Party Favor Tutorial

When I was at the Hamilton, ON Regional Convention, we were shown an adorable table little table favour.  The template was created using Stampin’ Up!’s print pattern background stamp.  When I got home and made it, although I loved it, I found that it was too tiny to be practical – you could maybe fit about 5 jelly beans in it!   

I started playing around with the general design, and created a template for a larger version. You can see the difference in size if you take a look at the picture on the left.  I also discovered a way to simplify making this a little, which I’ll share later on in this tutorial. 

The next picture you see shows most of the supplies necessary to create this project.  As you can see, there’s not an awful lot, which is why this is an awesome project for beginning paper crafters. The only other thing you will need is a paper trimmer with a scoring blade, or another means of scoring.

You will need:  a 6″ x 6″ sheet of designer paper, a 1/4″ square punch, Sticky Strip, Sharp scissors, a bone folder and some ribbon.

Above, is a picture of the template that I designed, along with the dimensions.  Remember that the paper is a perfect square.  On one side, using your paper trimmer with the scoring blade, you are going to score at: 1 1/4″, 2 1/2″, 3 3/4″ and 5″.  Then you are going to rotate the paper 90 degrees, and along the other edge you will score at 1 1/4″ and 4 3/4″.  The black diamonds are going to eventually be punched out.

Once your paper is scored, using your bone folder, you are then going to fold along each one of those score lines.

Your going to fold your paper at each score line (only one at a time, so that you have no more than 2 layers), you are going to position your 1/4″ square punch as shown above. You can see that the score line is aligned in the center of the top corner, and that the edges of the paper are aligned with the side corners, you are then going to punch.  You will do this for every area that showed the diamond in the template I gave you.

Once you are done, the picture above is what your paper should look like.

When you fold your favor, you’ll notice that one of the end flaps is narrower than the others.  This is going to be the flap that will get folded to the inside of the box.  So on the right side of the paper (the one that you want showing on the outside), along this narrower flap, you’ll place a strip of Sticky Tape along the edge as shown in the picture. You will also place one on the opposite edge, on the wrong side of the paper.

You are going to remove the red backing on the sticky tape and very carefully, form your paper into a rectangular box.  Be very careful as you are aligning the edges because sticky strip is NOT repositionable.

One at a time, you are carefully going to pinch each end as shown and tie a ribbon around it in a bow (if you’re good at tying bows) or a knot (which is my preference as I can’t tie bows to save my life!).

This is what it will look like after both ends are tied.  If you decide to leave it like this and not cut the edges as I did in the picture below, then I would tie the ribbons so that the knot is actually on the side of the favor, so that it sits on the table like this, as it is much prettier to look at when it is on it’s side.

In this one, I decided I wanted the sides to look a bit like those Christmas Crackers (is that what they’re called?) so I took a fine tip pair of sharp scissors, and cut the ends into a bunch of small strips, then very gently curled the strips in various directions with the edge of my scissors.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial.  All supplies are Stampin’ Up!