Place the cut paper in front of you on a flat surface. Arrange it in "landscape" orientation, with the long sides on top and bottom, and the short sides on the left and right.
- After finishing the process of decorating the paper, you should make sure that all the artistic elements have dried and stuck.
Fold the bottom edge of the paper up 5 cm and smooth it. Turn it back when finished. This will later become the bottom of the package.
Place the sides of the package together. Keeping the sheet landscape while working on it, fold the sides as follows:
- Find the center points of the top and bottom. To do this, measure the distance with a ruler, or simply take the paper, keeping the orientation, and lay the short sides together, pressing down lightly on the fold on the bottom and top of the sheet to mark the center on each long side. Mark these places with a pencil.
- Place marks to the left and right of each center point at a distance of 13 mm. When finished, you should have a total of six marks: three on one long side, and three on the other.
Fold the sides of the bag into place. Be sure to maintain the landscape orientation as you work to fold the sides as follows
- Attach the right edge to the leftmost mark and fold. Turn back after smoothing. Repeat the same with the opposite side.
- Turn the paper over, reattach the left and right edges to the center and glue them at the intersection. Make sure to fold in exactly the same way as last time (note that the folds will be on the other side). Let the glue dry completely before moving on to the next step.
Flip the bag over with the adhesive side facing in. Make sure one of the open sides is pointing towards you.
Fold the side folds inward in an accordion shape. You need to arrange the sides of the bag so that it opens in a rectangle.
- Using a ruler, measure about 3.8 cm from the left edge of the bag. Make a mark with a pencil.
- Attach the left side fold of the bag to the inside of the bag. Do this while the previous mark you made is on the outer edge of the fold line.
- Fold the paper down so that the pencil mark lines up with the new folded edge. When smoothing the paper, try to maintain symmetry between the top and bottom edges.
- Repeat the procedure with the right side. When finished, the base of the bag should fold inward on both sides, like a shopping bag.
Prepare the bottom of the bag. To determine its location, find the fold lines that you made earlier - this will be the bottom. Keep the package folded.
- Fold and glue the bottom of the bag. Once you've determined which side the bottom is on, fold it up.
- Bend the bag 10 cm from the bottom edge and fold it along this line.
- Slightly open the bag, keeping the main part folded. The inner folds of the bag should open to form a rectangle. Inside on each side you have a triangle folded out of paper.
Finish the bottom of the package. You will need to fold several sides towards the center. Focus on their triangular shape so that the bottom is even.
- Fold the left and right sides of the open square down. Use the outer edges of the triangle as a guide. When you're done, the bottom part will be in the shape of an elongated octagon - it will have 8 sides instead of 4 as before.
- Fold the bottom of the octagon up towards the center of the bottom of the bag.
- Fold the top of the octagon down towards the center of the bottom of the bag. The bottom part should now be neatly closed; glue the intersecting edges and let them dry.
The strength and simplicity of the look of kraft paper allowed it to become not only packaging for products and parcels, but also an excellent canvas for gift needlework. Bright decorations on such paper, even an ordinary ribbon, create the impression of decoration by a master with refined taste and attention to detail. This impression helps to increase the aesthetic value of the wrapped gift in the eyes of the recipient. Creating craft bags for gifts with your own hands is not difficult at all, just like decorating them.
kraft paper bag
Before you start following the crafting bag tutorial, you need to collect the following materials:
- a sheet of kraft paper;
- scissors;
- glue;
- hole puncher;
- ribbon, lace or rope.
We put the sheet in front of us in landscape projection. We bend one of the side edges towards ourselves. The width of the fold is approximately 2 cm.
We turn the sheet over and grease the fold along the top with glue. Glue the opposite edge to the fold.
We bend the resulting part in the sides to give the package a square shape.
Bend the bottom of the package away from you, about 5 cm.
After that, bend the corners on the fold again into triangles to the line of the previous fold.
The side walls of the package are brought into a flat position, while said trapezoids are slightly bent in the middle.
To glue the bottom, glue is applied pointwise to the sides of the trapezoid and the space between them, after which the sides of the trapezoid are bent inward. First, this is done for one side of the two trapezoids, then for the other.
After the glue dries, the bottom straightens out - the bag can already stand on its own. The top of the bag should be slightly bent towards the bottom and holes should be made in it with a hole punch, into which the ribbon for the tie is threaded. You should get a kraft package, as in the following photo:
Related article: Freeform Crochet
You can create a craft package using the following template:
To make the top of the kraft bag not bent, but with separate handles, you need to seal the edge of the top. To do this, at the beginning of the craft, you can wrap the paper on the wrong side, gluing the resulting fold. After drying and making holes with a hole punch, you should stretch the tape through the holes in a ring, tying it into a knot inside the bag, or make handles from two tapes tied inside in front of the holes into large knots.
In some home-made kraft bags, in order to cover the seams of the bottom inside the product, a rectangle of paper or thick cardboard is placed to fit the bottom, but this is not necessary.
Let's move on to design
The created kraft package can be decorated not only with various types of ties at the top, but also with other decorative elements.
You can apply your own design on the surface of the package. Ink, charcoal, pastel, sepia, sanguine are best suited for drawing on such a surface. The drawing can be either a solid composition or a set of small elements, as in the photo:
In addition to the drawing, a variety of flat crafts can be glued to paper, both from paper and from fabric, acrylic, etc.
The top of the bag can be left flat or ribbed. The lace design also looks very nice, in which you can paste over the package with it, or transfer the lace pattern to the surface of the paper using paint and a sponge.
Kraft paper flowers can become decorations using patterns for patterns made from plain paper. These decorations look like this:
Natural materials should never be neglected when decorating kraft bags: Christmas tree branches, cones, tied acorns are perfect for the light woody color of the paper.
Some aspects of work
In order to decorate the surface of a kraft bag with your own design or print impressions, it is necessary to start even before gluing the bag itself, since the density of the material may prevent the print from being completely imprinted or extruding lines of the design on the other side of the bag.