Arts & Crafts

A have to admit that I have an aversion to “Arts & Crafts”.

I think it all started when I was with a friend of mine who wanted to “just stop by” Hobby Lobby because she wanted to make a Christmas wreath. It seemed like hree hours later and we were still in there. By that time and she had selected a Styrofoam ring and had finally moved on to the actual decorations.


I was dying to get out of there. A trip to an oral surgeon would have been less unpleasant for me. I still cringe whenever I pass by one of those places.

I remember making a bird-house-shaped thing out of a Reader’s Digest while in Vacation Bible School when I was nine. I spray-painted the finished product with orange paint and thought,

“This is . . . well. . . .

. . . stupid.”

So, yeah, the Arts & Crafts bug escapes me.

That is, until I learned how to make home-made envelopes.

My dear friend and blogger-buddy, Speck, developed a template that enables you to turn any sheet of paper into an envelope. It’s pretty ingenious and I don’t know how she came up with the formula, but here it is, step by step.

Thankfully, she also gets a thrill out of providing detailed, foolproof instructions. Thank God there are people like her in the world to make up for the people like me.

So, I made the template and am now able to turn any 11 x 8½ piece of paper into a 6½ x 4½ inch envelope.

After you make the template, here’s how it looks.

Draw around your template: (In this case, I had swiped a catering menu from Au Bon Pain.)


Cut it out

Fold it up

And you have an envelope! Isn’t that incredible???

I became a man unchained. I began turning everything into envelopes. Cereal boxes, magazine covers, book jackets, music manuscripts, maps - - everything was a potential envelope.

I refrained from ripping the Heimlich maneuver poster off the wall at work.

But isn’t this the coolest think ever? And besides, in this age of texting and emailing, how many people receive a hand-written letter in the mail these days?

I told Speck that I was still uncomfortable with the Arts & Crafts thing. She said I could call it “Office Paper Engineering.”

I like that.