Girls Day Sakura Petal Boxes

Uh, oh! It's only March, and already I'm slipping behind on all my projects and blog posts...YIKES! I suppose part of the reason is that Valentines Day, Chinese New Year and Girls Day were all less than a week apart this year. That, and me not being able to come up with any creative ideas...I was especially stumped on what to do for Girls Day this year. Then I remembered some cute petal boxes I had seen a while back and recalled wanting to try them as sakura petal boxes. Searching online, I came across a few usable templates, but they were all four petal (square), six petal (hexagon) or eight petal (octogon) boxes. For a sakura, I needed a FIVE petal (pentagon) box. Desperate and running out of time, I finally came to the realization that I'd have to come up with my own template...UGH!

Tracing the template I found for a six petal box into MTC, I removed one of the panels to make it a five sided box, then created a pentagon shape for the box bottom. Ta-Da...it worked!

The individual petals of the sakura were also created in MTC by doing some pixel editing to separate the petals on a sakura image I had previously saved.

Various sized sakura and flower center punches were used to decorate the sides of the box...

and paper pieced kokeshi was created in MTC using a kokeshi head image found online and pairing it with the kokeshi body from Jin's (Under A Cherry Tree blog) freebie Kyoto Kuties cutting file.

Here's what the box looks like when it's open. I was able to finish ten of these just in the nick of time, and filled them with Japanese mochi candies.

Finished them off by bagging in cellophane...

And adding a fun topper.

Girls Day (March 3rd) isn't a major holiday but I always enjoy making a little something to share with friends. Brings back lots of warm memories of my daughter growing up and even of my own childhood.