Making a Magazine Envelope

To round out this week of card making I wanted to do the easiest tutorial ever on making your own envelope out of magazine pages. Any paper would work for this design, I just happen to enjoy the idea of re-using old magazine pages to create something so practical as an envelope. In earlier posts I made envelopes for the water color tutorial and the flower punch card out of card stock using this same technique. This tutorial will mostly not been done in measurement form, as the great thing about this technique is that you can use any paper of varying sizes to create it.

Any magazine page will work, but again my favorite is National Geographic as it is easy to find whole pages of beautiful things with little to no text.

1. Start by ripping out a page from the magazine. If it is not a clean rip, but close, just make a clean line and cut off the frayed edges. Make sure you are only cutting off a small amount as you do not want to make the envelope too small, unless of course you are sending an adorable, itty bitty letter.

2. Fold envelope almost in half, leaving enough space on the top for the size of your top envelope flap. Fold this top part over as well, creating a crease at the top and bottom of the page. When folding the page fold into the side you want to be the inside of the envelope.

3. Cut off sides of envelope starting on bottom half of crease about 1/8th of an inch. You can eyeball this amount. This will be larger if the paper you are using is larger than your typical magazine page.

4. Repeat for top half of the page. Cutting from the crease upwards about 1/8th of an inch on each side. This should leave you with two side flaps. Fold these flaps inwards so that the magazine page is again even on both sides.

5. With the two sides pressed down into the page, you can add glue to each side of the flap and fold the bottom half on top of it and press down. You may want to place under a book for a bit to hold it firmly in place. At this point you should feel like you have an envelope!