Leftover wallpaper project #2
Project two, and another wallpaper scrap goes.
Very matchy-matchy, I know.
My parents ran their business partly from home in the sixties and seventies, and when they closed it up I rescued some of their index card boxes. A couple hold photographs. This green one has held all the passports, vaccination cards and travel insurance documents in one place for years, and has been living towards the back of a shelf, because it is not attractive.
Perfect candidate for a new outfit.
Cutting
Cut a rectangle of wallpaper, roughly measured, long enough to wrap the box on every face with surplus. Do not try to be exact.
Set the box down in the middle of it, towards the front, and cut notches on the diagonal in towards the front corners. Those notches are what let the flaps fold round without bunching.
Gluing
A glue stick throughout, and one face at a time.
The most useful tool in the whole job turned out to be a handful of miniature clothes pegs, holding each folded flap tight against the box while the glue went off. Without them you stand there pressing with a thumb and the other side lifts.
Bottom front, bottom, back, top, top front. In that order, working round.
And then you improvise
Once those faces are done you have to work out how to cut the rest, and the answer depends entirely on the shape of your box. Mine ended up with a pattern of notches and cuts that would be useless to anyone else.
So: wing it. Peg everything while you think about the next cut.
It genuinely does not matter if you get it wrong. It is a box and it is a scrap of leftover wallpaper.
The sides at the bottom get folded in, trimmed so only a small edge folds over, and pegged. The bottom corners are trimmed along the edge afterwards, and the last flap folds underneath where nobody will ever see it. The top sides are the same again.