This is an instructable for a coffin made out of a shoebox. I am making this for Halloween as a coffin for my skeleton Boris and as a box for Halloween treats.

What you need for this project:

a box (I am using a shoebox)
a ruler
a pencil
a scalpel
super glue
paint (I am using acrylic)
brushes
palette
whatever you want to put on the inside of your coffin (I am using a red fabric, but you can also put some napkins in chosen color that you can dispose later)
scissors

Step 1: Making Measures

Now you have to decide what dimensions of the coffin you want. What I did is that I measured lenght and width of the box what you can see as a brown color on the picture. I decided that I want my width on the upper part of the coffin to be 8 cm and the width on the lower part of the coffin to be 6 cm. Since the width of a box was 16cm I found a middle (8 cm) with a ruler and marked 4 cm on each side on the upper part (4 + 4 = 8) and marked 3 cm on each side on the lower part (3 + 3 = 6). I decided that I want upper part of the coffin to take 1/4 of the lenght so I measured the lenght which was 30 cm. 1/4 of 30 is 7,5 so that's the lenght of the upper part of my coffin. With all the measures marked on the box I took a ruler and draw the lines of my coffin what you can see in green color.

Step 2: Making the Coffin Shape

Now put a box completely apart. See the part that I painted purple on the picture. This is the part that you need to cut out with a scalpel. Just be careful that you dont cut out too much, you have to leave a small part in the middle so that both parts of the cardboard stay connected to each other (the part that will make a bottom of a coffin and the part that will make the sides).

Step 3: Bending the Sides

The next step is to make a part of a cardboard that will make sides of a coffin able to bend. You can do this with a ruler and a scalpel. Put a ruler through the spots that you marked as a 1/4 of the lenght and make a light line with a scalpel along the ruler on the both parts of a cardboard that will be a side of a coffin. You only want to make a light line so that the cardboard can bend on the place where you made it, you don't want to cut it off!

Try to assemble your coffin to see what parts are excess. You can cut these parts off as I did on the second picture.

Step 4: Assembling

Take the super glue and make lines along the edges of your coffin bottom. Glue the coffin sides to a bottom (hold it for couple of seconds). Glue both coffin sides together. What you have now is a coffin! If you want to make a lid of a shoebox as a coffin lid follow the next step.

Step 5: The Lid

If you want to make the lid of a shoebox as the lid of your coffin you have to put your assembled coffin on the lid and draw the lines along the edges with a pencil. For the lid to fit the coffin it should be a little bit bigger than the coffin. I made the lines where I was going to cut 5 mm wider than the original lines. Now put a lid apart and proceed to the next step.

Step 6: Cutting and Assembling the Lid

Now do exactly the same what you did with the coffin in the steps 2, 3 and 4. Cut out the purple part, apply glue and glue the sides to the bottom. Try to put your finished lid to your coffin to see if it fits.

Step 7: Painting

I chose to paint my coffins brown with a wood effect. I used two shades of brown that I got by mixing red, blue and yellow paint and to get a darker brown I just added a little bit of black paint. The wood effect was achieved by painting dark brown spots all over my coffin and then painting up and down with a light brown paint.