How to Make a Felt Box

There always comes a time when you need a small box and you can't find one. Maybe you're giving someone a gift, or you need a place to put your jewelry or cufflinks, or maybe the Easter bunny has a great place to hide an egg! In my case, I was trying to find a creative DIY way to give baby onesies. So when I found this photo of felt boxes, I figured they were easy enough to make! And by golly, they are!

Make sure you have stiff felt, scissors, a pencil or pen to mark your measurements, and a hot glue gun, as you'll need a way to connect the sides together.

Pick two pieces of felt and cut one 9" x 9" (this will be the bottom of the box) and one 6 1/4" x 6 1/4" (this will be the top).

Lets start with the bottom. Mark every 3" around the square until you have 2 marks on every side.

Fold and crease the square into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Once that's done, you can either eyeball this or get your pencil/pen and draw the lines like you see on the squares below. Whether you draw the diagonal lines from inside corner to outside corner or from inside corner to halfway between the crease and the edge, it's up to you. I tried both ways and the boxes came out fine.

Cut where you made your lines and your square should look like this. The bottom is done!

Onto the top piece! Grab your 6 1/4" x 6 1/4" square and mark 1 1/2" on either side of every corner.

Just like with the bottom, fold and crease the square into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Again, you can either eyeball this or using your pen/pencil, draw lines like the ones you see below.

And cut out the triangles so your top looks like this.

Now comes time to assemble. Grab your hot glue gun, fold in one of the triangles, and apply glue to all of the edges of that triangle. Push the triangle into the square or rectangle piece and hold it until it's secure. Do this for all the triangle pieces until the top is complete.

 Do the same thing for bottom, fit the top on, and you're all set!

TOTAL COSTS: $6/pack (though you could find single sheets of stiff felt at Michael's for much cheaper!)

$6 for a pack of felt from Fiddlesticks in San Francisco
Scissors, hot glue, and pencil already on hand

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: 15-20 minutes
It depends on if you measure everything out or eyeball it and cut without measuring

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 1 out of 5
This isn't hard at all, it's just a matter of cutting felt, folding it, and gluing the pieces together!

Zombie Poker Card Hair Pin

Planning a trip to Vegas? Love zombies? Have a regular game night? This might be the perfect accessory for all those situations and, if you really want to stretch it, could be for St. Patrick's Day as well (I only used the clubs in this case). Yeah, that last one might be a bit of a stretch... but it's relatively quick and easy to make and I can guarantee no one else will have anything like it! I found this post originally on Instructables. To make this you'll need:

1. A template to cut out the large, medium, and small pieces. I used the original's template, however I suppose you could just as easily make your own!

2. Card stock paper (for the template)

3. A deck of cards

4. Something to draw the template on the cards. A marker smeared, a pencil hardly showed, so I found a pen worked the best!

5. Glue - hot glue, glue stick, whatever you've got!

6. Something to put in the center. I thought of using a gemstone or a dime but found a better idea - see below!

7. A hair pin/barrette/clip/etc.

8. Scissors

First, print and cut out your three templates on card stock. Once they're cut out, place them on top of the following cards, trace around them with a pen, and cut them out:

* Large template over the top corner of the Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and 10 cards

* Medium template over the number and suit of the 9, 8, 7, 6, and 5 cards

* Small template over the faces of the King, Queen, and Jack

Once all the pieces are cut out, fold the bottoms of each card up and cut a slit in the middle of each, up until the crease.

Slightly bend all the cards so they'll won't lie flat. You'll want them to pop out a bit once you're at the gluing stage.

Now the original post recommended gluing all the large cards in order (10, J, Q, K, A) in the top-right corner and once dry, pulling the Ace and 10 cards together to create the circle. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to do that and I failed miserably. Instead, I glued the bottom right corner of each card and created the circle that way. Don't worry if it's not perfect, it'll hardly be seen!

Once your large cards are glued together, take your medium cards and glue them on top in the middle.

And finally, take your three small cards and glue them in the middle as well.

Now you'll want to find something roughly the size of a dime. I used the back of one of the cards, used a dime as a template, and glued it in the center. It's a nice bloody touch, don't you think?

Glue your pin/barrette/clip to the back. Note that this could just as well work as a broach - it doesn't have to go in your hair.

And voila! Your unique accessory is complete!

TOTAL COSTS: $2.99

$2.99 for the Bicycle Zombies cards from Walgreens

Card stock, pen, scissors, hot glue, and hair pin all on hand

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: 1 hour

However, I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to glue just the large pieces in a circle so you might have better luck and get it done faster!

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 2 out of 5

The only difficult part is gluing the large pieces into a circle, however it's really not that hard, it's just a little frustrating if you're OCD like me!

Phone Book (or Newspaper) Wreath

When I saw this post by MormonMommyBlog, I figured I could knock it out in a couple hours and have a nice, eco-friendly, homemade recycled wreath. Let me tell you right now: get a friend, a child, a spouse, someone to help you or you will spend a ridiculous amount of time on it, which is something the original post doesn't tell you. So here's what you'll need:

1. A large piece of cardboard
2. Scissors
3. A marker/pen
4. A hot glue gun and 3-4 sticks of glue
5. A ruler
6. Something to trace your circles (I used a small bowl but you could use a coffee lid)
7. At least 1 phone book (I used 2)
8. A ribbon or something to hang the wreath


First, cut out the size of your wreath. Keep in mind, the bigger the square, the longer it'll take to cover! I tried to eyeball how big they made theirs so I could make mine the same and guessed it was about 14"x15".

Next, trace your circles onto the pages of your phone book. I started out using 8 pages but halfway through the project, I used 4 pages per circle and couldn't tell any difference in size. Batman wanted to help trace circles but he ended up playing in the leftover pages all over the floor instead.

Cut a spiral into the circle, roll it up tight, and slightly release to make rosettes. I recommend gluing the end of the spiral in.

Glue down your rosettes to the cardboard and note that they all don't have to look the same. In fact, if they're different sizes, the variation makes it look unique!

The tracing, cutting, rolling, and gluing takes the longest so if you have a second pair of hands, it would help! Also, your fingers will be covered in ink and hot glue by the time you're done.

Add a ribbon to hang and you're all done!

TOTAL COSTS: Free!
The cardboard was from IKEA packaging, the phone books we receive annually, and everything else was on hand.

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: About 8 hours
Just to cover the bottom, it took 2 hours, 48 minutes.

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 2 out of 5
It wasn't so much difficult as it was time consuming. You have to be careful not to burn yourself with the hot glue but other than that, it's a piece 'o cake!


UPDATE: It has been a month and a half since I wrote this post and I wanted to post an update. Since having the wreath up, some of the spirals came undone. I live in LA so my door is prone to the occasional Santa Ana wind gust, but I wanted to give you fair warning the same thing might happen to yours!

Melted Crayon Art with a Disney Twist!

If you're new to Pinterest, chances are you've seen melted crayon art. It's a bunch of crayons lined up in a row, melted onto a canvas. It's a fun rainy-day activity for your kids. SunflowerStoryTime shows the basics of how it's done in this post but I decided to put my own little twist on it. After seeing "Saving Mr. Banks", Mary Poppins had been on my mind and I decided to incorporate her in the design. I just Google-imaged "Mary Poppins silhouette", picked one I liked, and cut it out.

You'll need the basics to make this:

1. Crayons
2. A hot glue gun and glue (I used 1 stick)
3. A hair dryer
4. A canvas
5. A silhouette (optional)

I recommend you remove all the labels from the crayons, though it's certainly up to you. I'm a little OCD and if all the labels weren't perfectly lined up, it would have bothered me so I figured it was easier to remove them altogether. Depending on the size of the canvas, you'll want to lay out all the crayons first before gluing anything down, so you know just how many to use. I ended up using 43 crayons, which was almost the entire box!

Next, take your hot glue, glue right onto the canvas, and then place your crayon on top. I don't recommend doing it the other way around because the glue doesn't stick well and ends up melting the crayon.

Once all your crayons are glued down, take your canvas to an area that you're not afraid of getting wax on. I decided to lean the canvas against the bathroom wall with paper towel underneath, which was a good idea because the wax melted all the way to the bottom and I did get some wax on the tiles by accident. So if you're near expensive furniture, carpet, or animals, you might want to relocate.

Keep the hair dryer roughly 12" above the crayons and after a couple minutes, they will begin to melt. Be careful when moving the hair dryer around or you'll start to spray wax on your walls!

Once you're done melting your wax, take your silhouette and hot glue it to the canvas. I made the mistake of not leaving enough room for Mary so she's a bit cramped in the corner.

Also, if you put a paper towel under the canvas and the melted wax touched the paper towel, you may have some of the paper towel stuck to the bottom of the wax so gently remove that. However, I kinda like it - wherever you sit the canvas, it'll looks like the wax is on that surface!

And voila! Your work of art is complete!

TOTAL COSTS: About $12
$4.11 for a 14x18 canvas panel from Utrecht
$5.99 for 64 Crayola crayons from Vons
Hot glue gun and hair dryer already on hand


TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: 1 hour
40 minutes to remove 43 crayon labels
11 minutes to hot glue crayons to canvas
9 minutes to melt wax

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 2 out of 5
It's not difficult, per se, but if you're not careful, you could easily get wax everywhere and the clean-up would not be fun. So the one thing you should keep in mind is how close your blow dryer is to the canvas and how many Lysol wipes you have on hand for cleaning up!

Penny Vase

Do you have lose change all over your place? In your couch, in random small jars, on your bedside table? For us, we have an old Double Bubble Bubble Gum container that holds all of our pennies but because we never use pennies, it has been overflowing for some time. What's the best thing you can do with pennies? Well, the answer is probably not glue them to a vase, but that's what I did!

Here's what I originally saw on Pinterest (the link it was tied to no longer works):

Now being the pessimist that I am, I saw multiple ways this could go wrong but really, you get what you expect!

I used an old vase I received when my husband bought me flower from the florist (which I don't recommend because the color peels off), a hot glue gun, 2-3 sticks of hot glue, and some pennies.

I started from the top and worked my way down. Here are a couple things to keep in mind:

1. As soon as you put hot glue on the penny, put it on the vase immediately. The longer you wait, the faster the glue will cool and it won't stick to the vase.

2. There are three ways I found to place the pennies. You could have them line up with the row above/below the next row, creating a bigger pocket. You could have the pennies go in between the row above/below the next row, creating a smaller pocket. Or you could slightly stack the pennies, so they overlapped a bit. Whichever way you glue your pennies, note that you'll be able to see the color of the vase underneath, no matter what.

3. Any penny from 1941 or 1942 is worth a lot of money, so don't use those!

And that's it! Now you can either put flowers in the vase or have this be a bigger coin jar for you and your family!

TOTAL COSTS: Depends on how big a vase you use and how many pennies
My vase was 12" tall and free and I ended up using $2.25 worth of pennies. Hot glue gun and hot glue already on hand.

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: Depends on how big a vase you use and how many pennies
Mine ended up taking 2 hours, almost to the minute

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 1 out of 5
It doesn't get much easier than this, kids. You're just gluing pennies to a vase, it ain't rocket science!