D-I-Y newspaper gift bags

Holiday season is coming up soon! The season for sharing and gifting. And what better than homemade gifts? There are some great activity ideas, on pinterest, to do with your kids at home during holidays.

Next week I am starting a new, once a week, project with children at the foundation where I volunteer –

“Christmas gift for my family”.

We got a donation of lots of beads from a girl who was leaving Angola and that is what started this idea. Over the next 4-5 weeks I’m planning to teach kids, how to:

• make a gift bag using old newspapers
• decorate the gift bag with colourful cutouts and make gift tags- we will try to reuse empty biscuit boxes, wrappers etc for this.
• Make a Christmas card for their family. This would include writing a letter to their family as well. Telling them what it means to be together during the holidays :).
• make bracelets or keychains or other small trinket using the beads we received.
• make christmas ornaments for the tree at home.

I am amazed at how many ideas, people have shared and also the amount of free templates available for Christmas decorations and ornaments and tags! Really really grateful to everybody putting out resources for others to use and re-use!

I will share the resource links as and when I use them. But today I made a newspaper bag myself just to be sure of the steps. Explaining in Portuguese is bit difficult for me as is and to do it without preparation is even more! 🙂

Making a bag out of newspaper looked simple, but when opened a newspaper flat and stood in front of it, I was at first a bit lost and then I got a ruler and a marker to start measuring. After that it was easy. I took pictures of each step.

Here is my step-by-step guide to a gift bag using newspaper.

You will need:

• old news papers, old card/ cardboard, marker, scale, glue stick, paper punch, scissors and some ribbon.

1. Measure out your newspaper and mark grid lines depending on the size you need. I made a 7”X3”x3” bag. Since newspaper is not very thick I used 3 sheets of it to make one bag. Depending on the thickness of your paper, you can choose how many or how little to use.
2. Fold along the mark lines once and open back so that folding later on is easy.
3. Fold the top margin inside. If its too big you can cut out excess paper. But have at least about an inch of fold inside.
4. Align the two broader edges together and punch two holes for tying ribbons later on. This will just ensure that the holes on both the sides are aligned.
5. Fold along the vertical lines to make your cuboid. Glue the margin inside.
6. Now fold the bottom.
7. From the inside it will look a bit messy, so just cut a rectangle (slightly waller than your base size – 7”X3” here) from another waste cardboard and glue it on the inside.
8. Almost done now! Tie a ribbon for handle on each of the wider sides and you are done!