DIY Paper Party Favors with a Message
How To: Curled Up Quotes Decorate Your Celebration with Fun
Oct 16, 2008
Send a note or share a sentiment with your guests in a decorative way. By choosing fun, romantic, or poignant quotations on strips of paper and rolling them into a pleasing curl you can send your guests a festive message or reinforce the theme of your party and have your friends passing notes all night long.
Supplies:
- Decorative paper
- Printer
- Paper cutter
- Pen
Method:
- Choose what you want to say and type your quotations, passages, or messages in a fitting font.
- Format the page so that the lines are fairly close together and each line is centered on the page.
- Print out your pages of quotes and cut paper into strips– one for each quote removing enough blank space to keep the strips delicate, but not so much as to crowd the text.
- Hold the strip of paper firmly to the body of a pen and turn the paper around the pen tightly until the strip is completely rolled up. Release the paper strip and you’ve got your curl.
If you’ve got a pen that’s thicker on one end and thinner on the other, or two pens of different thickness, you can use that differential to make your curl more graceful. Use the thinner pen to make the inner part of the curl and the thicker part to make the outer part of the curl.
Choose Your Words
That’s the basic method and once you’ve got the idea, make this project your own. Think about the occasion and your audience to determine what you want to say.
For a wedding use quotes from romantic poems. On Halloween, choose notable quotes from your favorite horror flicks. For a Christmas event, lift lines from favorite carols. You could create your own candy heart messages for a Valentine's Day party.
Depending on your crowd, be sweet, racy, funny, or clever. Use Shakespearean quotes for a classical mood or television catch-phrases for a fun mood.
Stumped? Tap into your cultural background or someone else’s. Create fortunes for your guests for an Asian-themed dinner party. Love is a tradition in every culture. Explore your ethnicity’s love lore for references your can use. Or look up a fitting phrase in many different languages for an international flavor.
Pretty Paper
Once you know what you want to say, figure out how you want it to look. Check scrapbooking and craft stores for interesting papers that are beautiful, fit your theme, but don’t obscure the words that you’re going to print on them. You want a paper that’s going to print well and roll well.
You want paper that will fit in your printer, keep its shape, but be flexible enough to roll into a curl. Cardstock and regular printing paper work well. Velum tends not to print clearly and uncurls easily.
You may want to do a test before you buy a bunch of paper to make sure the kind you choose is good for your project.
Fantastic Fonts
Decide how big the font should be. There are a couple of things to think about here: The curls tend to look nice in a variety of widths — they don’t have to be uniform. You can have varying widths depending on how many lines the message runs, but in general, you don’t want them to be more than an inch wide and thin ones have a pleasingly delicate look.
Consider the audience. If your guests are of a certain age, adjust the font size so they can read the messages.
Display your paper curls in a bowl or in conversation areas where guests will discover them and receive your message of festivity and fun.
