Crackers for a Gift Box

 

On page 31 of the holiday catalogue, there’s a suggestion to make traditional cracker boxes using the Brightly Gleaming suite of products.  Whilst these aren’t the usual pulling-banging crackers, they can be at least filled with decent stuff rather than useless bits of plastic.  The crackers would also make ‘cracking’ gift boxes! ?

The trick is to use the small ornament punch to make the holes which allow the ends to fold in.  In case you’ve not got the ornament punch, I did try it out using a circle punch. The sides are smaller on this one, 3.5cm each.  For this end, I used a ¾” punch……

….and this end used the 1” punch.  This end’s a bit gappy.

Anyway, onto the ornament punched cracker.  Since I don’t have any Brightly Gleaming DSP, I decorated some Highland Heather card with the ornament stamps.  Whilst the catalogue suggests sizes for the sides, that’s all the information it gives.  I cut out a square 7.5” and scored it as follows:

Next, I stuck a length of double-sided tape along the small tab, then punched the holes, lining up the small ornament punch along the score lines.

I had trouble getting the ends to fold in on my prototype so I scored along the top and bottom edges of the holes.  This made construction considerably easier.  If you wanted to be able to 'pull' the crackers, it'd probably require adding a perforated line down the centre of these score lines.

I lightly folded in the edges along the holes like this:

Then, I flattened it out again and folded along the other score lines.

The next job was to remove the backing tape and stick the edges together to form a tube.

Lengths of ribbon were tied around the holes to gather the ends.

Lastly, I made a tag using the scalloped tag topper punch and the Itty Bitty Christmas stamps.  These would look great on the Christmas table or for presenting a small gift.  Now, who wouldn’t want this awaiting them under the tree?