Life: Designed: 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.

Life Designed

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.

Life Designed

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:

Life Designed

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.

Life Designed

I liked how it all turned out until I tried to insert one tag into a can....

Life Designed

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.

Life Designed

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.

Life Designed

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!