Crowing In with the Year Of The Rooster

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy New Year! Seems I have been MIA for 2 months from my blog, but I think I can safely say that I am finally nearly caught up with life now and can comfortably resume posting again. Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! Mine was a bit hectic, but I survived and it's all good.Today is Chinese New Years and it feels good to start off the New Year with a new blog post. For those who might be interested, I have decided to post all my Christmas and holiday projects from 2016 retroactively. I'm thinking no one will want to see Christmas stuff this late into January, but since I still want to post them for my own personal reference, I'll be dating those posts for December 2016.

To celebrate the Year of the Rooster, I put together a dozen of these double hinged boxes for sharing the almond cookies I baked with family and friends. For the construction of the box, I used the basic instructions on Crafty Caroline's You Tube tutorial found here. but increased the size of the box to 5 x 6"  with a depth of 1-1/2" so it would hold a dozen small almond cookies. What I liked most about Caroline's box is how she cut away part of the lids on the top and bottom sides to give it a nice angled design.
The stylized rooster icon and Chinese character were found on the web and rendered into cut files using Make the Cut. Shadows and octagonal shapes were also created in Make the Cut. Rooster was cut from gold foil board and I used the Mystic Clouds embossing folder by mpress to add texture to the first octogonal layer.Oriental design corners were cut using wikiCAPS Asian Designs metal die.

The double hinged box opens from the center...

...and the hinged lids fall to the sides of the box.

Wrapped the boxes in cellophane bags tied with red and gold ribbons to finish. 

Also want to share this super cute Year of the Rooster candy holder created by none other than my dear friend Lorna. Isn't this just too adorable? Lorna made her treat box to look like a Japanese Daruma doll and added a rooster face with a "matsu" or Japanese pine icon for his comb. Cute, cute, CUTE!

Here's a view of the box attached to the daruma and the New Year's greeting stamped (Mama Elephant Lunar Extras) and embossed on the back of the box. 

And here's my furbaby Latte joining me to wish everyone a Happy, Healthy, Prosperous New Year in 2017! (She'll do almost anything for treats...!)