Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Birthday Party Goody Bags Using Paper Lunchbags



Goody Bags Assembled and Ready for the Party



My older daughter recently celebrated her 7th birthday.  For the goody bags for her party, I was very inspired by designs I saw in the 2011 Cricut Holidays magazine:
This magazine

This issue contained several designs for using plain brown paper lunchbags and using them as holiday-themed goody bags.  I basically just took the instructions for one of the designs and adapted the materials to fit a girl's birthday party theme.  I used my Cricut Expression with 12x24 mat, Elegant Edges and Mini Monograms cartridges, Gypsy, Cricut cardstock, American Girl paper pack and butterfly/bee sticker embellishments, pink ribbon, Xyron sticker maker, hole punch, and foam adhesives.  Fortunately (and this is rare for me), I had every bit of these supplies already on hand.
Other supplies that I used.  The coffee is a "supply".




First, I used the Elegant Edges and cut Book-Shift-<Swirl1> at 5-1/2" on plain cardstock.  After folding the top edge of each bag down about 3", I used the decorative edge of this cut to trace the shape onto the edge of the bags.  I then trimmed the bags along my trace-line to create a decorative edge.  Yes, I know my hands are ugly; try to look at the bag.


Next, I used some striped paper from the American Girl paper pack, and used the Gypsy to set up the mat to cut 12 3-1/2" circles.  I probably used Mini Monograms, but use whichever cartridge you already have that has a circle shape on it.  Since the paper size is 12x12, I just put 2 sheets on the mat at the same time, so that I could cut out all 12 circles at once.

Next, I used white Cricut cardstock, in a 12x24 size.  I used the Gypsy and Elegant Edges cartridge to set up the mat to fit 6 of the Frame-Shift-<Swirl1> at 4-1/2".  Since I could only fit 6 frames on the mat, I had to cut this mat twice to get all 12 that I needed for the goody bags.

For the circle shapes in the center, I decided to use 4 different paper designs, so that the bags would not all be exactly the same.  To add some stability, I used the Shadow feature of my circle cuts to cut coordinating shades of plain cardstock.  They were all done at 2-1/4".  Since I made 12 bags with 4 different paper patterns, I needed 3 circles of each paper/color.  So I positioned the circles on the Gypsy mat in such a way that I could put the paper or cardstock on my mat in quadrants.  I pre-trimmed the papers into 6x12 sizes and positioned it on the mat as shown in the photos.  Then I only needed to cut the mat once to get all 12 circles.
My Cricut Expression with the base cardstock
My Cricut Expression with the patterned papers


Once all of my cuts were completed, I ran all the shapes through my Xyron EXCEPT for the colored cardstock circles.  Once my shapes were all stickers, I adhered each small patterned circle onto a coordinating cardstock circle.  To the paper bag, I adhered the striped circles first, followed by the white cardstock frame.  Finally, I used double-sided foam tape to adhere the smaller circle to the center of the bag.



I then attached the sticker butterfly/bee embellishments to the center of each circle.

Once that process was complete for all 12 bags, I stuffed each one with confetti paper filler and the goodies.  I then used a single hole punch to make 2 holes at the top of the bag, making sure to go through the flap and the top of the bag itself.  I used pink ribbon to tie the bags closed.  These bags were a big hit at the party, and were a nice, inexpensive (given that I already had these supplies on hand...probably left-over from previous projects) goody bag option that is a little different from the norm.

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