Paper Bunny Basket Favors for Easter
These adorable bunny baskets are made from cardstock and can be filled with small candies for a fun Easter favor!
One of my earliest Easter memories is going over to my Grandma’s house and having a fancy dinner in her dining room (well, actually the kids’ table was in the family room). She had made the cutest little paper basket favors with a bunny on the front and filled them with jelly beans maybe? (It could have been dinner mints and peanuts, though, as that was another favorite addition to her holiday tables.)
I was so enamored with these little paper bunny “baskets” that I took one home to duplicate it and sell it at my school store a couple weeks later (I was probably in 2nd grade?). I filled them with M&Ms and one boy kept coming back to buy more refills…but he only wanted the candy, which was so disappointing to me since I had worked so hard on the bunny baskets. Haha, funny memory.
In honor of my grandma’s adorable Easter favors, I made my own this year with a slightly updated design, doing my best to recall what hers were like decades ago. These were perfect table favors when I hosted my own Easter dinner for family and brought back fond memories of my sweet, crafty grandma (whom I get my crafty gene from).
Get the simple tutorial below to make your own bunny box/basket favors!
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What you need to make paper bunny basket Easter favors
- Cricut machine and a fine-point blade
- LightGrip cutting mat (or a StandardGrip mat would also work)
- Cricut scoring stylus
- brayer tool, optional but I always use it when cutting anything on my Cricut
- cardstock: I used kraft colored cardstock for the baskets and cream, pink, and black for the bunny faces
- Cricut tweezers or other crafting tweezers
- this paper crafting glue (my favorite!)
- foam adhesive dots for dimension
- white or colored pom poms
- hot glue
- paper shred (I found mine at Michaels in their Easter stuff) or Easter grass
- Easter candy, small toys, or anything else you want to fill the baskets with
How to make paper Easter basket favors
Customize the Design Space project (optional)
Open my Easter Bunny Favor Boxes project in Cricut Design Space. There are two different bunny faces, a box template, and a skinny strip that forms the basket handle.
I designed the faces with an extra layer for scoring (it’s already attached to the base layer). This way, your machine will score the eyes, nose/mouth, cheek circles, and ears so you know exactly where to glue them. This is one of my favorite tricks for perfectly-assembled paper crafts!
My finished boxes measure 2.25″ which was a pretty good size to fit 4 or 5 mini candy bars in. You may feel this is too large, but keep in mind that if you resize the pieces smaller (you’ll want to highlight everything on the Design Space Canvas and drag the bounding box to make them smaller), the bunny faces might become too small to cut well. If you have to have smaller boxes (say you’re filling them with jelly beans or a small unwrapped candy), then I’d skip these bunny faces and choose a simple image, like a bunny silhouette, to attach instead.
Score & cut cardstock pieces
Once you’ve finished making any edits (optional), click Make.
Choose On Mat, For any material and Confirm.
On the Prepare screen, change the number of project copies to match how many favors you will need (each project makes two boxes). Rearrange pieces, if needed, to maximize the cardstock space.
You can fit two boxes and their handles on a single mat, so you’ll want to click on one of the boxes and then the three dots next to it, select Move object, and move it to another mat (see image below).
You could fit more than two handles here, so if you’re cutting multiple boxes at once, you can keep more handles on the same mat to save even more space if you want. It’ll be tight, but you can fit up to 8 of the handle pieces on a mat with two boxes. Just be sure no pieces overlap. Then the rest of the mats will only have boxes so you can save a larger cardstock scrap for a future project–maybe this is a superfluous explanation, but this is how my thrifty brain works!
When cutting my bunny face, I was using small scraps, so I wanted to save time and cut everything on the same mat. If you’re using the mobile Design Space app, you can use SnapMat (a handy feature that allows you to visualize and move pieces around to perfectly fit whatever material you’ve placed on your cutting mat), but I just eyeball the positioning when I’m on desktop. I simply moved all face pieces to one mat, paid attention to where I needed to put my cardstock on the cutting mat, and cut them all at once. This is completely optional.
Once everything is arranged, click Continue.
Set your base material to Medium Cardstock (or whatever material you’re cutting).
Load a scoring stylus in Clamp A and a fine-point blade in Clamp B. Load your cutting mat with cardstock (I use a brayer tool to press it down firmly) and load into your machine. Follow the Design Space prompts to score and cut your project.
When finished, remove the mat from the machine. Then remove the pieces from the mat by flipping it upside down and peeling the mat away from the cardstock (this way avoids curling or bending your material). You can leave the small face pieces on the mat for now and remove them with tweezers as you assemble the faces if you want (these pieces are tiny and easily disappear on a messy craft table–which mine usually is!).
Assemble bunny faces
It’s a little hard to see on my cream-colored bunny, but there should be faint score lines where you’ll glue the face pieces.
Using tweezers to hold the tiny pieces, apply a small amount of glue (the fine tip of this glue is why it’s my favorite!) and adhere to the bunny base piece.*
*Note: if for some reason you’re struggling to do this, you could always draw the faces on with a marker!
Assemble box/basket
Fold the box template on the score lines and glue the sides together (the flaps should be glued to the inside of the box).
Apply a small amount of glue to each end of the handle piece (do one at a time) and adhere to two opposite sides of the box to turn it into a basket. (Again, glue these on the inside of the box.)
Attach bunny face
Position the bunny face over the front of a basket to see where it will sit. Then apply foam adhesive dots to the back of the bunny face and adhere carefully to the basket (squeeze the foam dots well so they stick, but don’t crush the box or bunny face).
Glue on pom pom tail
Hot glue a pom pom onto the back of the bunny basket for a cute tail!
Fill baskets with filler and candy
And you’re all done! Fill baskets with paper shred or Easter grass, then add candy, small toys, or anything else you’d like to gift. Such a cute Easter favor that kids and adults will both enjoy!
Isn’t that pom pom tail on the back the cutest detail?! I love how these boxes turned out!
DIY Paper Bunny Easter Basket Favors
I hope you are inspired to make your own little Easter basket favors for your own Easter celebrations! These were so nostalgic to me and I absolutely loved making them and sharing them with my family.
I hope you have a happy Easter! He is risen!
Don’t forget to pin and save for later!
