Its a beer garden box. This is pretty cute and very easy to make.
- The Set Up:
My fiance usually gets the short end of the stick when it comes to gift giving occasions. My Birthday is well before any of the expensive holidays and he’s just a bit after Christmas and Valentines Day. This year things have been good. We went from a very low income ramen noodles and cold showers kind of budget to where we have enough to comfortable pay our own way and eat real food, lol.
We still couldn’t afford “spectacular” but I wanted to make sure he got gifts and a party this year because he always does something nice for me. For Valentines day, I told him not to get me anything this year and he brought my some discounted flowers a few days after. 🙂 He’s just sweet like that.
So when I get presents, I tend to get one actual gift and one silly/gag/impulse type gift. I didn’t have a real budget in mind, but I wanted to try and keep it less than $100 for all gifts and party type stuff. (I’d secretly invited a few friends over.) So I headed to the store with a few indistinct ideas thinking I’d order him a fancy gaming mouse for his computer online.
- Wandering around the store…
I knew I’d get him a case of Blue Moon because its his favorite beer and we had some miniature oranges at the house he loved. He doesn’t indulge often and never buys the stuff for himself even though he likes it, so I wanted to make sure to grab some. You can obviously substitute beer for something of similar packaging, like glass bottles of Cream Soda. Just find something indulgent that you know they like. 🙂 It could be a bottle of wine, or maybe even ice cream flavored coffee creamer. You can experiment with this wrapping idea and come up with some cool and unique gift ideas that you dress up with a very simple, cheap wrapping technique.
Clementine oranges are small and peel easily. You can drop a slice or two into the bottle and retrieve it with a chopstick or something similar.
I went down the party isle kind of on a whim. I wasn’t expecting to really get anything because most of what’s on that isle is really expensive crap clearly marketed towards kids. I still hadn’t found his gag gift and was looking for ideas. There was a package of very simple party decorations for like a dollar. It had balloons, table confetti, two banners, some streamers, and other kinds of birthday themed wall art. Just kind of cute stuff. We’ve never, ever decorated before, so I thought it might be cute for his very “official” birthday, lol. I also grabbed a roll of cheap tape.
I couldn’t find any wrapping paper, which blew my freakin mind. How do you have an entire party section with no damn wrapping paper? Seriously? I’m not being cute with news paper and old magazine pages this year. I’m gonna buy some wrapping paper that Lou will appreciate. But I’m thwarted by expensive giftbags…ugh…but it did lead me to this:
Less than $1 for 20 good sized sheets of colored tissue paper.
There was also green and blue tissue paper.
After looking around some more I found a poster display and decided to see if there was anything worth notice. I didn’t expect to find anything there either, but I was kind of running out of ideas. I did find a great Big Bang Theory Poster. Lou isn’t really a poster guy, but I thought he might like this. The right character and show, the right catchphrase and the right colors. Perfect and inexpensive. I also grabbed a cheap, plastic poster frame so that he could put it up on the wall and take care of it if he wanted.
- Wrapping phase…
Wrapping a poster tube and sticking a bow on the end basically looks like a goofy flower. Since I had tissue paper, I decided to experiment:
Not bad for winging it. You just kinda play with it and mold it, pinning back some places with small pieces of tape. Then wrap tape around the base. I attached flowers like this to the end of the wrapped tubes.
As I was making these blossoms, I realized that each sheet was big enough to wrap the bottles individually. I had plenty of paper and nothing else to wrap, so I began to wrap the blue moon bottles and shape the ends to look liked grass or flowers.
After that I just wrapped two sheets over the cardboard box and tucked the edges down.
I even used the colorful sheath of tissue that the sheets were wrapped in. I just folded it so the company logo wouldn’t be visible.
I made it into a sign for the bag the little beer garden box was going to sit in. It says, “Happy Birthday Louie. I got you a …really cool garden! xoxo Love Tephy.” Next time I will make sure I have a better sharper or pen. They make metallic ones that would have been pretty cool.
Once I was done I put my two flower stems into my bag and the end result is this:
Yeah, that’s also a Darth Vader bag in the corner.
Snevilly's Resolutions 
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