DIY: "Open when..." Letters

Hello everybody! As you may be able to tell by the title, today's post is going to be a DIY! I'm going to show you how to make "Open when..."  letters. In case you don't know, they are envelopes filled with stuff for someone to open in a specific time. They're kind of hard to explain, but hopefully by the end of this post, you'll understand what they are and hopefully you'll make them because they're an amazing present for anyone. I made some for my friend for Christmas, but haven't given them to her yet. So, I still have them, but I sealed them before deciding to do this post. Because of that, I won't be able to show you exactly what I put in them. Also, since I have already made them, I won't have most of the steps in pictures, but I'll explain the process the best I can.

Step 1 - Get your materials

You will need:

1) Envelopes

2) Computer paper

3) Scrapbook paper (colorful paper)

4) Glue

5) Scissors/Paper cutter

6) Markers, pens, and/or sharpies 

7) Stencil letters(optional)

8) Anything you want to put in the envelopes

Step 2: Decide on topics

The first thing you have to do is decide what topics you want to use and how many you want to make. I'm going to compile a list of topics you can use. The first 13 is the ones I used.

1) Sick

2) We're arguing

3) Lack motivation

4) Start studying for finals

5) It's the first day of finals week

6) Sad

7) Can't sleep

8) Mad

9) Feel lonely

10) Stressed

11) Need to laugh

12) Bored

13) Want to reminisce

14) It's your birthday

15) It's Christmas

16) Doubting yourself

17) Worried about the future

18) Nervous

19) Feeling silly

20) Feeling worthless

Step 3 - Decide what to put in the envelopes

Now that you have decided on topics, it's time to get things to put in your envelopes. What I did was put a short handwritten letter in each one. Everybody loves a handwritten letter! In a lot of them, I put pictures I had printed off of the computer. I'll take you through what I put in some of them

1) Bored- Letter, and some thing for her to do like a word search, maze, and color page.

2) Need to laugh- A funny letter and I searched google for way too long for funny pictures and found the best of the best and put them in the envelope.  

3) Want to reminisce- I wrote a letter where I talked about our best memories and I put a lot of pictures of us in it.

Step 4 - Decorate the envelopes

This part will be hard for me to explain, so hopefully you won't get lost. I put a picture above for you to refer to. I'm going to explain how I did it, but you can obviously do it however you want to.

1) On the back side of the envelope, write "Open when..." on the upper left hand corner

2) Cut a piece of scrapbook paper so it fits on the back side with not much of the envelope showing

3) Cut a piece of white paper so it fits on the scrapbook paper with around an inch of the scrapbook paper showing, but don't glue it on yet

4) Write the label of the envelope on the piece of white paper you just cut. You can use stencils or you can hand write them. 

5) Now, glue the label onto the piece of the scrapbook paper, then glue it on the envelope. 

Step 5 - Put it all together

Finally, put the things you have put together for each envelope into the corresponding envelope. 

So, there you have it! If you make these, send me pictures of your creation and it'll make me feel very accomplished because it would mean that I finally managed to teach someone something! Good bye for now!