Making Spring Party Favors

Make Flower-Shaped Sugar Cookies

• Treat guests to flower-shaped sugar cookies that they can enjoy long after your spring party. Pull out your favorite rolled sugar-cookie recipe, and make enough cookie dough to provide three to four cookies per guest. After rolling out the cookie dough, press flower-shaped cookie cutters (such as tulips, sunflowers and daisies) into the dough. Then bake your springlike sugar cookies according to your recipe instructions.
  
  After your cookies have baked and sufficiently cooled, ice them with pastel-colored frosting that you can make by adding one or two tiny drops of food coloring to white frosting. For example, to make pink frosting for a dozen cookies, place a drop of red food coloring into a small bowl filled with about 3 tbsp. of white frosting.
  
  For a little variation, use a pastry coupler, pastry bag and various decorating tips to make frosting designs on your cookies. Then top off your cookies with pastel-colored sprinkles in coordinating colors. Lastly, wrap up several cookies for each guest in cellophane and tie with a matching pastel ribbon.
  
  

Make Springtime Flip-Flops

• Obtain your guests' shoe sizes a few weeks before the party. Then run out to your local discount store to purchase plain flip-flops in your guests' sizes, one pair for each guest. Then customize your springtime flip-flops for guests by using hot glue to secure flowers, beads, trim, rickrack and other embellishments to the tops of each pair of flip-flops. Make each pair of flip-flops a little different to account for guests' individual personalities and styles.
  
  

Design Spring Gardening Kits

• Design a springtime gardening kit for each guest to use in his or her own garden following your party. Make a trip to your local nursery to purchase small clay pots, small gardening tools like mini-shovels and claws, various flower and vegetable seed packets that can grow in your climate/soil conditions, and a large bag of potting soil.
  
  Fill up a small plastic bag with potting soil for each guest and tie it shut with a pastel ribbon. Place a potting soil baggie in the bottom of each clay pot. Then stack flower and vegetable seed packets on top of the baggie, followed by a small gardening tool. Customize each gardening kit by using a calligraphy and/or paint pen to write guests' names on their clay pots. Further embellish your clay pots by using hot glue to secure beads, springtime decals, trim, rickrack or felt cut-outs to pot surfaces.