DIY Gift box roundup!

We all would love to make every holiday gift from scratch, especially for family and loved ones. But there isn't always time, you may not have the right tools or materials or skills, and then all of a sudden there's two weeks left and what to do?

If you have a 3D Carving machine on hand, there's an easy way to put a personal touch on a thoughtful gift: make a wooden gift box!

Turns out it's pretty easy to do and there's a couple of different ways to go about it. A few strategies, with examples:

Boxes with mating halves

A box with mating halves is one of the easiest to make, because there's only one joined edge, and you can just glue the pieces together. Adding a nice detail like an initial or icon adds that extra bit of fancy and earns you major bonus points. This one was made by Tait Leswing, click through for the project details:


Here's another example from our programmer Jim Rodovich using a more complex shape as the outline:



Parametric box generators

There are some great online tools for generating laserable and carveable box patterns. Here's a few example made by our own Paul Kaplan, click through for the project files:



To make your own box like this, consider using Makercase or Makeabox.io. Both are web-based parametric box pattern generators that allow you to specify dimensions, material width, kerf and etc to make a perfectly laserable or carveable box pattern in vector format.