Year of the Horse Cookie Boxes

Friday is Chinese New Years, the official start of the Year of the Horse so Chinatown was bustling with activity this weekend. To celebrate the start of the New Year, I put together these Year of the Horse boxes filled with almond cookies for sharing with our family.

I used the same octagonal box cutfile (from My Scrap Chick) that I used to make the Hello Kitty boxes I posted earlier. I chose an octagonal box since it's considered to be lucky because of it's eight sides...the number eight being a lucky number to the Chinese. Figured our aunts wouldn't be too keen about Hello Kitty so this time around I went with a more traditional horse image and stuck to the lucky red and gold color scheme instead to decorate their boxes. The horse image was purchased from GL Stock Images and traced into a cutfile using MTC. I used metallic gold cardstock to cut it out and placed it together with the Chinese character for "horse" onto a background embossed with a folder from Cuttlebug's Asian bundle.

Finished size of the box is about 4-1/2 inches wide with a depth of 3 inches; large enough to hold a dozen cookies. As a finishing touch, I wrapped the boxes in cellophane bags tied with a glittered tulle bow. Hubby kept calling this "the firecracker box" because the shape of it reminded him of the octagonal "bomb" that's commonly seen attached to the top of long strings of Chinese firecrackers. LOL....that might actually be kind of a fun thing to recreate in paper...a box with strings of paper firecrackers hanging from it....maybe next year.