How to Make an Envelope from a Printer Paper

Here I’ll show you how to make a bar envelope out of a single piece of office paper. That’s 8.5 by 11 or A4 paper. First, we're going to fold this in half hamburger style. Now we're going to take the open edge of the top sheet of paper and fold it back on it so it reaches a close edge. And here we’ll basically do the same thing. Take the open edge. Fold the back on itself so it reaches the close touch.

Now give that one a good crease and then open it up. And now we’ll take this open edge and fold into that middle crease that we just made. Once you got that piece folded, fold it back up along the original middle crease that we use as guideline and this becomes the bar of our bar envelope. Now we’ll take this open edge here and folded down so it just meets the bottom of that bar that we made. Give that a good crease and then open it up.

Now on this close corner here we're going to take that edge and folded up so it meets the bottom of the bar. Give that a good crease and then do the same on the other side. Now we're going to use the edges of those corners we just folded as guidelines for taking the side of the envelope and folding it on itself. This starts to get a little tricky because there's already so many folds in the paper and it gets to be really thick but do your best to line everything up as well as you can. When you’re done giving that a good crease go ahead and open a back up and then do the same on the other side.

Okay now we’re going to use these creases as guidelines for our next fold. We're going to need to fold the diagonal here, so that it goes from this corner to this corner. Line it up as best as you can and then just crease that one diagonal area. We're going to use that as a guideline for later. Now do the same on the other side. Okay, that does it for our guidelines and now we're actually going to start folding this thing.

Okay unfold these corners in the bottom and take that bar and fold it up. Now we're going to take just the top edge of this side here and folded it in towards the middle. As you do that, you’ll need to make sure you open up the bottom part here into this triangle shape and then flatten it down. Check to make sure that everything lines up as best as you can and then give it a good crease to hold it in place. You’ll of course need to repeat the whole process on the other side. Once we have both sides folded we're going to take this top part and folded down so that we see our bar again.

Now tuck your finger into that little triangle here and pull it down and in towards the middle. We’ll put the edge of the paper over and on top. Now give it a good crease. Now we’ll take this corner here and pull up slightly and then took it back into that pocket. This is going to add stability and hold for envelope. Now of course do everything again on the other side.

Okay and now we're going to use that where diagonal crease that we made earlier. Gently open up the pocket of the envelope and use your finger to take that slant end. This horizontal crease right here in the foreground should line up exactly with the horizontal crease in the background. When you got that alignment squash everything flat and gave it a good crease. And then of course do the same thing on the other side. Okay give that a good crease and we're almost done. As you probably guessed by now this top part is going to be the lid of our envelope, you can fold that down and give it a crease and to seal the envelope just take that edge and fold it right into the bar. And there you go. Signed, sealed, delivered it’s yours.