DIY Fabric Box Tutorial

Today’s post is a tutorial on how to sew a fabric box. I was in the midst of organizing my sewing space and thought a box made from pretty fabric would be a perfect accent. I looked at many tutorials on how to make a box and in the end came up with my own method that just required cutting half a yard of fabric and sewing the 3 seams. Want to give this a try? Directions after the jump.

The print I used is from the Honor Roll line by Anna Maria Horner named Overachiever. I used half a yard of but you can adjust your fabric size depending how big you want your box to be. I wanted mine to comfortably fit my Liberty fat quarters so the dimensions ended up to be 10.5D x 7.5W x 4.75H. Is it too weird to say how happy I am when I look at my Liberty fabric?

1) First start out with your half yard of fabric and iron on fusible interfacing to one side. I used Pellon 808 Craft-Fuse Fusible Interfacing. If you want the box to be more rigid you can interface the entire half a yard of fabric.

2) Sew along the 3 seams I noted in red and leave about a 4″ gap so you can turn the fabric right side out. I used 1/2″ seam allowances.

3) Turn fabric right side out and push out the corners. You can clip the corners first to reduce the bulk before turning.  Topstitch close to the edge of the fabric to close the gap. Iron your fabric so the edges on both sides are aligned.

4) Now we need to do some folding. Take one corner of fabric and fold into a triangle. Measure the angle until you get to how high you want the box to be. My ruler shows 5″ here but I ended only going up to 4.75″ high.

5) The fabric is too thick to pin so you can use some binder clips or clothes pins to mark how far to fold this triangle corner. Here I’ve folded the corner over to the longer side of the box.

6) Sew the folded corner to the side of the box. Here is the end result. Now do this for the remaining 3 corners.

7) Here is what your finished result should look like for the sew corners. If your box is more of a square, you can trim down the corners and tuck in the raw edges before sewing to the side of the box.

8) Turn the box inside out so the sew corners are on the inside of the box. I stitched along the edge of the box about an inch to make the sides more pronounced You can stitch down the entire length of the box if you wish. I kinda like the floppy look on the bottom.

Here is my finished box.

And here it is filled with my Liberty fat quarters and eighths =)

What I like about this method is I only need to cut fabric along one side and I can adjust the height or depth of the box based on how big a corner I fold over. It’s also a perfect project for 2 fat quarters if you want a box this dimension. How do you like to sew your fabric boxes?

BTW, I finally joined the rest of the world and created an Instagram account =) You can now find me at @mad_for_fabric.

Thanks for stopping by today and happy “mad” box sewing!

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