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! :D 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!