DIY Paper Gift Bag

I needed a gift bag to put the embroidered baby block in, so I thought I’d try my hand at making one from scratch.

I searched on Google for a tutorial, and I ended up pretty much following one from How About Orange. She made hers from newspaper, but the concept is easy to learn for any kind of paper.

I used a personal favorite – contractor’s paper. It’s brown like craft paper, but it’s very thick. You can buy a big roll of it for 20-some-dollars at Lowe’s near the paint. I often use it to create envelopes for shipping Matthew’s Etsy orders. And it made a very good base for a craft-paper-looking gift bag.

Basically, it’s like wrapping a package, but leaving one end open. The tricky part is that there’s no package inside to put pressure against when you’re folding the closed end. If you did have a package of the appropriate size to slide in, that would make forming the base of the bag much easier. Then you could just slide it out.

When you visit the How About Orange tutorial, also keep in mind that you can make your bag any size you want. I customized mine to perfectly fit the little ABC block I made.

I sealed everything with a glue stick. Something tougher, like hot glue, might be a better idea. But it’s blazing hot in the garage right now, and that’s where the hot glue is. So I used what was indoors.

For the top, I cut slits down the folds, leaving 8 inches of each fold uncut. The cuts let me fold down each side individually, instead of trying to coax the whole top portion down into one neat fold together. I glued the folds down towards the inside.

Then, I used some ribbon to match the gift inside to decorate and create my handles.

It was easy, and cheap (I had everything on hand already). And it matches the gift. Why not make a DIY gift bag to match your next hand made gift?

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