Making an Octagonal Gift Box with your Cricut

Posted on 27th April 2018 by Emily
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Natalie from Craft A Go Go is going to show you how to make a Octagonal Gift Box with your Cricut. 

This is a file that looks really complex but isn’t, because your cutting machine and the file do all the hard work!

You will need:

• Paper – the mid-sized version of this (the default size in the file) is designed to be made on a mere two sheets of A4 (that’s slightly larger than Letter paper, if you’re in the US or Canada) paper! This will give you a box of 53mm high (not including the gerbera!) and 82mm across at its widest point – but of course, with this being a vector file, you can resize it – limited only by the width of your cutting mat! (This means you can make the largest piece of the pattern up to 11.5″ wide at its widest point.
• Stylus attachment for your machine
• Glue – for flaps on boxes I find the tape roller-type glue the best, but I use a glue pen for flowers
• A very sticky cutting mat!
• Optional: tools for shaping the flower pieces. I find this set of flower tools really really useful (especially to soften and curl the central pieces of the gerbera), but you can also make the folds of the longer petals by bending them over the edge of a pair of tweezers or scissors.

Preparing the file:

1. Import the file into a New Project
2. Click on the images that appear on your canvas and click on Ungroup.
3. Now, you need to convert some lines to score lines. These are easy to detect in the right-hand margin; basically, anything that is a line rather than a shape needs to be converted. Do this by clicking on the Cut (i.e. Scissors) icon next to the item and then choose ‘Score’ (the Stylus icon) from the Layers Attribute panel that pops up.
4. Once you’ve done this, drag and click over each piece individually (e.g. the whole of the lid, including score lines) and click on Attach.
5. In the file (for ease of loading) we have included just ONE large flower piece and ONE small flower piece. You really need (minimum) THREE large flower pieces and about EIGHT small flower pieces. So click on the pieces and duplicate until you have the amount you need.
6. When you’ve finished (depending on however many pieces you need, your pattern will look something like this:

You’re now all ready to cut!

Assembling the boxes and flowers:

The pieces you’ve cut out will look something like this:

1. Fold over all of the score lines (as you can see, we’ve done this in the picture – that’s around the box and the lid (and the flaps on them), but also – take the large parts of the gerbera flower and fold down the middle of each piece, bending them over something more solid (like the edge of tweezers, scissors or a ruler).
2. Glue the flaps around the bottom of the box – you to do this, you need to fold over the large hexagon and all of the small flaps alongside it AND the one at the very end. Glue them all before you start to apply the edges together.

Eventually, you’ll get to a point where there’s just the vertical flap to apply

Repeat the same process for the lid of the box. The flaps are much smaller though! 

Look! You’ve made a lovely box!

Now all you have to do is make the gerbera embellishment! Take one of the larger gerbera pieces and apply glue to the centre:

6. Position another of the large pieces on top, ensuring that the petals aren’t directly on top of one another, but overlap slightly.

Repeat for the third large piece. Now you need to make the centre pieces.

7. You can use tools if you have them – but, regardless, we need to ‘soften’ the paper of the centre pieces so they are malleable. I recommend rolling them around in your hands. To put the centre together, use exactly the same technique as we did before, gluing one piece on top of another – this time, though, you’ll have many more pieces (at least eight. Choose the number that works for you though!)

8. Once you’ve stacked all of them together, apply the centre piece:

As you can see, it looks pretty rigid. ALLOW TO DRY THOROUGHLY! Then, roll around in your hands until it’s really malleable. At this point, you can glue it on top of the larger flower (i.e. the three larger pieces you glued together earlier).

9. We’re nearly there…again, ALLOW TO DRY THOROUGHLY! Once that’s happened, you can ‘rough up’ the pieces in the middle, and end up with a realistic looking gerbera or gerber daisy! Here are a few we prepared earlier:

10. Now, all we have to do is apply a bit of glue to their undersides and attach them to the lids of the boxes!

11. Again, allow to dry thoroughly. You’ve made it!

Want to make this yourelf? Head over to Craft A Go Go to download your free file: http://craftagogo.com/projects...

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