Christmas Craft - Handmade Cookie gift container!

Every Christmas one of the things I look forward to the most is baking.  Even though Christmas time is so busy and we're all running around going to parties, catching up with old friends and family, shopping and cooking, sometimes it's nice to slow down and bake!

Every year I'm a part of a Cookie Exchange with friends, where we each make many dozens one type of cookie.  Then we get a dozen of everyone else's cookie that's a part of the exchange.  It's fun because you're only baking one type of cookie, but end up with 4 or 5 types back, depending on how many people are in the exchange.  But this post isn't about Cookie Exchanges, it's about an idea for making a festive container to hold the cookies and give them as an edible gift!

Since I've been supplementing nursing with formula and solid foods I've had a lot of formula containers that I thought I could reuse for something.  At Christmas time I thought, why not use them to hold edible gifts like cookies or candies.  By using the container you can keep the cookies, etc. fresh and give them in a cute container that the person can keep.  So here's how I did it:

Step 1: Clean the empty formula container and rip off the label.  I left the sticky strip on the container that held the label on because it would help to hold on the Christmas paper in the later step.

Step 2: Cover the container, not including the top in white glue.

Step 3: Cut out a piece of Christmas wrapping paper to fit the tin.  Wrap the paper around the tin and make sure it sticks well to it and has the least amount of wrinkles as possible.  It's easier when you have better quality, thicker paper, because then you'll have less wrinkles.

Step 4: Optional -I painted a light coat of gold paint on top of the wrapping paper because the paper had a few wrinkles I wanted to minimize.

Step 5: Decorate the top with any Christmas-related crafty felt or "bling" or anything like that in Christmasy colours like red, green, gold or silver.  I chose to glue on some red and green stars, and "bling" that I picked up at the Dollar store.

Step 6: After waiting for everything that was glued on to dry and set, all you have to do is add some tissue or wax paper into the tin and put in your edible gift - cookies, chocolate, bark, etc.

And there you have it!  A nice handmade container to display the great baking you did and that is part of the gift!  You upcycled a container that would have ended up in the garbage and made it cute and useful.  Merry Christmas!!