Christmas Card Display and Stow-Away

It's usual to have leftover gift wrapping after holidays, as well as an abundance of gift boxes. The thin-grade cardboard of clothing boxes in particular can perform just like oak tag, and without a highly coated, branded finish, they can be as good for drawing. Regardless of finish or branding, however, the boxes are great for decoupage or something even simpler, like this Christmas paper wrapped hanging card display. Collect next season's Christmas cards and stow them away at the end of the season in festive style.

Start with your materials gathered and ready... used gift box tops and bottoms, 2-3 wrapping paper varieties at a minimum complementing your chosen theme, a square of cuttable cork, craft string, and adhesive of your own preference. The last three items are easily sourced at any craft chain store or the many specialized online outlets.

Use a standard glue if you wish, but be prepared to weight the side while it dries, to press them flush. Your box fold may still be crisp and not require any glueing at all. Judge the situation.

Again, use the adhesive method of your choice, and several are reflected in the photos. Your printed paper may be comic strips from the newspaper, that of another holiday, or of a very different motif. Securing the paper well in this step makes for less fuss later.

This time, I used Elmer's gel glue for the gift wrap, and it worked just as well and required less product. I also show a tube of paste. Mine happened to be dried out, but it's another product that could work here.

2-4 tiers of decorated box fronts or oak tag sheets make a great height for dangling together and showcasing your seasonal card's for the following year. You can do it each year and collect them in a box year after year, adding a creative twist each following, to keep the celebrations intact.

Make sure to arrange the units in a way you wish them to appear, and tack with hot glue in a continual enough way that they won't dangle from the string flimsily once you hang it for display. You want it to last the month or so with increasing weight added to it on what becomes a daily basis.

If you want to avoid hot glue, just keep the appropriate positioning and pressure in mind to join the surfaces. For instance, when glueing at the papered top, for stability in the tautness and line of the string, I'd also make sure to tack the string directly to the underlying surface, in order to avoid tearing and reinforce that line even more.

I went with thicker rectangles for the bottom, one for placement along each side, and narrower rectangles for the surface above, to arrange in a disparate barcode fashion.

Do what you want. Craft stores retail some precut cork slices - you can cut your own from a larger square or even larger rollup for much less per unit. And you can make them as chunky and rough or as precisely edged as you wish. Just use your sharpened scissors. I like fastening each of these with a thin line of hot glue.

Card stock is thick enough, you can arrange your cards by fastening with a matching pin at the top edges, middle-to-bottom corners, atop different parts of another, and so on. Your placement of the cork only determines part of your display's layout and you can change it up throughout, especially if you incorporate a third or fourth tier in the display.

You can bake some colored clay tops onto standard metal-headed tacks. I've used straight pins in cork before, and I like the plastic pearl-tipped ones a lot, but the longer the pin, the easier it may be leveraged out of the cork unintentionally... if you have pets or any family members or roommates with a preference for bare feet, you will want to be careful of this, especially since it will become more likely with use of the display's surface area.