Birthday Gift Bag

Hello!  As the holidays have gotten closer, lots of stuff has gotten in the way of my crafting, so I haven't had much to show lately!  In fact, all I have done since my mom's birthday card was a little gift bag for my daughter's friend.  She had her birthday party last weekend, and we got her a gift card for Claire's.  I thought it might be nice to do something besides just stick it in an envelope, and I remembered a cute little origami purse from a book I picked up recently at the UBS.  Origami Boxes by Florence Temko has lots of neat boxes, and what's nice is that there are very explicit instructions for the origami-challenged like me!  The purse is basically a triangle box with a handle added.  I thought it had a lot of potential.

My test worked out great, though small- using a 9x12 sheet of paper yields a box a little smaller than standard gift card dimensions.  We looked for some cute gift wrap that we could cut larger than 9x12 to get a bigger box, but there is very little selection out there for gift wrap anymore.  Remember when there was an entire asile in Target devoted to gift wrap?!  No more- I guess the trend has shifted to gift bags nowadays.  That doesn't help those of us who want to make our own!  Even Michael's only had a few designs, most plain, and not what we were looking for.  Since we were there, we decided to just pick out a scrapbook paper to make the small box, and would figure out a way to cram the gift card into it.  I had in mind using a cute patterned paper, but Meredith had other ideas.  She found a bright turquoise, fluffy gift bow that she just HAD to have, and wanted to use a matching paper for the box, so that is what we got.  It did present a challenge- since it was card stock weight, it was harder to fold, so if I had it to do over again, I would definitely go with a lighter weight paper.  All I did was fold the box- Meredith decorated it and made a little gift tag as well.  Here it is:

You can see that the poofy bow is fastened to the back, and it is larger than the box!  Here is the bow side:

Meredith's friend liked her gift a lot, and I think she liked the packaging too.  It was fun to try something different!  I'd love to try this again with a larger sheet of gift wrap.  Maybe we'll try it for some Christmas gifts!

That's it for now.  Not sure what's up next- I hestiate to plan much, since things are going to be so busy for the next month.  I am thinking about making some bookmarks similar to the ones I made for my son's band section leaders, just with the school colors and logo, but without the names and instruments.  The band boosters are holding a holiday bazaar on the evenings of the winter concerts and are looking for vendors for them.  I'm not sure I'd want to go and have a whole table to myself, but I thought about donating some bookmarks for the band boosters to sell at their merchandise table.  We'll see how much time I have between now and then!