If you eat a lot of Thrive Life, you’re going to have a lot of standardized packaging left, so you may as well put it to use.  For “G” in our series, we’re going to talk about using the Simple Plate boxes as gift boxes.  (You can use the cans for gift packaging, too — especially for baked goods, etc.)

The Simple Plate boxes are a great size and style for gift boxes, but they’re printed on the outside, like this:

Unless you want your recipient to think they’re opening up food, you probably don’t want to use the box quite as-is.  But there’s something pretty cool about these boxes: if you flip them inside out, the exterior is a beautifully blank white, perfect for decorating in any way you like.

It’s pretty simple to do this.  Gently push up the tabs where they’re seated in the bottom “seams” of the box so you can unfold the whole thing.  Then flip it around and refold with the outside on the inside.

So we now have a nice clean white exterior, but what about the interior?

Depending on who your gift is for, this might suffice.  But you might want to cover up/disguise all that print.  This part is probably not a big deal:

It will largely be covered up once you have a tissue paper-wrapped gift in there.  But you’ll probably want to at least tone down the upper flap.  You can do this pretty easily by trimming two pieces of paper and adhering them with glue stick.  (The width is just under 10-3/4″.  The depth of the lid is 7″ and the flap just under 3″.)  Be sure to trim it just smaller than where the folds cause ridges around the edges.  (You’ll see what I mean if you look at your box closely.)  Otherwise, the paper will scrunch together at the folds and get in the way.

If you want to just mostly “screen out” the printing so it’s less obvious, you can use plain printer paper:

The print still technically shows through, but it’s not very noticeable.  (Note that this process works best if you put the glue in a line around the edges.  In this picture, I “zigzagged” the glue across the flap trying to be quick because I wanted to do this both ways to show you, and you can see where that did weird things to the appearance of the paper.)

If you want the print completely blocked, use cardstock.  It could be fun to print a birthday greeting (or other message as appropriate to the occasion) onto the cardstock and then adhere it to the box.  I didn’t do that here, though, because this isn’t a real gift for a real occasion; it’s just an example.

Insert your tissue paper and your gift.

And wrap it up.  Once you’ve done that, assuming the box is fairly well filled, you won’t even notice the printing inside the bottom of the box.

Cost: 1-1/2 sheets of cardstock & a few swipes of glue stick.