Precious Parcel Card Kit & Alternatives

Well hello there Stampers! How are you this fine day?  Actually, it's late here. VERY LATE! lol.  But sometimes a girl has to wait til everyone's in bed asleep before she gets a minute of quiet time to gather her thoughts. Ya know?

Sale-a-Bration kicked off on Thursday and I'm having a FANTASTIC time with it so far!  Everyone LOVES the promotions (buy $50 worth of products and get special limited time products for FREE), and the sign on incentive (get $175 worth of products for only $99 and FREE SHIPPING!!!).  Of course they do! All of the FREE flyin' around can make your head spin!  But hey! It's only once a year right?  Use some of that Christmas money on a few stamp sets for yourself. :-)

One of the GORGEOUS free products in the Sale-a-Bration catalog is the Precious Parcel Card Kit.  Now, this kit may very well be perfect for beginning papercrafters with it's no stamping required design, but it's also one of the most beautiful card sets I've ever seen! 

I mean, Look at it!! Isn't it beautiful?  The Victorian mailbox, the vintage colors, and that adorable envelope, just sent my heart a-flutter! Each card has a little insert that you can write love notes or other greetings on. It's just the cutest card set ever!

It's SO CUTE!  BUT upon first glance, it looks very limited. It doesn't appear to have much room for modification. So, I set out to make some alternative projects with it.  I'm very happy with what I've come up with, and I hope that you will be too!

Enter here, two totally different treat packages! As you can see, the one on the left is made from one of the cards. A little nip here and a tuck there and viola! A 3D Post Box.   The box on the right is actually made by disassembling one of those glorious envelopes!  Anytime I get my hands on an envelope with a pattern on the inside, I'm compelled to take it apart and use it in my projects, so I knew I would do SOMETHING else with one of them.  The difficulty came in deciding which side of the envelope to use because the inside is a beautiful blue spotted design.  SO CUTE!! 

The deciding factor was when I realized what the final box would look like by using the white and striped side out.  You are gonna FLIP!!! Check this out! I couldn't have planned it better if I TRIED!! Which I didn't. It just happened this way. But what a happy result! :-D

Isn't it SUPER ADORABLE?!!  Not only does that GORGEOUS stripe go perfectly all the way around the top of the box, but it also creates the perfect envelope on the inside!! I just love it!

So, how did I get the box from the envelope?  Easy Peezy, my friends!

First, you carefully open the envelope completely.  Take care not to tear any of the flaps.  Then, you'll want to score 1" to the inside of the prescored lines on the body of the envelope.  Go ahead and score right down the flaps too. Just 1" on all four sides.

Then, you're going to cut away some excess parts of the envelope until you're left with this:

Notice that I have made a cut into the striped rectangle in the upper left? I've actually done that on all four sides.   This photo shows it better:

The next thing you're going to need to do is fold and burnish some lines.  Start by fold and burnishing all four flaps to the original fold lines.  Then, while that flap is folded, go ahead and fold the folded flap onto itself again, lining up with the 1" scored line.  That sounds complex, but you can see it fairly clear here:

Notice in this photo I have put tear'n tape on those four little tabs.  I put it on both sides of the tabs to help hold the whole thing together tighter. You don't have to, but I like my boxes to be STURDY!

Ok, the next thing you'll do is open all those folds and attach your tabs into place to form the box.  Once you have all four tabs secured and your rectangle is formed, you can start folding the flaps back over the tabs into the middle of the box.  Start with the two short sides first, and then the base of the envelope, and finally the pointed top (as pictured here). Notice the tear'n tape along the edges. I did that on all four flaps.  Again, STURDY! ;-)

See how beautiful the inside of the envelopes are?  I will likely take another one apart and do it inside out so I have a box with that gorgeous print. It's so pretty!

I am thrilled with how the stripes lined up on the box this way!! :-D

The next thing we need to do is make the box top.  For this, I used a piece of window sheet cut at
5 13/16" x 4 1/2" And then score all four sides at 1".  You'll need to put a little OOMPH to get the window sheet scored and then burnished. But make it crisp!

All that's left to do is cut the four little corners off completely.

There you go! Now, just slide the lid into the base of the box and you're done!  I embellished the box simply with one of the notecards from the kit and a bit of braiden linen.  Pretty much everything I used came from the kit, so this will be an easy project to replicate.

It holds 12 dove chocolates......... If you were wondering. ;-) I just LOVE Dove Dark Chocolate. It's my absolute FAVORITE!

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you rip apart some envelopes!  Just be gentle about it. hehe.

Please leave a comment below and let me know if these instructions were easy to understand, or if I could improve this post in any way. I love hearing from everyone!

I hope you have a wonderful day and

as always,
Happy Crafting!