Make a Woven Basket-box

• 1). Cut off the box flaps, leaving a nice sturdy, plain, square container. Since you'll probably have some gaps in your weaving, you may want to spray paint the cardboard the same color as the paper you'll be using for weaving so gaps won't be obvious.
  
  
• 2). Now, prepare your paper strips. If you're using brown paper bags, cut strips that are as long as you can make them, with a width of about 3 to 4 inches. Take these strips and roll them into long ropes. Since paper crumples easily, take advantage of this and go for a raffia-type look. You'll need quite a bit of these "cords" and of course the quantity depends on how big your original box is. You might want to make enough to get yourself started and then come back and make more as you need it.
  
  
• 3). Take a strand of the "cord" and your glue gun. Glue an end of strand to the inside lip of the box and bring it down the entire side, across the bottom, up the opposite side and back to the opposite inside lip of the box. You'll want to tack it with the glue at a couple of points on the bottom of the box. You want to have it be tight enough that it won't fall off, but you'll be weaving in and out of here, so don't make it super taut. Repeat this process, placing a new cord every inch or so until you've got the whole box covered. When you get your first two opposite sides finished, you can then complete the next two sides, weaving the cord in and out of the cords lying across the bottom, then bringing the cord up and gluing it to the inside lip again. Don't worry if there are gaps in the bottom.
  
  
• 4). You can now weave across. Start in the inside lip, near the top and weave over and under until you've gotten around the whole box. Do about two rows and then make a row that kind of sits on the raw edge of the cardboard box. Then start moving down the sides and outside of the box, over and under. When you need to add length to your cords, neatly hot glue the pieces together. Keep doing this until you reach the bottom of the box. Keep weaving in and out until you've completely covered the box in nice weaving.
  
  
• 5). For finishing up, you may want to take some more paper and glue it to the inside of the box, as a lining. (Make sure you fold and flatten the raw paper edges nicely to make things neat and cover up all the glue bits and so forth.) Alternatively, you can certainly use some nice fabric to do the same thing.