Earlier this month, my baby sister graduated from high school and it’s still blowing my mind… she’s about to go off to college like an adult- so weird, I still see her as a snotty little kid, hah. Anyhow, I wanted to sort of theme the gift my boyfriend and I got her on the college, (UT Austin, woo, Hook em’!) she’ll be attending in the fall. The first thing I made was some hand painted wrapping paper recycling the brown packing paper from some packages I had recently received.

Their colors are burnt orange and white, so I used orange paint and painted a sort of fish scale/wave design. After it dried, I used this tutorial to make a bow.

Here is everything all done! For her gift, we got her an orange Camelbak and I painted a longhorn on it in white. Our original plan was to completely fill that bottle up with one hundred $1 bills, but then I got a better idea. A money lei.

Here it is all wrapped up! Now on to the leis~

I was looking around online for different kind of leis that people would get for graduation, and soon I came across the money lei. How perfect, after seeing these I immediately decided that would be a way better way to give her the $100 that was originally going to be put in the bottle. I soon ended up convincing my mom and sister to give her money leis as well, with me making them of course. I wanted her to be completely swamped with these things. I decided to make 4 $50 leis so she could receive one from my mom, my sister, my boyfriend and myself. The tutorial I used used one hundred $1 bills, so I took colored paper(blue and yellow – her high school colors) cut them to the size of a dollar, folded them up and made 50 spacers for each lei. That ended up actually being way too many. The first lei I made alternated: dollar, blue, dollar, yellow, etc. and it ended up being very, very long, so I started making different configurations for each lei afterwards. For example, one was ten $1 bills, three blue, ten $1 bills, three yellow, etc. Also, instead of taping the dollars, I used two paper clips per dollar to connect each side of the bill. After hours of folding and assembling these things, I was finally done!

So many $1 bills all folded up and ready to be assembled.

Here’s an in progress shot.

And here she is after graduation! Completely swamped, just as planned! All in all, I’m completely happy with how these turned out and how unique the leis ended up being; I was really surprised to see she was the only one that received anything like that!

Congratulations class of 2012!