350 Cards & Gifts: The Gift Card Holder Challenge

The other Moxie Fab World challenge (they are all great!) that I just couldn't resist was the Gift Card Holder Challenge. Yeap, packaging again. Are you starting to see a pattern? :)

My thought is that if you were going to do a handmade package it would only make sense to really customize it to the gift so the first step in this challenge was deciding what gift card I would create my holder for. I'm an avid reader so it's no surprise that Barnes & Nobles was the first one to come to mind.

This is the holder I came up with. It's reminiscent of those 'book safes' that you can buy. I've even seen handmade versions using real books with their insides 'cut out' too.  

These papers are all in the current 'open stock' selection at my JoAnn's. The leather design is by Hot Off The Press, the black with silver script that I used as my end paper is by DCWV, the binding is a Mulberry paper made by ANW Crestwood and the inside pages I cut from various card stock sheets in my solids stash. I intentionally mixed, tans, ivories and some parchment styles so the edge of the book would not look completely uniform.

The cover is stamped with a Stampin Up Sentiment and says 'Just for You'.

I don't typically show 'in progress' pictures unless I am doing a tutorial but I took a couple I thought I would share, to give you an idea of how I approached this piece. The book pages are simply a stack of identical die cuts glued one on top of another.

You could do this using any rectangle die set (or even completely by hand, though I admit that would be laborious!) but I don't own one and so I put my Silhouette Cameo to the task. I was able to cut 12 sheets of 8.5x11 paper with 4 book 'pages' on each for a total of 48 pages, which ultimately measure up to about 1/2 inch. You don't need it to be deep to accommodate the card of course but you want to have enough to have the final piece feel like a book.

Here they are all taped together with the scored card stock cover ready to be covered in the patterned papers. The final book measures just under 5" x 4" and while I will admit that this project was a bit of a 'figure it out as you go' scenario it wasn't that complicated. I would caution that you'd want to use a basic weight paper to cover your book. A cover stock on top of the cover stock base would simply be too thick to manipulate. Other than that, I taped down the inside (black/silver script) first and then cut my leather paper a little bigger and wrapped the front and back separately. The 'binding' edge then wraps over the spine.

This was a lot of fun and my mind is still wandering around thinking of other gift card holder designs so this may well be a challenge I revisit again in a future post.

Happy Crafting!