How to Turn Cereal Boxes Into a Wizard Tower

Can you make the tallest tower? The wonkiest tower? The prettiest tower? Whichever way you decide to take it, your tower should have the fundamentals. The simplest tower is a toilet paper roll with a cone on it. The most complex hosts layers upon layers connected with supports, windows, balconies, added rooms, chimneys, bricks, shingles, staricases, and probably its very own dragon (though this is a wizard tower tutorial, not necessarily a princess tower). Most importantly, have fun with it!

Materials

• Cereal Boxes (or those with similar properties: Granola bar boxes, pop tart boxes, etc.)
• Hot Glue sticks
• Coloring utensils
• Extra decorations of your choosing

Tools

• Craft Knife (and cutting board)
• Scissors
• Pencil
• Hot Glue Gun
• Ruler
• Compass or large circular objects
• Countertop

Grab yourself a cheerios box or any other just-emptied box. Dump out the granola bars or oatmeal packets if you have to. Once you've got a couple boxes, follow this process:

1. Take your box and tear open the bottom flaps if they haven't been opened already. This will flatten the box.
2. Take your scissors and cut off the box's tabs.
3. Take your hand and find (inside the box) where there's a tab holding the four sides together. Tear apart the tab from the side, flattening the box into a one-layer-thick sheet of creased paperboard.
4. Cut out the panels so there are no creases interrupting the smooth surface.

Such is the process I use for all of my boxes. It helps the stored paperboard take up less space, and removes the excess tabs from the equation.

The rounding method I use to turn rectangles of paperboard into cylinders always involves a table.

Locate the edge of your countertop. If it's an extremely rounded edge like my family's dinner table, find a different counter. Once you have one with a ninety-degree edge, take your cardboard in hand on both ends press it down over the edge as though using it to shine a shoe. Run it back and forth from end to end. If done with enough pressure correctly, you'll notice when you hold the board back up, it curves on its own. If you were to try to round a flat sheet of paperboard into a cylinder without this bending process, it would likely fold and crease. Using this method, you simply tighten the curve by gluing the rectangle in place and it forms a near-perfect cylinder.

To form a (bottomless) cone from a box is nearly as simple as forming a cylinder.

In the case of a cone you must cut a circle out of your paperboard. Whether this involves the use of a compass or a circle stencil by means of cup, plate, water bottle, icecream lid, tape roll, or you name it, find the center point and mark it. Then cut out a large section of the "pie" shape you've created. The amount you cut out equates to the steepness of the cone, and the radius equates to the maximum height of the cone. So if you want a massively pointy roof, you need a massive circle with a massive portion of its pie missing. To make the cone uniformly round, you should bend it in a similar way to the cylinder bending process. Though this time, with the center of the circle and the circumference of the circle following in line with the countertop as you round it. Then you glue in place, and you have your conic roof.

It's a bummer if you already glued all your shapes, but it's not the end of the world. It just makes the decoration stage a bit more difficult and sometimes a bit less refined.

To add brick decorations to the walls, you will want to choose your pattern, and add them to the paperboard rectangles before you glue them into cylinders. Same for any shingles on the conic rooves. You can still check by rounding and holding the shapes to see if they're the right size, and mark where you're going to put glue so you don't detail there. But it's highly recommended to add the drawn-on details before gluing the shapes into the third dimension.

When adding windows and doors you can either add on paperboard details, take away portions from the shapes to be able to see through into the tower, or do a combination of both. When taking away (via craft knife), it is best to do so with a cutting board on a hard surface, which is very difficult to do when the shapes are glued together already. Hence the cutting out windows and such before gluing.

Some details are better added after your shapes are glued, as any attached pieces need to follow closely the curvature of the tower and/or roof. If those specifications later change because of inaccurate gluing, the balconies, room addons, chimneys, and staircases may not fit just right.

To add a balcony, trace the tower's circumference you want to add the balcony to on a new piece of paperboard. Then jutting off of that you can create your balcony's surface. When you glue that to the tower, you may want to add supports and a railing. If you want to add a door, try to cut that out before gluing the cylinder. Planning ahead is key for those details.

To add a room, you do the same as a balcony, but instead of a railing, you add three walls via a folded piece of paperboard. Atop the walls you add your roof. If you do a single-fold roof, you'll want to add a point in the front section of your three-walls piece.

To add a chimney, you need to form rectangular prisms (without a bottom or top) and glue them together. Then cut one end at an angle to fit the angle of your roof. Countless details can be added to a chimney alone, and if any are drawn on, try to do so before gluing it together.

To add a staircase, take a ruler and crease a strip of paperboard forwards and back following the edge of the ruler to get a staircase shape. Using the remainder of the strip can make a simple connection to a tower, but you can just glue the stairs straight on if you so desire.

The base of the tower must be structurally sound. Well, that is if you want your tower to stand up.

This can mean adding triangular supports, or just gluing the bottom circle to a large, flat base (or both). The base of the tower also tends to be where any staircases are attached, and is where you might consider adding a door. (That is if it's not a Rapunzel tower without entrances besides windows.)

The base can sit atop a dramatic cliff (or high shelf) to emphasise the impracticality that is a wizard tower.

By now you hopefully have a base, some middle segments with details, and a roof to top off your tower... and you're ready to connect them! This is where circles and supports come in.

To start you'll want to trace the larger of the two cylinders being connected onto a piece of paperboard to see its circumference. Then you want to make a circle about a centimeter larger than that. Cut out the larger circle, and glue the larger cylinder to it as centrally as possible. Next you want to glue that circle (with the first cylinder attached) to the next cylinder.

The circle looks fine and all, but it seems like an abrupt transition. That's where supports come in. They're most commonly little triangles with one side being the distance from the bottom tower's circumference to the edge of the circle, and the other being a bit longer. Glue these in the corners created to add detail and logic for the tower growth.

That should be it! If you have any final touches, like some sweet photography on a jagged rock in your backyard, go for it. The wizard tower is a very repeatable project, with each result looking (hopefully) quite different from the last! (thanks to various sizes of cylinders and cones).

I hope you had fun crafting! If you want to see more of my work, consider checking out my website! Besides that, have a fabulous day!