Paper Fortune Cookies

29 Nov 2010 by Paper Exploits - Handmade Personalized Stationery

The other day, I wrote a quick preview post on my Paper Fortune Cookies which are now Christmassy-fied and in the Shop! Here’s the full post on them, as promised.

Before these…

Came these!

These happy little cookies were made specially for a customer who is hosting a Christmas/Birthday party in December. She had wanted Paper Fortune Cookies as favours for each guest, so I made quite a few of these for her. I gave her the option of coming up with her own text for the cookies, so the brilliant lady went to one of my favourite sites– Things We Forget– and picked out uplifting phrases she liked. And boy, did she pick good ones!

I typed them all out on a cream sheet of paper, so this is how a section of it looked before I sliced them out into:

These! I really liked that they weren’t just “Merry Christmas”, and instead have truly inspiring phrases– how apt for the season. Anyway, they worked out so well that I decided I was going to make some explicitly Christmassy ones for a personal Christmas party that is coming up.

I made three designs– Santa, Ho Ho Ho, and Holly Stripes. Each has random little bits of text in them too. After making these, I showed them to Andrew who insisted that they should be put into the shop, if only to show how cute they are. :]

So I decided to go with this happy little Santa design, and offer 5 phrases for customers to choose from! As I say in my Etsy listing, these aren’t your typical fortune cookies. For one, they actually feature proper grammar. For another, they don’t pretend to be able to tell your fortune. Instead, each little slip features simple bits of wisdom that challenge us to whine less, love more, and live better.

I’ve made these before and am just delighted that people are liking the idea. I like them not only as party favours, but imagine wedding favours! How kitschy in a good way! I love how you can actually pull the strips out like a real cookie, and then keep it afterwards on display to proudly show off your brilliant “fortune”– a good reminder of the important things.

So of course, I owe a debt to my lovely customer (who’s since received her entire stash, by the way– perhaps I will do a post on it soon), and of course the talented artist behind Things We Forget (TWF). The site is well worth visiting– think conventional (if forgotten) wisdom illustrated on post-it notes, which are then “left to their fates in public places”. TWF on Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook.

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