You probably have a lot more shipping supplies laying around the house than you realized. Cardboard boxes, packing peanuts, duct tape, packing paper, address labels, air pillows… these are just a few of the shipping supplies that we come across many times even in just a regular week.
The great thing about all of this excess is that they can make for some pretty cool projects. Here is a list of five fun projects you can do with a variety of different shipping supplies:
- You know how charitable organizations often send you a book of address labels, usually decorated for a certain holiday or season, in the hopes of having you send them back a couple bucks for their time and effort? Just as soon as I think I’m getting to the end of the ones with the nutcrackers on them, I get a pack decorated with the American flag. I have since discovered an amazing little secret: use the stickers to make roads and train tracks on the carpet. It keeps kids well occupied, and they peel right off when you are done.
- Packing peanuts make a great craft. Stick them together with toothpicks to form different figures and sculptures, or glue them on a piece of paper to make a raised mosaic. I’ve even seen people dye them and sew them into long strings and hang them over a doorway to give the effect of a beaded entrance.
- Perhaps no shipping supply has ever been quite so popular as duct tape. Nowadays they make with all manner of designs printed on it, everything from a colofrful tye-dye to bacon and eggs to sugar skulls. For a long time now people have been using duct tape to wrap stuff in and call it “cool”, and the different colors and designs make it even better these days. Try wrapping some pens in duct tape, or make wallets out of it, and sell them as a fundraiser.
- Every time I order something from Amazon it comes in a huge box and wrapped in about eight feet of brown packing paper. That’s when I take the paper and take it up on the wall, close to the ground, and let my kids fingerpaint all over it, or color on it. It keeps them busy and winds up being a beautiful collage for the next couple months.
- That big box I mentioned you got from Amazon? There is no shortage of things to do with It: using it for storage or to put together a giant castle in the basement, the possibilities are endless.
