I had a fun challenge given to me a couple of weeks ago. A dear lady said she had been wanting to order cookies from me to support my Ukraine mission effort for TWO years and she finally had a very good reason. Her mother was turning 80 years old and she wanted to surprise her with a box of cookies that represented things in her life.....and a box for each of the 11 other dinner guests! How fun. :)
She chose a house cookie representing that her mom was a homemaker. Then she wanted a cross representing her faith. Next, a lighthouse because she was from Maine. Because of her love for birds, we added a hummingbird. And finally, a heart was included representing the love.
I had a lot of fun putting together this collection. I needed five cookies per box and twelve boxes.....so there were sixty cookies in all. I sailed through the decorating with no problem.
Then came the packaging. I had planned to use one of my all clear boxes to put all the cookies in on top of crinkle shred. I've done these a couple of other times.
For the Ukrainian women, I did some small boxes like this:
And then at Valentines Day, I did boxes like this:
Well as you can see.....the cookies in those boxes were fairly study and stable or small.
When I tried to stuff the first box with the lighthouse cookie, it broke. (Thankfully I'd made extras!) I suddenly realized that the bend-ability of these all clear boxes was not good for fragile cookies. :(
Suddenly I was in a frenzy to figure out how I was going to package the twelve sets without using anything I had planned. Oh my......I was a mess!
After praying about it and asking for God's help.......I remembered that I had some 10x7x2" boxes left from last year. Guess what? I had 13 left!!!!!! So I scrapped my old plan and worked to figure out how to make these boxes as stable as possible for the fragile cookies. I decided on lots of tissue paper underneath (2" deep boxes takes LOTS of tissue paper), but I didn't have that much tissue paper in one color to fill TWELVE boxes!
Oh......but then I remembered that I have lots and lots and lots of yellow tissue paper from Karen's Cookies. For those of you that order from her, you know that she wraps every item in a sheet of yellow tissue paper. The fact that I had so much yellow tissue paper in my house tells you how much I order from her! :o)
So........I set out to make it all work. It certainly wasn't what I had envisioned...........but it gave me a nice final product.......and the client was very very happy with them. And best of all.......after lots of prayers (and lots and lots and lots of bubble wrap and air bags!!!!), everything arrived in perfect condition.
After what seemed like a potential disaster.................everything turned out well.
I was so grateful for the answers to my prayers. :)