How To: Upcycle a Cereal Box into a Shipping Evelope

Well it's Day 3 of the 2012 July Upcycled Crafting Challenge and the girls and I are having so much fun!  Today we're going to be working with cereal boxes.  Now I had a hard time choosing what I wanted to make today.  I thought that cereal boxes would be awesome to use as canvases on the wall.  Just spray paint them white, let your kids do the artwork, and hang them on the wall.  Then I thought they would be great gift bags.  Just paper wrap, add some ribbon for handles, and fill with your gift and tissue.  How about organizer boxes?  Slice them open at a diagonal, decorate with paper, and fill with magazines or mail.  So many ideas!!!!  So what did I settle on?  I've decided to make shipping envelopes.  I personally HATE to spend the money on shipping envelopes.  I'm the type of person that saves all the envelopes and bags that I get in the mail so that when I need to ship something I already have packaging on hand.  There are times when I run out of shipping materials though and that's when this awesome tutorial comes in handy.  I ALWAYS have tons of cereal in our pantry (duh!  I have 3 kids) which means tons of cereal boxes.  Check out this tutorial on HOW TO UPCYCLE A CEREAL BOX INTO A SHIPPING ENVELOPE!

What You Will Need:

Cereal Box

Scissors

Shipping Tape

Step By Step:

1 - Disassemble your cereal box making sure not to rip the box.

2 - Lay your box flat so you're looking at the printed side of the box.

3 - Fold all the flaps in except for the two flaps on the very end.

4 - Cut off the two small flaps on the end.

5 - Fold the box in half making sure that all the small flaps stay folded in.

6 - Tape the sides of the envelope closed. **At this point you can store the envelope away till you need it.

7 - Fill your envelope with whatever you need to ship (It needs to be fairly flat)

8 - Fold the top flap down and tape it closed.

9 - Add your shipping label and postage to the front.

Voila!!!  You've just created a shipping envelope for practically no cost at all in about 2 minutes.  How awesome is that!?!?  I've already created a ton of these and set them aside for the next time I ship something out.  Next time I'll wait till the cereal is gone.  I got some pretty odd looks when my husband when to get some cereal and saw a whole bunch of cereal bags with no boxes.  Hehe!

*This post is part of the Upcycled Crafting Challenge (#freefromtrash) hosted by Calley, The Eco Chic, and is part of a one month challenge to create from trash.  This challenge will hopefully open your eyes to the number of items that we still end up trashing every day that could be used by ourselves or our kids to create fun and useful items.  To find out more about the challenge and to see other projects click on over to Calley’s announcement post.*


Check out some of the other great posts from today below and be sure to link up your projects today too!!!  Just link to your blog post, Pinterest picture, Photobucket Picture, etc.  I'd love to see your upcycled cereal box projects.