Tea Box Wallets

I love tea. I love everything about tea. The taste, the ritual, the feel of a warm cup in your hands.. And of course, the tea boxes. There are some really amazingly cute tea boxes out there! Hello, Celestial Seasonings! Trader Joe's has some cute stuff, too - I may or may not have bought this tea based on the fact that there was a lemur playing with Christmas lights on the box. But it's silly to just leave the boxes lying around, right? (At least my roommate finds it strange.) So inspired by some creative wallets I've seen on the internet, I decided to tackle turning a tea box into one.

And I'm in love! I've made four now, three of which I've used and have photos of here. (The fourth didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked, but hey, learning experiences, right?)

I made one largish one:

Money pocket + 4 pockets for cards.

Clear ID pouch on the right.

When it started to wear out, I made a new one, but decided that I wanted it to be smaller so that it could fit in my pants pocket. I don't carry a purse often, unless I have a *lot* of stuff (or am toting a book around), and often all I have with me is phone/keys/chapstick/wallet, which I don't feel is really worth a bag. So this wallet was born:

Unfortunately the glossiness makes them very prone to glare from the flash. But what an adorable cottage, right?

First time playing with velcro on these - not perfect, but kinda cool.

I really, really liked this one. It's small and compact - enough pockets to hold what I need, but not enough space to tempt me into carrying a bunch of useless stuff in my wallet.

So when that wallet wore out, it was replaced with one constructed exactly the same way, just from a different type of tea box.

Outside of the wallet. Both sides look like this. Epic castle wallet FTW.

Inside - two pockets for cards and such, and of course a money pocket.

One of the outer flaps flips up to reveal another card pocket and a clear pouch for IDs.

I save most of my tea boxes now so I can make wallets with them. There are, in fact, 7 empty tea boxes sitting on my bookshelf at this very moment! Some boxes don't work as well as others because of the dimensions, but if nothing else, that's incentive to play with new designs. Eventually I feel I'll end up with more of these than I can use, but I haven't come up with a cool idea for something else to make with them yet, though I'm sure there's something out there.