Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve. We always have a big homemade dinner
on the Eve to celebrate and then leftovers the day after because you’re not
supposed to cook or do any work on Chinese New Year ’s Day. In addition to all
of the yummy food, one of the big traditions is to hand out red envelopes
(typically married people hand them out to unmarried people). We thought it’d
be a cool idea to make our own red envelope in honour of the year of the rooster
and give you a little step by step guide so that you too can make your own
little red Chinese New Year envelopes.
2017 is the year of the Fire Rooster. Rooster is almost the epitome of
fidelity and punctuality. People born in the Year of Rooster are said to be honest, bright, communicative
and ambitious. Some notable roosters are... Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake,
Elton John, Jennifer Aniston, Cate Blanchett, Diane Sawyer, Elijah Wood,
Jessica Alba, Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon, Natalie Portman, Catherine the
Great, Amelia Earhart, Rudyard Kipling, Groucho Marx, Roger Federer, Serena
Williams.
You don’t need too much to make this craft. We’re keeping it simple and
sticking with two colours of cardstock, a red and yellowish gold. Red and gold
are what you usually find on the red envelopes, but some may have coloured
pictures on them as well as red and gold symbols/pictures/words. We thought it
easiest to use the Silhouette Portrait, but we realise that not everyone has one so you
can easily make this craft without one as well; you’ll just have to do some
cutting with the scissors.
We cut out about a 2 ½ inch rooster out of the gold/yellowish cardstock
with the Silhouette. You can decorate with stickers, you can find a rooster
image (we thought that would be fitting to put on the front for this year), you
can draw or write symbols/pictures or you can write words on the front. Then we found a red envelope template roughly measuring 5 ¾ inches from
top to bottom including the flap and then cut that out.
You can make a bigger
envelope if you like, but this is the usual size for a red envelope. If you
decide to go with a bigger red envelope make sure that you adjust the image on
the front to that it looks the right size.
After both parts are cut, we folded the red envelope and glued it
together and then glued the rooster on the front. Keep in mind that sometimes it's easier to score the parts that you are going to fold.
And here you have it, your very own homemade red envelope!
No comments:
Post a Comment