Friday, September 14, 2012

Korean Doljabi

A huge Korean tradition at a child's 1st birthday is the "doljabi".  This is where the child is presented with various objects that represent something ie. money = wealth, yarn/string = long life. It's said that whatever the child chooses will determine their future. 

Of course it's silly and superstitious. We don't believe in any of it but it's a fun little tradition that everyone in our family has participated in. It's a way to have all the guests gather and give their full attention to the birthday child. 
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The is an opportunity to have a raffle where guests predict which object (and therefore which profession/future) Mia will choose. They take a tag, write their name on the back and drop it in the appropriate can. After Mia participates in her doljabi, a "winner" will be picked at random from the chosen can and awarded a prize. 


So for this activity, I was originally thinking about using mason jars but I was at the dollar store and saw jumbo baby bottle piggy banks. I contemplated it for about 20 seconds. They were $4.50 each and a baby bottle is more for a baby shower than a 1st birthday.
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Next to the bottles were these piggybanks and they were only $1 each! As much as I love our Canadian money, something had to be done about this.

Right when I walked into Michael's there in front of me was pink camouflage scrapbook paper at Michael's on clearance for 39 cents a sheet so I picked up a few sheets, cut them to size and used double sided tape to wrap it around the cans:
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I should mention, before I did that, I spray painted the edges of the cans white because they were a light purple grey tint.

When making the front tags, I used my scallop edged circle paper punch. (The images are just Google images I found). Then I took my 1/8" single hole punch and punched holes on the top of each piece.
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I liked how it all turned out until I tried to insert one tag into a can....
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It didn't fit!! How silly of me to not do a test before punching a zillion tags!
So then... I had to manually trim each scalloped tag...what a pain but there's no point in creating waste. 
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Ok so now how was this all going to come together? 

I had this 12"x16" canvas that I picked up from the dollar store months ago but I needed to have it stand up on it's own on the table.  Coincidentally I came across an old backing of a picture frame that I kept for some reason even though the frame was long gone. 
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Even though it's a lot smaller than the canvas, I knew it would still work but before I did that, I needed to add some foam core to the back - you'll find out why soon enough!
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I stacked 3 layers of foam core and staple gunned it to the frame. 
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Then the backing got staple gunned to the frame and voila!
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Yes, the back is ugly but it's going to be against the wall so we'll just keep this between you and me.

I designed a sign in Publisher:
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I love the chevron pattern but felt there was too much going on and decided to simplify:
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After I wrapped the paper around the canvas, I hammered some nails into the canvas/foam core and then hung the tags:
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And there you have it!
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It's just a fun activity to get the guests involved and of course, everyone loves a chance to win something!

6 comments:

  1. Genius! I love how they look

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  2. Hi,
    Which font did you use for the board?

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  3. How fun! I love all of the colors and fonts. (And I would totally be trimming everything too) I had to google what this was this morning after watching a video of a friends little boy doing this on FB. Austin chose the ball. What did your daughter choose?

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