My son celebrated his first birthday two months ago, at his paternal grandmother's house a few days before Ramadan. As the day approached I never thought that there would be so much dilemma concerning a year old's party. For starters I didn't want to spend many many ringgits for his first birthday party. After all he will have more birthdays later where he will be older and definitely more aware of his surroundings. Maybe then I'll splurge more.
Anyway, I was feeling like a scrooge because I originally thought about celebrating in JB where he was born. But upon realizing that I do have a lot of diy items on hand which can be turned into party favours, I decided to create my own party favour bags.
Growing up, I like to create things with my hands. But since I worked I hadn't been in touch with my hand made creative side. These days I often pore my creativity into work via photoshop. That wasn't too satisfying. I miss my artsy days.
So the night before going back to Temerloh, right after birthday boy went to sleep , I started working on the paper bag project.
Since I am an avid magazine reader, I have an endless supply of magazines which are now threatening to take over my house. Each month I buy an average of 5 magazines so in a year I have 60, if I buy them without fail. I buy Cleo, Female, Galaxy, Her World, Time Out KL, Pa & Ma, Dara, Nur and Hijabista almost each month. Sometimes I give them away to colleague if they are more than 3 months old.
For this party favour bag, I used Galaxy magazine. I used one magazine and got 37 bags from it. The ribbon and glue were lying around in my house and the labels are printed out.
You can make your own too.
Under the label I planned on decorating it with something else.
But because I ran out of time I just emboss it with my RM5 embosser.
Here's a close up of it. I bought a cute embosser set from Daiso.
If only the puncher costs RM5 too, that'd be awesome.
I think the other embosser got heart shape, bow and some other cutesy shapes.
There are 5 or 6 shapes in the set.
Stuff the bag with my favourite candies.
The highlight of the party favour is my hand made brooch.
I made 40 of this to sell at a bazaar, but no one bought them so
I turned them into my son's party favour.
I didn't give away the pink one. Too cute to sell.
These brooch usually sell for RM3 each at bazaars.
Tadaaaa.
The end product.
In a group shot.
I managed to give some to my officemate's offsprings too.
I didn't hand made just that. I also made a Happy Birthday sign for birthday boy.
After thinking back, making my own party favour bag is a good thing after all because party favour bags are thrown away. In the future I plan to sew party bags so people can use them for other purpose too.
When I got married 2 years ago, I didn't manage to convince my mom to use brown bags for my wedding favours, She said it looked cheap. I think that's because I never show her the dolled up brown bag. But next time I am going to hand made all my party bags. But I think I have to prepare them earlier next time, not just make them right before a party.
A dolled up brown paper bag.
ps: I never understand why people tell me to put caption first and picture later. Aren't we supposed to do it newspaper style, picture first and followed by caption?
