DIY Magazine Envelopes

As promised, here is a tutorial on making your own envelopes for stationery sets. While this template makes a rectangular envelope, you could certainly modify it to make squares as well, and as usual this image is scalable (the actual jpg is quite small, I printed it at 250% to make the cute envelopes shown in the tutorial--I just like cutesy small stuff, my original envelopes were much larger).


To make these envelopes you will need:

Paper or magazine pages of your choosing.
scissors or an X-Acto knife
a ruler
Envelope template (below)
glue (elmer's or glue sticks work just fine--if you do not have glue, you can go without and use stickers to close your envelope as well)

Start by printing the following template to your desired size:

Cut out your template and trace it onto your paper of choice. You could use scrap booking paper, thicker card stock, magazines, maps, old book pages, etc. For this tutorial I decided to use a jewelry advertisement from a magazine. The rose and jewelry are very Valentine's Day appropriate, don't you think? You could also use home and decor magazines to make envelopes for a housewarming party, or wedding magazine's for wedding invites and thank you's!

Once your image is cut out, as show above, you will want to take a ruler or other straight edge to aid you in folding your envelope flaps in evenly. I generally use the ruler as a guide and push my paper up against it to give me a general line of where my fold will go. If using thicker paper, you can gently score your paper to give a more defined guide, just be careful not to cut all the way through.

Now, you will want to fold all the flaps in with a harder crease. Turn your envelope over to the "pretty side" to decide which end you want to be the top and bottom. I generally like to fold over a straight edge on my "bottom" flap, but you can always leave all the points if you like that look.

Now, you will use your glue (very little is needed, so I generally use a brush to make a thin layer, or use glue stick) to glue down the bottom flap to the two side flaps. Here is your finished envelope!

If mailing these, I use white address labels to make it easy to read. You could also use white or silver paint pens on dark envelopes like this, just make sure to print clearly so the postal service can get it where it needs to go.