...50th BiRtHdaY gift...

Our friends 50th birthday was this week.  

I dropped her off cupcakes last Saturday...raspberry stout cupcakes with chambord ganache and Bailey's irish cream buttercream

I delivered a bottle of wine and a balloon on her real birthday.

But for a 50th birthday, you deserve at least a birthday week...it's too big an event to fit all of the festivities into just one day :)

Plus, she invited some friends out to dinner last night, so I needed something special to bring.

...enter the craft project that made me cry...

okay...looks incredibly simple right...how could that possibly have caused TEARS?????

So, the box is a go-to staple for me...they sell the sweet little things at Hallmark for like $6...and that amazing doo-dad on top...another $2.50...those guys at Hallmark are simply genius when it comes to packaging...now...almost $9 is more than I'd normally spend just to wrap something...but I've been sick all week and I knew I only had one project in me...not a project and a cute package....gotta know your limits...



So the actual present was 50 scratch off lottery tickets...which is why the box says - Hope you get LUCKY- inside...get your minds out of the gutter...what were you thinking?!?!?!


The concept of the packaging for the lottery tickets was simple...accordion fold paper to hold each ticket and just glue as many pieces of paper together as needed to make it big enough to hold all the tickets...it was the scale of the project that I failed to grasp...


ok...so...here's the tear inducing project...

Here's the front....simple enough...nothing drama inducing here...

...and a side view...where you can begin to see the dilemma...that is an awful LOT of folding going on....

I don't have a good close up of the finished product because it's nearly impossible to fit something 

over 10 FEET long 

into one photo...8 sheets of cardstock, cut in half and then each half folded first up 1 1/2 inches to make a pocket and then scored and folded every 2 1/2 inches to make the page...and i needed FIFTY pages...I scored and folded for over an hour...

The concept seemed so simple...but the reality was an ugly, unwieldy, disaster...

ok...maybe not a disaster...but it wasn't a walk in the park...

I'm not sure if it was the lack of sleep or the weird chemicals in the cough syrup...

but half way through the folding I was in tears...

Since I was sick, we didn't actually get to go to the dinner...but I heard the birthday girl liked her present...and hopefully, she really will get lucky and there will be something good on one of those scratch off tickets! ;)

Thanks for looking and enjoy the rest of your weekend!
jen