Thursday, 22 December 2011

How To... Make a Milk Carton the size that you want

These instructions took some thinking about, but I got there in the end. 

The first thing that you need to do is to decide the width & height of the Milk Carton that you want to make.  During this How To... I am going to use the following sizes as an example: 5cm wide & 10cm tall, all of the measurements for this example will be shown in Red Text.

To start you need to work out the size card that you will need to use, so grab a pen & paper; get out your fingers & toes and I will begin...

For the width:
  1. Multiply the width of your box by 4 (5cm x 4 = 20cm)
  2. Add 1cm to create a tab (20cm + 1cm = 21cm)
For the height
  1. Take the width of your box & subtract 1cm (5cm - 1cm = 4cm)
  2. Multiply this number by 2 - to create the Base & Top (4cm x 2 = 8cm)
  3. Add 1cm to create the tab used to close the box (8cm + 1cm = 9cm)
  4. Add the height of the box (9cm + 10cm = 19cm)
To create by Milk Carton which is 5cm wide x 10cm tall I will need to use a piece of card 21x19cm

Next you need to work out where to score the card, again I found that it was best if I worked this out on a piece of paper:

For the width (the long edge - 21cm)
  1. Score at each multiplication of the width (5cm, 10cm, 15cm & 20cm)
  2. You will then have a 1cm tab at the end of the card
For the height (the short edge - 19cm)

  1. Score at the following points
    1. Width - 1cm (4cm)
    2. Height of your box (14cm)
    3. Width - 1 cm (18cm)
  2. You will then have a 1cm tab left at the end of the card
Now you have your card cut and scored you can follow the same instructions provided to make a Milk Carton from A4 card stock which is found here.

I would strongly suggest that before you make a box out of card stock that you use a plain piece of paper first to ensure that the size of card & score lines are correct. 

It is up to you if you glue the Milk Carton together, I did and then wrote the measurement & score lines on the side for future reference.

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