How to Wrap Beer as a Gift in the Shape of a Nutcracker

Another year…another gift of beer!  Yep, in carrying on the tradition we are building another beer gift present for my sister!

I had this idea last year so we used it for this year so here is how we did it.

Our first step was figuring out what pieces we needed structurally to build it.

Below is the body (beer box), pelvis (sparkling ice box), platform between then that holds the arms (where the beer is).

So we started building each box and wrapping all the pieces in black wrapping paper to give us a base color to add embellishments too. We added structural elements like a criss cross carboard in the middle of the beer box to add some support. Stuffed inside with brown packing paper, then put beer inside. The hip area we used a sturdy sparkling ICE box and put 4 cans in there. Building in between strong cardboard bases to hold each section.

It occurred to me that all the pieces would not stay ‘together’ just with tape so we needed some sort of support beam that went down through the whole thing and I had recently watched the British Baking show and saw they put dowels in their 3 and 4 tier cakes for support. So i had a few dowels on hand and was able to drill holes in the cardboard we already had so we could stick the dowels into the legs, through the body, and up into the head area. So here are some inside pics of the legs, and how we embellished the boots with gold sharpie to make the laces and the cardboard bottoms of his feet made of a hard thick cardboard we thankfully kept from a recent purchase!

Next we built the body, the arms, and head.  This involved piecing together paper cutouts, fabric for the cape, embellishing the body with gift wrap bows, cut paper all to form the shape of what we were going for.  We did intend on making a mechanism to make the mouth move but at this point we had been working on this for at least a month and we were running out of time LOL