I am currently obsessed with box making. I wanted to make a spiral box I found on Pinterest, but it was hard to fold and the diagram I downloaded was very small. I decided to try making my own based on Tomoko Fuse’s nautilus shell on pg. 67 of her fabulous book Spiral.

To create a box, I added a 1 inch border to the long side of the triangle to give the box a side and turned the first fold into a 1 inch side with a glue tab. This required modifying it a bit. My first few attempts at folding the box had folds along the long side corresponding with the mountain folds on the triangle, but when I reversed folds to make the box top, the angles on the two box parts were out of sync. I realized that folds along the side weren’t necessary.

Today I got out some nice papers to fold into box tops to go with the white cardstock bottoms I folded yesterday. The red paper is a good quality wrapping paper, the blue and white is thick handmade paper from Cave Paper and the map is thin paper from an old atlas. The Cave Paper was perhaps a bit too thick, but it looks lovely. The thick papers require glue on each triangle section bounded by the mountain and valley folds in the diagram. The atlas paper only needed to be glued on the smallest sections before I tucked them behind the long side where the shell curls. I think it is a good idea to make the box bottoms from cardstock if you intend to put anything inside as the atlas paper is a bit light.

I hope you try making this project. You can print out this pdf on any 8.5 x 11 paper, then cut, score, and glue to create a box. If you are familiar with the nautilus fold from Tomoko Fuse, you can draw any acute right triangle, add the extra paper for the sides and begin folding. To make the base transfer the folds from the top to a second sheet of paper so your folds allign. Enjoy!