I wanted everything for my son’s first birthday to be totally unique so I designed these party favors all on my own. It took some time and effort, but as one of my good friends always says, it was a “labor of love!”
I went onto google and searched “the very hungry caterpillar” in the image search. I found the picture of the caterpillar crawling on the dirt with the sun setting. I copied and pasted that into Microsoft word (yes, I did all of this using word lol) and sized it to the size I needed. I wanted my paper to be 4.8 inches long and a total of 3.4 inches tall. I say total because this is the front of the party favor label, the paper is folded over and on the back there is a picture of the famous dots from the book. So this picture should actually be 1.7 inches high. You can crop it or re size it if you need to by going to the “format” option on your toolbar in windows. I found the “dots” by searching “the very hungry caterpillar dots” and several images popped up on the google search. Just copy and paste the picture into word and crop it to the size you need it. Adjust your text wrapping on both images to “behind text” and this will allow you to move the images wherever you need on your layout. Now line the pictures up and sit the dots picture right on top of the other picture. Press “CTRL” and select both pictures with the mouse while holding down that key. Then go to “group” in the format toolbar and select “group” This will make it so these two pictures become one and you can move them around your page as you need to. Now, as for the words, this is a bit more time consuming but being the perfectionist that I am, and always having my mind set on things being just the way I want them, I went for it! I searched “Eric Carle Alphabet” and Copied and pasted this picture into the paint program. I then cropped each individual letter and saved each letter. I did this for two separate sets of alphabets to give variety. I then opened another Paint program and copied and pasted each of the letters onto this page for the words that I needed. So, for example, the word “Thanks” I coppied and pasted the letter “T” and then pasted the letter “H” and lined it up next to the “T” and then pasted the letter “A” and lined it up next to the “H” and so on and so on for each of the letters in that word. I always saved these pictures of the words as well. Though this may seem like a lot of work, it actually came in handy for several other projects that I made for my son’s party. Make sure to open a new file for each letter or word you are making after you have saved it because if you save the picture and then just erase it and start something new, when you go to save that image, it will erase you previous image that you saved. Always save and then click “New”. So once I had all the words I needed for my message. I copied and pasted them into word and arranged them as I wanted them to be arranged. Then I grouped them all together and formatted it as “in front of text” so I could overlap the words onto my caterpillar and sun picture. I was able to fit four of these onto a page by changing the page orientation to “landscape” and printed the labels, using my home printer, onto white cardstock. I printed them out and cut them using my paper cutter. I folded them in half and folded them over the bags which I purchased at Micheal’s Craft store. If you don’t want to purchase these bags, you could use sandwich baggies but they do tend to get very wrinkly looking, I tried this at first because I am the ultimate cheap-o. However, the bags that I bought at Michael’s are nice and stiff and were very cheap actually. Keep in mind that if you decide to use sandwich baggies, the dimensions of your labels might be different. Once I folded the label over the top of the bag, I lined it up and stapled it twice along the very bottom of the label. If you are putting things into the bag that stick up past the bottom of the label, remember to not staple the label to the item inside the bag, staple to the left or right of it.
Stay tuned for instructions on how to make the items inside the party favor bags!
chantillycreations 