Happy New Year of the Dragon

Kung Hei Fat Choy!  I'm finally back after my holiday break. Today marks the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year, and this year we celebrate the Year of the Dragon.

I baked batches of almond cookies to share with family and friends and created these boxes to put them in. 

The design of my cookie boxes was inspired by the four-sided lantern style boxes often seen used as favors at weddings. After looking at several illustrations of  templates for these wedding favor boxes online, I tried to design something similar in Make the Cut Design Studio by welding together a few basic shapes. I then sized my box to be large enough to hold half a dozen or more cookies and added legs to the bottom of it to make it look like an Asian style lantern.

Two sides of the box were decorated using a free dragon image from Vecteezy.  A stencil cut of the image was created in Make the Cut and pieced together using gold foil board and red pearlescent text weight paper. On the alternate sides I used Spellbinders Destination China: Chinese Coin Window die to cut a  frame from gold foil board. The Chinese character for "dragon" was traced in Make the Cut to create the layered stencil image in the center.

I also put together several of these fun "laisee" or Chinese lucky red envelopes decorated with a whimsical paper pieced dragon, inspired by Tsuki-san on Pixta Japan.   The dragon's head was adhered to the flap of the envelopes separately from the dragon's body so recipients could lift the dragon's head up to open the envelope.

I  was excited to use my new Chinese character "Fu" (for good fortune) wax stamp to make wax seals to add to the envelopes. I tried the double layered wax technique for the first time to get the gold wax border around the red wax and colored the "Fu" character using a Marvy DecoColor gold metallic paint pen.

I also want to share these super cute Year of the Dragon lucky money bag treat holders that I received from my dear friend, Lorna. Lorna very cleverly origami folded Chinese red envelopes into the shape of a Chinese Lucky Bag, and decorated it with an adorable paper pieced Hello Kitty dressed in a dragon costume.

I also received this fun Year of the Dragon Chinese New Year pop up card in the mail this week from my crafty friend, Bev. I love the lantern design digital paperon the front of the card. The sentiment "Gong Xi Fa Cai" is Mandarin whereas "Kung Hei Fat Choy" is the Cantonese pronounciation of the same greeting, meaning "Wishing you prosperity".

For the pop up feature inside, Bev used the mechanism from Karen Burniston's "Rocket Pop Up" die. As the card is opened the dragon inside pops forward and slides to the right... so fun! Happy New Year!

(P.S. I will be slowly adding back dated posts of  my 2023 Christmas projects so you may scroll backward to older posts if you're interested.)