Recycle – Small folded paper envelopes

I’m a bit in a recycling/upcycling mood lately. However, this little project wasn’t really intended… I was just about to throw away another DIN B4 envelope when I saw the rising pile of waste paper and thought about how to reuse at least a bit of it…

…and one big brown kraft paper envelope transformed into a handful of cute little individual paper envelopes/bags, perfect f. ex. for small presents. After all, christmas is coming closer!

I cut the the envelope lengthwise but not into equal parts – I wanted to create one window faced envelope and had to adjust the hight to the window. That’s why I ended up with three bigger envelopes (approx. 8×11 cm) and three smaller ones (approx. 5×8 cm).

When cutting the two envelope pieces into smaller parts, I didn’t use exact measurements, but just cut by instinct. The rest of the show is a bit of folding (folding in edges for about 1 cm), cutting and glueing.Additionally I rounded the corners of some of the envelopes with a corner punch (You can of course use normal scissors as well). For the decorative part I had a quick look around me and used what I had at hand: circle punch and origami paper, dymo, flower wrapping paper and  – of course – some washi tape. Stamps would be a great choice as well. I left the envelopes that had already the post stamp on them as they were – they look nice in their own way, too, I think.

Funny coincidence that today I stumbled across a DIY challenge called “Upcycling Dienstag”. Have a look at Ninas blog “Werkeltagebuch” or the huge collection of creative upcycling ideas on Pinterest for some more inspiration.