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie

**Edited & updated from a post previously published on this blog 28 November 2008**

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