Ringing in the New Year for my family is generally a small, casual affair and doesn’t usually get a whole lot of attention when it comes to party décor. Although, this year, our celebration will have a little more fancy added to it thanks to some inspiration during my last shopping trip.

Last time I was out at the Dollar Tree I spotted these cute little individual serving-sized bottled of Sparkling Red Grape Juice that resembled a fancy wine bottle and thought it would be perfect to dress them up a bit to make our celebration at home feel a little more special for my kids.

I’ve put together some other quick and easy ideas for your holiday celebrating! These ideas work for a New Year’s Eve celebration, but they are also suitable for any celebration whether it be a birthday, anniversary or wedding. Of course, each of these ideas uses some of my favorite Fiskars tools in very simple ways – simple because I want you to spend all your time celebrating this holiday, not slaving over your decorations.

It’s quite traditional to wish everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise in the coming year and I wanted to put my own spin on wishing my family well by gifting them with words of motivation and affirmation inside of a paper fortune cookie party favor.

They are quite simple to make and only need a few supplies.

First decide upon your ‘fortunes’ and print them in your word processing program. You’ll want your phrases to stretch no longer than 4.5” long and no more than a few typed lines tall. You can google ‘fortune cookie sayings’ if you need help with wording your fortune.

Then, you’ll gather patterned papers and cut a 4.5” circle for each fortune using the Ultra ShapeXpress along with the smallest circle from the Super-Sized Circle Set.

Gently fold circle in half, creasing ONLY 1” in the middle. Open circle and add a glue dot approximately ¼” away from the crease on both sides of the crease. Then pinch the circle in half in the opposite direction of the crease, but DO NOT crease.

Instead, grab the opposing points with your thumb and middle finger, while pushing inward on the crease with your pointer finger. Once the crease starts caving move your pointer finger and tuck the thumb and pointer finger in between the paper to pinch the glue dots together. Slide fortune into cookie. Once you get the hang of this process you can tuck the fortune in the cookie before collapsing the paper to form the cookie shape.

There are many other small ways in which you can put a little fun and sparkle into the occasion. For this next idea, I’ve just customized a standard bag of plain white confetti by adding small pops of color and sparkle to the mix. This is done with just a little hand exercise squeezing the ¼” hand-held circle punch! The punch collects all the little confetti dots as you punch controlling the mess as you go. You’ll be surprise at what a small amount you’ll need to punch to breathe life into the plain white confetti. (Pssst…if you can’t find plain confetti at your discount store, then raid the 2-hole and 3-hole punches at the office. They work beautifully!)

Then, to ‘ring in the new year’, I added jingle bells as a functional embellishment just tied around the top of the tube.

To decorate the ‘fancy’ kid-friendly wine bottles, I simply covered the labels by layering patterned paper, with cardstock and sparkle paper, then finished it off with some ribbons. To add a little more dimension and visual interest, I ran the turquoise cardstock through the paper crimper first. The only thing you’ll have to remember when doing this is to use a stronger adhesive when adhering the crimped paper.

A party wouldn’t be a party without and invitation, now would it!? These invitations were made super simple by using the Ultra ShapeXpress along with the Uppercase Letter ShapeTemplate Set. Cutting the letters with a template ensures that each one is exactly the same and saves tons of time if you are duplicating the design over and over.

Lastly, since it’s a party celebrating the arrival of a new year, you’ll want to play off the ‘2012’ in your décor as much as possible. A ’12 sticker placed on cardstock, then punched using a squeeze punch makes the perfect little embellishment to hang from the neck of a wine bottle, the stem of your wine glass or even as a topper on your tube of confetti.

However it is that you decide to celebrate the New Year, just know that the Fiskars family wishes you a very safe, happy, and memorable celebration!