Backpack! Backpack! Dora Themed Gift Wrap

Over the past year, I have been lucky to meet some very lovely ladies and their adorable children through our playgroup.  I had been in other mommy groups and classes and haven’t really clicked with anyone so I am thankful to have found these ladies and get to spend time with them on a weekly basis.  Our friendship has grown outside of the regularly scheduled playgroup now and I am so excited that we have now started to be invited to some of the kids birthday parties.

The first party we have been invited to was a Dora themed party so I wanted to find the perfect gift.  There is a lot of cheap Dora themed stuff out there so I ended up settling on a cute Disney princess dress and tea party set.  I decided I could make it Dora themed through the wrapping, so I bought a roll of purple wrapping paper and set to work!

Part 1 – “Backpack” wrapping

This idea came from purple paper bag backpack themed treat bags I have seen on the internet.  The gift I bought was a nice rectangular shape so I decided to wrap it and make it look like backpack.  I simply started by wrapping the gift as normal with purple paper.  The pockets, top flap and back straps were just folded out of the same gift wrap and taped on.  The finishing touch was Backpack’s face which I found on the internet and printed on my home computer.  It was cut out and attached with double sided tape.

The pockets on the backpack were stuffed with Dora fruit snacks and a Dora themed activity book I found from the dollar store.  When I showed the final backpack to my 3 year old, his first questions was “where’s Map?”  With all the other stuff I had for the pockets I didn’t even think to add him, but I am so glad my 3 year old suggested it!  To make Map, all I did was print the same face I used for backpack and rolled up the sheet of paper.

Part 2 – Helium Balloon Star

If you have been “lucky” enough to have seen an episode of Dora, you have probably seen the happy faced stars floating around.  When looking for Dora gift ideas on the internet I came across pictures of these stars and they reminded me of the star shaped helium balloons I have seen at Dollar Tree.  I know how much my 3 year old loves helium balloons so I thought this would be a nice little addition to the gift.  Unfortunately my Dollar Tree was out of the big star shaped balloons so my idea to have stars floating above backpack had to be modified to be a small star shaped balloon coming out of Backpack’s pocket.

The balloons are cute on their own, but I figured they could use an extra Dora touch by adding faces to them.  To do this, I simply painted eyes on in whiteout and used a sharpie to draw in the mouth and eyeballs.  And then I found cute “Happy Birthday” helium balloon with Dora on it at Dollarama so I was still able to have a balloon floating above backpack!

I love the way it turned out and was so excited to give it to the birthday girl.  She didn’t even notice the gift inside wasn’t Dora related, and her mom tells me she was asking for a princess dress anyway, so it ended up being a perfect gift all around.

Now my problem will be to come up with something equally awesome for the next party!  I think I may have set the expectations a little high.