Make it! Embossed Folders Using Recycled Cereal Boxes

When I was in fifth grade, my name written in bubble letters was how I personalized my notebooks. When I was in high school, I covered my textbooks in plain paper and filled them in with doodles — favorite band names and not-so-secret crushes. At the start of the school year, the clean surfaces of brand new school supplies offer such an inviting blank slate. For a sleek, modern twist on notebook personalization, create a DIY embossing plate from recycled cardboard. It’s a lovely way to add your mark to your school supplies.

Making your own embossing plate out of cereal boxes offers so much variation and freedom. The sky is the limit on shapes and initials. And once the plate is made, you can emboss to your heart’s content — the cardboard form will last a long time!

Chances are you have everything you need in your home already  — just pull that cereal box out of your recycling bin and let’s get started!

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom
DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom
DSC_0625-1
DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom
DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

Supplies:

– empty cardboard cereal boxes
– scissors
– hot glue or white glue
– printouts of letters/shapes
bone folder
– spray bottle
colored paper, card stock weight or thicker
folders, notebooks, date books, etc.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom
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Decide what letters or shapes you’d like to recreate. I chose a few letters, both serif and sans serif, and a few simple shapes.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

Cut them out of the cereal box cardboard. For these projects, you’ll need several layers of cardboard. Cut out the shape you want 3 or 4 times, then stick them together to make one form.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

Once the letter and shape stack is thick, attach it to a larger piece of cardboard, a ‘plate’, and prepare to emboss.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

To emboss, lightly mist a piece of paper and lay over the embossing plate. Damp paper has more give and stretch.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

Top the misted paper with a white piece of paper (printer paper will do) to protect it from the bone folder. Plain white paper is best so there is no color rub off. The white paper shields the paper below from getting shiny during embossing.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

Rub steadily around the embossing plate, making sure to hold the paper in place. Think of this process as slowly coaxing the paper to bend to your will. It’s best to work slowly, taking extra time to gently work into corners, around text serifs, on the edges and in any openings.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

When you feel like the paper is shaped well, remove the white paper and check. Some of the corners and edges might need a little more attention. Once the image looks good, remove the embossing plate and use the bone folder to smooth any wrinkles or crinkles around the shape.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

For folders, simply embossing the actual cover is all you need to do. But if you’d like to emboss the thicker cover of a composition book or date book, the technique is slightly different — emboss a blank sheet of card stock, then glue it to the thick cover of your notebook. Pictured above is a small date book with a blue piece of embossed cardstock glued to the cover.

When gluing it to another surface, add glue to all the areas outside the embossed shape (including openings in letters), then use the bone folder to smooth down the paper.

DIY Cereal Box Embossing - Customize all your school supplies! | Design Mom

A few tips:

– Thicker paper worked best for this project. Card stock, thick cotton paper (artist paper) and the folders worked exceptionally well.

– When the paper is thick, like the folders, spritz the under side of the paper, the side of the paper that will lay on the embossing plate.

– Instead of trying to get the paper embossed in one pass around the shape, it’s better to make a few passes around the shape gently and firming reshaping the damp paper.

– The paper around the shape may get a little pinched during the embossing process. Most can be rubbed out with the bone folder.

Hooray for back to school! I hope you have fun with this cereal box project. If you come up with other fun ways to use these cardboard embossing plates, please share your ideas in the comments!

P.S. — Why we don’t stress out about choosing a school.


Created for Design Mom by Amy Christie

18 thoughts on “Make it! Embossed Folders Using Recycled Cereal Boxes”

  1. This is genius! I absolutely LOVE craft or art projects involving cereal boxes. They’re such a great resource and have so many uses. I never would have thought of this one. I’m so going to try this for a myriad of different projects. Thanks for this! And who would have known that Cheerios were so environmentally conscience?! Respect.

  2. Wow, so cool. I never would have thought of this. Did you have any issues with the colors of the cardboard running or changing when you sprayed them?

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  4. What a great idea.

    If you have a manual die cutting machine/embossing machine you can also feed these through like any other embossing plate. They will work fine :-)

    When I cut out my letters, I also cut a slightly smaller one from fun foam.

    I then glued this to a piece of cereal box, inked it up, and used it as a stamp on my embossed letter – looks good :)

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