Chinese New Year Treats

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Based on the traditional lunar calendar, Thursday (February 19) marked the first day of the Chinese New Year and the beginning of Year of the Sheep. Baked up batches of hubby's favorite almond cookies again this year and put together some Year of the Sheep boxes to put them in for giving to friends and family.

I chose to make octagonal boxes again this year to hold my cookies, just a little bit different than the ones from last year. Got the freebie cutfile for these from SVG Cuts. I really liked the unusual shape of this box...difficult to tell from my photos, but the bottom half of this box gently flares out to give it a slightly wider base than its top. Also liked the idea of the shadow box type window on the cover...the original box from SVG Cuts comes with a pretty heart shaped window which I swapped out for a lantern shape instead.

Another unique design feature I love on this box is its wide scalloped edge lid.

The lantern shapes for the window were created by welding rectangle and oval shapes in MTC. The cover on this box is four layers thick...a top red cover layer embossed with a folder from Cuttlebug Asian bundle, a shiny gold foil layer for the window frame, the mat gold inset embossed with a plum blossom folder also from the Cuttlebug Asian bundle, and finally the slightly larger black cardstock layer which peeks out from the edges as a border. 

I chose a Chinese papercut style design for my sheep and added the character for "sheep". I'm always intrigued by the intricacy and details on Chinese papercuts and was thrilled to find an image that could be easily rendered into a cutfile and cut on my Silhouette machine.
An interesting and amusing thing I came across while searching the web for inspiration for my cookie box this year...the Chinese character and word "yang" apparently refers to any member of the sheep genre, which explains why many of the Chinese zodiac images for this year look more like "goats" than sheep. Many refer to this year as being the "Year of the Goat". I thought this was especially funny since  earlier I had mentioned how hubby (who was born in the Year of the Sheep)  was so insistent that this was the Year of the RAM", not "sheep". LOL, wonder how he would feel about being called just an "OLD GOAT"?!!!