The Year of the Tiger Roars In

Gung Hay Fat Choy! To celebrate the start of a new lunar year, I put together tiger themed cookie boxes and red envelopes for sharing with friends and family.

I decided to change things up a bit this year by making whimsical, cutesy boxes instead of the usual traditional red and gold boxes I've made in the past to hold the almond cookies I bake for Chinese New Year. The inspiration for the design of these boxes comes from a freebie project  for a tiger "toy" offered by Canon Creative Park. 

I used Make the Cut design program to render the free printable template into a cutting file for the tiger head, paws and stripes. The original Canon Creative Park project used a closed trapezoidal box, but I needed one with a lid. Happily it didn't take me too long to find a trapezoid shaped cupcake box with a hinged lid in the "B is For Birthday" project set at SVG Cuts. I enlarged the cupcake sized box in the set to one that would be large enough to hold about a dozen cookies.

After my tiger boxes were assembled, I used the print and cut function to add a gold medallion to the lid of each box.

I baked 4 batches of almond cookies to fill 16 boxes and still had enough left over cookies to keep hubby happy!

I also made these Year of the Tiger "lai si" red envelopes. There are so many adorable tiger images on the internet that I had a hard time deciding which to use for my red envelopes. I finally chose to use this one because I liked how he looks like he's roaring and smiling at the same time! Cutting files for tigers were designed in Make the Cut. 

Cutting file for the red envelope was traced in Make the Cut from a free template available on Bride and Breakfast website. Paper pieced tiger head was glued onto the flap of the envelope and the body below it. Lucky red knot charms the tigers are holding were cut from "Knot and Coin" die from Lala Land Crafts. I covered the coin charm die with a red square so I could add the Chinese character "fu" for good fortune onto it.

Then, at the last minute I came across this adorable image of a string of fireworks and felt compelled to make a card for our granddaughter. I should have resisted the urge because often things I do last minute, and in a rush have poor outcomes. 

Creating the cut file and paper piecing the string of fireworks for the front of my card went pretty smoothly. I made sure to use a lot of red and gold foil, pearlized and glitter cardstock to give the card enough bling to delight any child.

On the inside, I added an interactive mechanism for the "Hideout Card" which I learned from a video tutorial on You Tube by Srushti Patil. As the card is opened, two images simultaneously pop out from behind a center panel. I added a small paper pieced tiger to pop out above the center panel and the year 2022 to pop out below the panel. 

I was successful in getting the mechanism to work quite well when the card is initially opened but ran into issues with "catch points" when trying to close the card. This wouldn't have been a problem had I used stamped or printed images, but with paper pieced images the tiger and "2022" would catch on each other while returning back behind the center panel as the card was being closed. I redid this card five times, but in the end had to write a note to Mom and Dad to "please gently close card by manually pushing tiger back behind his panel..."  I really like the movement of this card so I definitely will be doing more experimenting and practicing to learn how to make this work for me!

Stay tuned for more fun Chinese New Year projects I'll be posting soon...