Cute reused milk container packaging

© http://permacultureideas.blogspot.co.uk/

Just discovered this cool little container made using recycled milk cartons, over at Permaculture Ideas.

I have been looking for a good REUSE for all those milk cartons for ages now - there's only so many seedling 'greenhouses' one can fit in one's garden patch - and now here's this cute little box container thingie to try out!!

For cool REUSE this novel idea has to take the biscuit - can't wait to give it a try.

Thinking about it a little more, these might also become the new cool packaging for my  Cyanotype Kits instead of the brown bags I'm currently using. If I can figure out how to make them work, a well as how to create them easily. They are just soooo funky!!

Now all I need is to find the little popper button fastening!
Oh and drink up my milk!


[EDIT]

Several cups of tea and milk later....

OKAY, I had to have a go... never have I wanted to drink my milk so quickly!!

Here's the first prototype in pictures, it's not pretty, but I learned a lot from the exercise and look forward to consuming my next carton of milk!

STEP 1
Drink milk, wash carton :o)

STEP 2

Mark out the cutting line - I have used pure guesswork here, but I think it's almost right - a few tweaks next time will make it much prettier. One thing to watch out for is making sure that each corner is the same height - I noticed (due to my tardy cutting and complete lack of measuring) that each corner was slightly different and the final container was a wee bit lopsided. I used a four pint carton here.

STEP 3
Make an incision/starting point with a sharp knife (I used a scalpel), then once you can fit your scissors inside, begin cutting around your drawn lines.

Once you have cut the basic shape out, you can now go around the edge and even up the corners and curves. If you want to get fancy, you could even go around the whole edge with crimping scissors!!! Whoah!

STEP 4

Fold in 'flaps' and measure the place where you will make the fastener.

I went for the 'use what you have' approach for the fastening and made a little straight incision on the main body, and a D shaped... erm... 'tongue', on the largest flap. The D-shaped 'tongue' hooks into the slice and holds itself in place, rather than sourcing/buying the little fasteners in the original post. Well that was the idea anyhow!

And... this works really well! You could adapt the fastening in all kinds of ways - different shaped tongues and flaps etc, or even using a hole punch and thread/twine to loop through and create a tie fastening!

Well, there you have it! Thanks again to the original post on Permaculture Ideas, this ugly little duckling has huge potential and I'll be trying this again once I get through my next couple of pints of milk!

If you have a go, please post a link to a picture of your creation. Lets keep more cartons out of the landfill!