From plain to fabulous: upcycled gift package

We've been drowning on birthday parties. Maybe it's because it's spring, but apparently half of my kid's friends were born in April and May.

Last weekend we only had one birthday party, but the previous weekend we had four and we already have two more scheduled for next weekend. Let's just say I've been making and wrapping a lot of gifts.

A couple of weeks ago I shared a tutorial on how to make a gift bag out of a cereal box (missed it? it's here). It's been very useful, and I already have a few empty cereal boxes lined up to make more. Today I'm showing you how you can turn a plain cardboard box into a cute gift package.

Boxes are particularly useful to wrap fragile gifts and, in my opinion, better than wrapping paper or paper gift bags because recipients can reuse them (for storage, for example).

In my particular case, I was looking for a fun way to wrap this diary gift set:

(I posted about this diary gift set here, and you can find the tutorial here; it is an easy and fast handmade gift, especially for girls).

This was the starting point: one perfectly plain brown cardboard box that we received in the mail with something my husband ordered online.

It was the perfect size to fit the diary gift set inside, but too boring and plain, especially for the birthday party of a little girl turning eight.

So I went back to the scraps of glittery self adhesive paper (leftovers from the homemade Christmas cards) and cut some shapes. The only other things I used were a piece of purple tulle, also a leftover from last year's Halloween costumes and a bit of pink tissue paper. Here are the "ingredients":

I actually would have preferred purple glitter paper, but I didn't have any, so I went with pink instead. The rest was made using the silver glittery paper. Oh, and I used the Sizzix to cut the stars, but if you don't have one, print the shape you want and just trace it in the back of the paper (or use cookie cutter to trace the shapes, that works very well too).

Here's how it looked with just the glitter paper on:

I placed the tissue paper over the bottom of the box to carefully wrap the gift around it...

 ...and then tied the purple tulle around the box to close the opening:

This was the end result:

This is proof that a fabulous and professional looking gift wrap does not have to be expensive and there are lots of items around your house that can be repurposed for this. It saves you money and reduces clutter.

Don't have glitter paper? Use colorful cardboard shapes, glitter glue, regular wrapping paper or even magazine cutouts. Or go online and print cute and fun digital papers (Pinterest has loads of them, free for personal use). No tulle? Use fabric scraps, yarn scraps or matching ribbons. The possibilities are endless, you just need to stretch your imagination a bit.

Have a wonderful week!