A Housewarming Gift

Two weeks ago, I posted a tutorial on napkin rings that coordinated with napkins I made. Now I can show you all the rest of the gift those were a part of.

This is an It’s A Wonderful Life-inspired housewarming gift for friends/coworkers who recently moved into a new house.

It’s not all home-made (if only I knew how to make wine, I’d likely be too sloshed to sew…), but in addition to the napkins and napkin rings, I made the fabric box/tray and tags for the bread, salt, and wine.

The container

I stumbled across this hostess gift box pattern on Sew Mama Sew a while back. I’ve seen similar boxes, and they’re quite simple, so I took a shot.

Mine is obviously much larger—approximately 11″ square with 4″ tall sides. Aside from changing the dimensions and tacking down the corners, I didn’t modify the construction at all.

I also found this awesome video that shows the same basic construction technique, except with two layers of interfacing and completely sewn-down corners that makes more of a rounded shape.

Sewing in a Straight Line by Brett Bara – How to Sew a Round Bowl with Straight Lines Only from Rarebit Productions on Vimeo.

With the specified construction at the size I made—even with heavy-duty interfacing—the sides would not stand up. They just flopped around and sagged. Stiffy Fabric Stiffener came to my rescue, or tried, at least. It definitely adds stiffness and makes the box a little more box-like. I probably should have used multiple coats, but ran out of time.

Tags

To label the items à la It’s A Wonderful Life, I whipped up some tags in Illustrator and printed them on the colorfast printer fabric that I have left over from other projects. (Tutorial here.) After backing them with more fabric and adding ribbon ties, they were the perfect complement to the typographical fabric from Pure that I used as the lining of the box and the napkins.

Type geekery: in case anyone is wondering what font Sweetwater used for the typographical prints, it is Century Gothic (or another clone of Twentieth Century), a typeface designed in the late 1930s and digitized in the early 1990s.

And that’s that: a housewarming gift that’s a mix of edible and either useful or presumably re-giftable, and it was fun to make!