Trunk of Wildflowers Box Card Cricut Tutorial ⋆ A Mandatory Activity

Trunk of Wildflowers Box Card Design

You don’t have to tell me that I sound like a broken record, I KNOW I sound like a broken record. My record is, in fact, broken. This is another gorgeous SVGCuts design and I absolutely fell in love with the trunk of wildflowers box card design.

The link to the file is here (affiliate link): SVGCuts Trunk of Wildflowers Box Card

The design is beautiful (obvi), but for me this was a multi-day project. I always talk about how much I enjoy box cards, but part of the reason for that is because I like the puzzle aspect. Lots of little pieces coming together at the end for a satisfying finale…and that’s what I got with this card.

Tons of steps, lots of pieces, and totally worth the effort (for the right recipient).

You know what I mean. There are some people who really appreciate a handmade card, some people who only moderately get the amount of work involved, and some people who don’t even pay enough attention to realize that the card IS handmade.

All I’m saying is, choose your audience to maximize your efforts. 🙂 Those who take the time to enjoy the handmade cards, get the best handmade cards.

And those people should get one of these box cards.

Grab the file and follow along. If you prefer a video (I often need more than pictures) there is a video tutorial link toward the bottom of this post, so you can just go there if you’d prefer. No judgement. 🙂

What's A Box Card?

If you’ve stumbled into this post and you don’t know what a box card is, first of all welcome, and second, it’s MAGIC.

When I first got my Cricut many moons ago, the box card was the ultimate goal for me. I was motivated and wanted to get there quickly, because in my mind it was the perfect mechanism.

I’d always been fascinated by pop-up cards (in fact, my old college roommate reminded me the other day that I used to buy pop-up cards and take them apart to figure out how they went together…perhaps a little life goals foreshadowing there?). But the pop up card can sometimes be kind of one note. You know? It’s fun and then it’s over. With the box card, you get the same dramatic pop up card effect and then you can rotate it and admire it from all sides!

It starts off flat, unfolds to be super-dimensional (look at this one, it’s like 4 inches deep!), and then folds back up to go into your envelope. MAGIC.

Get Your File Into Cricut Design Space

Ok. Grab the file, and let’s get it into Design Space. I did a whole video tutorial on getting third-party (non-Cricut) files into Design Space, so if you’re new to this process, I’ll link that video for you as well. BUT, I will go through most of it below…

The link will take you to the SVGCuts website. You’ll likely get distracted and never come back to finish this blog post, but my hope is that if I call you out on it now, you’ll catch yourself and come back to me. 😉

The site is super-well organized and the box cards are in the menu on the left. My link will take you directly to this particular file, but you should come back sometime and grab some others when you want to play!

Once you buy the file, save it somewhere on your computer where you can easily locate it. I personally have an enormous repository of svgcuts.com files from many years, so I put mine in there.

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project.

Select upload image, and then find the file wherever you have saved it. There is a lot of stuff in your download, but here’s where you should start.

Open the folder called “SVG Files”, and then head to the “extras” folder.

Then open the solid score lines folder…

And in there, you will find the entire card file, with solid score lines. Download that one!

You’ll hit save in the lower right, and then you will see your file ready to be uploaded into your project.

Just click on it, and go to the right to select “insert images”.

Voila! Your file is imported into Design Space.

Make A Few File Adjustments In Cricut Design Space Before You Cut The Pieces

In the video tutorial I linked earlier, I go into more detail about this part of the process, but you need to make a few changes so that some pieces that are marked as cut lines can instead be scored.

I started with the hinges. If you select them and look to the right, you will see the highlighted hinges and the lines are marked as “cut”. Those need to be score marks instead. To accomplish this, ungroup them with the ungroup button on the upper right, then select just the “cut” lines so they are highlighted.

Once the cut marks are highlighted, go to the upper left and change the “cut” in the dropdown menu to “score”.

Once you do this, you will notice the cut marks are now score marks and all is right with that portion of the file.

Repeat this process for a few more pieces. I’ll post their pics below.

The first one are the main pieces of the box card, and all of the cut marks are attached, so you only need to make the change once. If I’ve lost you, I encourage you now to go down to the bottom of this post and watch the video, because I do it step by step and that may be easier to follow.

The second one is the insert at the top in the middle.

And the final piece that needs attention is the envelope. You need to highlight the big black rectangle in the middle and change that from cut to score too.

Print Out A Copy of the Trunk of Wildflowers Box Card PDF

This is a matter of personal preference, of course. I typically print out the pdf document to use as a reference while I’m putting the project together, and then I just save it for scrap paper later.

It’ll be in the folder you downloaded in a safe place and marked as a pdf document. It looks like this.

Cut Out Your Pieces, and Assemble!

I have an 8 year old boy, so whenever I say or read the word “assemble”, what goes through my head is “Avengers, assemble!” 🙂 It’s oddly motivational, and also super-irritating.

But, let’s assemble!

Start With the Box Card Front Piece

Here’s what you start with on the first layer on the front panel. All of the front panel pieces, as shown below. Make sure you don’t try to put the left panel piece on the front. You know the left one goes on the left because the brad holes line up.

You can also add one of the leaf pinwheels, and the smaller of the little green draping wildflowers to the front.

Then you can add the first flower embellishment on top of the leaf pinwheel.

I chose to ink the edges of the petals a little, and added a Doodlebug Designs enamel dot to the center of the flower.

Next Do Insert Number One

There is a number 1 that has been cut into the side tab of insert 1…so it’ll be easy to indentify.

Start by adhering the leaf on the right side.

I assembled the yellow flower with a few foam squares, some inked edges, and a little bling in the middle.

I glued down the small green leaf, and then placed this yellow flower on top. I actually put the foam adhesive too high on the flower, so it would be sticking out in the back. I needed to fold down the edges to hide them. An easy fix!

With the right side of insert 1 complete, work on the left side. Start with the large green part, and then you can assemble the remaining 3 green bits in whatever arrangement you like.

Assembled, mine looked like this.

Now For Insert Number Two

Find the piece with the number 2 cut in the side, and let’s put that one together next!

I put down the first couple of pieces. The leaf on the bottom, the tall green thing that pokes out of the top, and one of the smaller little pinwheels of leaves…

I glued on the yellow flower first, and then glued on the red one sitting slightly on top, plus the little embellishment in the center, so it matches the first one.

I didn’t have a stick-on embellishment that I liked for the center of the yellow flower, so I grabbed my collection of buttons and poked a hole in the paper and just popped one of those inside.

Assemble the Back of the Back Piece

That’s right. There’s a front of the back and a back of the back. I started with the back of the back.

This is where that last trunk side panel goes.

Then you arrange the frame pieces along the back as shown.

If you get stuck, I would again encourage you to look at the video tutorial…I show you how to place each one.

Note that the 3 pieces at the top are flush with the top of the card. None of the other pieces are, so I’m pointing it out since it matters as that’s the front flap of the trunk.

Finally, add the oval sentiment panel.

Flip it over and let’s do the front of the back…

Start with gluing on the back panel. For those of you keeping up, this is the back panel on the front side of the back. 🙂

The giant twiggy part comes next.

Be careful when you attach this that you don’t extend the top of the twig too high. If you can help it, it’s best to keep the top of the twig below the fold line of your trunk lid so you don’t have to fold it inside and make it extra bulky.

Add the larger pinwheel leaf and then your bigger flower on top.

I used some foam squares to pop up the layers of the large flower. I sort of just rotated it until I thought it looked nice and this is where it ended up.

Now For The Magic Part - Assemble the Box Part of the Box Card!

Start by putting some glue on the side tab and aligning the cut out shapes with the brad holes on the side of the card base.

Next, glue the left tab of insert 2 and glue it flush with the back of the card base.

Be careful here to also align the holes on the tab with the holes on the side of the box card.

Glue the left tab of insert 1 and glue that down butting up against the front of insert 2.

Do the same thing with the right side tabs…making sure to stop and fold flat regularly to make sure everything is well aligned.

Finally connect the front of the box card! You made a trunk of wildflowers box card!

Add Final Embellishments and Envelope

Home stretch, ya’ll. I told you it was a lot of steps. I probably should have turned the writing of this post into a multi-day event too!

To finish this up, you need to add the hinges. To add the hinges, you need some craft brads.

There are two different kinds of hinges. 4 of them look like little hip bones to me, and the other 4 are straight. The hip bone ones go on each corner.

Add the remaining brads to the empty brad holes. You can’t cheat here and glue them on instead…the card won’t open and close correctly if the hinges are glued down!

Finally, fold up the envelope. It’s simple, just 4 folds and a little glue!

One thing to note before you put your card in your envelope.

If you fold the card all the way to the left, the little twiggy bits stick off to the side, which would make them prone to being bent.

Folding to the right will help keep those pieces safe from squishing. 🙂

Fits perfectly in it’s GIGANTIC envelope. I put this in the mail as a birthday card, so I was sure to add extra postage and a piece of cardboard inside the envelope to keep it from being bent.