Golden Ticket Love Coupons
by Kat Richter

Celebrate your inner child by surprising your sweetheart with their very own Golden Ticket love coupon! Inspired by Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, our Golden Tickets are based on those sent out by Willy Wonka, the eccentric chocolatier who decided to award five lucky children a private tour of his factory. Use our Golden Ticket template, taken from the 2005 film starring Johnny Depp, to design your own, slightly more adult version.

You will need:

• One bar of chocolate (we recommend Lindt, Godiva or Ghirardelli as opposed to Hershey's. If you’re going through the trouble of creating your own Golden Ticket, you might as well splurge for the good stuff!)
• A piece of single-sheet metallic, gold foil labels such as the Full Sheet Gold Foil Labels available at labeloutfitters.com.* (Don’t bother with Office Depot or Staples. They only sell multi-label sheets for printing smaller projects such as return address labels.)
• Our Golden Ticket PDF template
• Scissors
• One yard of gold ribbon
• And little bit of romantic creativity!

*For this project, we used the 8-1/2" x 11" Gold Metallic Foil Laser ONLY Labels made by Label Outfitters and available at Amazon.com. They cost $12.97 for a packet of 20 full-sheet labels, which means you can print up to 60 Golden Tickets; you’ll be set for the rest of your life! Unfortunately, the 20-sheet packets aren’t always in stock and the 100-sheet packets will run you close to $40. One alternative is to use Label Outfitter’s 8-1/2” x 5-1/2” labels, which cost $10.97 for a pack of 20 sheets (or 40 labels). With these you'll have one ticket on the sheet with a line running through it (the middle one) but the other two will be fine.

Our PDF contains three complete tickets, designed to fit onto a single page, so you can try out a few different options and see which you like. Just fill out the light blue form fields, load your printer with a sheet of the metallic gold paper and then print. To give your ticket that realistic Golden Ticket feel, peel a blank foil label and lay it on your table sticky side up. Then peel your printed label from the backing, carefully lay it on top of the other label (sticky side to sticky side) and cut out along the dotted lines. An easier option is to leave the printed label attached to the white backing paper, then cut it out and use as is. Simple but not as elegant. Whichever you choose, be sure to order the correct kind of paper for your printer: some are made specifically for inkjets while some are for laser printers (this is kind of important).

One of our readers posted her completed Golden Ticket on Pinterest. She printed out several customized tickets, stashed them inside one of those gigantic Hershey's bars and then resealed the bar before presenting it to her boyfriend for their one year anniversary. What a great idea!

You can either open the outer box/wrapper and lay your Golden Ticket on top of the foil wrapping, or cut a small incision in the wrapping so that you can slide the Golden Ticket inside the foil. As Wonka purists, we prefer it inside the foil, but you'll be disguising your handiwork with a decorative bow so you won't ruin the surprise either way. Both options require a steady hand and a little dab of glue to get things looking pristine again. You can go with a simple “birthday present” bow made by crisscrossing the ribbon around the chocolate bar, or a more decorative wrapping job in which you loop the ribbon around two corners of the bar before tying a bow in the upper left hand corner.

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