Upcycled: gift bags made from vintage wallpaper (with tutorial)

Hello, and welcome back. If you've been visiting a while you already know I love upcycling stuff. 

So what did I do when I found an unused roll of wall paper in my old grandparents house during our summer vacation this year? 

I used it to make gift bags, of course!

I wanted the gift bags to look like those store bought ones that stand up on their own (even if I was using wall paper from 50 years ago or something), so I searched online for the perfect method - and, as usual, ended up mostly creating my own. 

I tried to take pictures of all the process - as this works great with any other kind of paper and homemade gift bags are always useful. 

I started by cutting a rectangle of about 55 x 40 cm (which, after all the folding and gluing, turned into a gift bag of about 30 x 20 cm, so adjust your measures accordingly depending on the finished size you need). 

Then I folded the two longer edges inward, overlapping a bit, and glued them in place - I used paper glue, but two sided adhesive tape works fine too. 

Here's how it should look at the end of this step: 

Now let's focus on the bottom of the bag. First, follow the steps below to fold the paper: 

Glue the folds in place and the bottom of your bag is done!

Fold in the sides a bit. 

By now your bag should look like this (front and back): 

Now onto the top of the bag. All you need to do is to fold the edges down, measure and mark the place for two holes (I used a pencil for the markings and a hole punch for the holes): 

And your bag is ready to be used! 

Place a gift inside, run a ribbon through those two holes you punched, tie a pretty bow and you're done!

Because I had so much fun working on this bag, of course I immediately made another one, slightly smaller this time:

 

And here they are together: 

Have fun and happy Thursday!