How to Make a Fabric Box

Today I’m going to share with you how to make a fabric box. These little guys are great for storage, decoration, gift giving, cat-sitting, and really any other possible reason to need a box.

This fabric box is a Pellon Project – The Reversible Fabric Storage Bin. I did not write this tutorial, but I’ve linked the tutorial I used here and I am going to walk you through the changes I made to the directions, including what I would do again and the changes I attempted that you want to avoid.

First Change: Fabric Requirements

The pattern as written on the Pellon website calls for a half yard each of the lining fabric and the main fabric.

Sure.

But then it’s cut down ALMOST to a fat quarter. I was making this fabric box for a secret Santa gift holder and had a tight budget to not spend more than the limit.

So, I decided to work with fat quarters and buy half as much fabric as the original pattern.

This change worked out perfectly fine. My box is a little smaller than the dimensions in the pattern, but that’s no reason not to use less fabric. Sometimes you want a smaller box.

Second Change: Still Fabric Requirements

Why use a boring old fat quarter when you can piece together fabrics and make a striped box!?!?!

This where the bulk of my tutorial is going to take place – making the outside of the box fancy.

My original intent was use white, gray and black fabrics to make a gingham pattern.

I still recommend you do this, even though I didn’t. My grays were all over the place as some were lighter and some were darker, most had cooler tones and a few had warmer tones. It was a hot mess of colors and fabrics that didn’t work together, so I scrapped it.

You need 16 fabrics that are 2½” by 9¼” and four fabrics that are 2¾” by 9¼”. I used two of each print.

Why are some of the strips wider than the others? The fabric box pattern uses a ½” seam allowance throughout and this way the finished strips will all be a uniform width once the box is complete.

Place 10 strips in a row with two of the wider strips on the outer edge, alternating colors or otherwise placing fabrics as you like. These 10 strips, if any have a directional print, will have up facing up.

Place the remaining ten strips in a row, this time in the exact opposite direction to the first ten strips. This time, down is up and up is down (see the blue arrows for my directional fabrics). As before, the two wider strips need to be on the outer edge.

Sew strips into pairs and sew pairs into rows.

When sewing the two rows together, pin every single seam.

Now, in place of one outer/main fabric, you’ve got an 18” by 21” piece of fabric.

Third Change: Quilting

No quilting is required from the original pattern as the main and inner fabrics are ironed to the Pellon Interfacing.

It’s probably not required for my pieced outside of the box either, but better safe than sorry.

I used bright pink thread, to coordinate with the inner fabric and did some quick (and very basic) quilting of my outer fabric after it had been ironed to the interfacing.

Fourth Change: The One To Avoid

My local craft store was closed the day I was making this box. And I had that Secret Santa deadline, so I went to a back up (and pricier!) craft store.

They did not have the Pellon® 809 Décor-Bond® listed in the directions for how to make a fabric box.

So, I switched to a different Pellon interfacing. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember the number. As long as it’s one sided fusible, and feels like a good stiffness for a box, it will be fine to use.

What I did not notice, because I was flustered by the decision to change up the interfacing and not follow the pattern exactly (gasp and shudder!), is that whatever I bought was not 40” wide as I had assumed.

I only had enough interfacing to fuse to the outer side of the box and not to the inner side.

At that point, I was tired and flustered and decided on a rogue “I can do whatever I want, the rules don’t apply to me!” course of action and so I did not return to the store to get more interfacing.

I made my box with interfacing only fused to the outer side of the fabric box, not to the lining.

Don’t do this.

Change the interfacing. Use a different weight/sturdiness. Just make sure you fuse to both the inner and outer fabrics.

See how the pink inner fabric is loose inside the fabric box? You can avoid this by actually following the directions!