A Party Favor

A few days ago my next door neighbor emailed me asking for a favor.  Now I need to tell you, my next door neighbor is awesome.  I totally won the next-door-neighbor lottery.  If she ever moves, I'm going to sell my house and follow her.  (Because that's not at all creepy...)

But as I was saying... she emailed with a favor.  She wanted to know if I could help her brainstorm ideas for her four-year-old daughter's birthday party.  Now this is the kind of thing that I frequently offer to do for people and I am always thrilled when they realize I'm serious and take me up on it.  As it happened, I had recently seen something on Pinterest that I was dying to try.

Image from Pinterest via http://blog.celebratethebigandsmall.com
PINNERS: If you would like to pin THIS image PLEASE pin it from the site I've linked to above.
The rest of the images in this post are mine and can be pinned from my blog
but I want her to get credit for her image.
THANK YOU!

The idea was initially pinned from here and she was apparently inspired by this.  It's called a "Punch Box" and it's a great alternative to a pinata.  (Four-year-olds with big sticks can be a little scary sometimes.)  Instead of beating on a pinata with a stick, each child punches through one of the pretty colored circles in order to grab the prize inside.  

I set out to make one using some guidance from the originators plus a few of my own ideas.  I also decided to document the process with the intention of doing a tutorial.  It's my first one, so bear with me.  

I started by gathering up some supplies.  I was really lucky in that I had almost everything I needed in my garage.  The most important item (which I forgot to photograph) was the box.  I got my husband a bike rack for Christmas and he had been meaning to disassemble the box it came in for awhile.  I'm glad he didn't.

The first thing I did were some rough measurements of the box.  

I knew I wanted ten circles.  I debated whether line them up or to put them in a random pattern.  I decided to go with the lines.  Ultimately I used my circle cutter to make a template from a brown paper bag.  This helped me plan out the spacing.

Then I used the circle cutter to score the box.
(You can buy your own circle cutter here.)
Sorry about the dark pictures.

My intention was actually to cut the box with the circle cutter but the cardboard was too thick.  So I ended up making the actual cuts with a box cutter:

As you can see, the cuts weren't perfect, but I decided the four-year-olds wouldn't notice.  ;)

I had to take the box apart to do this.  Other bloggers made their own boxes.  

I just took mine apart and then reassembled it.

Then I needed to attach tissue paper to the back of each hole.  At first I tried staples, but they went all the way through to the front of the box and I decided that they might cut one of the children.  Can you see all those little holes?  Yeah, so could I.  Kind of a bummer but I decided not to freak out about it.  

So I turned to my good friend hot glue.  And scotch tape.  Here's a picture of the covered holes:

And here's how they looked from the front.  I used old tissue from my garage-area wrapping station so it's a little rumply-looking:

Pretty cool, huh?  At this point I had already glued on these:

Again, that's a crummy picture, but the letters are called "Twinkle Type," and I had a box of them in my garage.  They were originally purchased at Michael's.  I decided to add them because I thought the middle of the box needed a little extra somethin'-somethin'

Then I flipped the box an added toys on top of each piece of tissue:

  

After that, I took paper bags and cut them like so:

And I taped a bag over each toy.  (Why I didn't think of masking tape for the tissue paper is beyond me..)

It was a hot mess back there with all that tape.  Kind of like a sausage factory; you really don't want to know what's going on inside.  

Finally I reassembled the box using packing tape.  (The one thing I didn't have; fortunately my neighbor did.)

And here is the finished product:

Unfortunately we couldn't make the party but I heard it was a hit.  Here's what remains of the box.  I think I can reuse it:

Please let me know if you attempt one; I'd love to see your pictures!


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