Tutorial: Baby Shower Favor : M&M gift bags

Hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving!! Mine was crazy, busy, fun, and filled with lots and lots of family...you know, the norm.  There are so many things I have to be thankful for this year...I am just immensely blessed!

I didn't get a chance to post a tutorial on one last item I made for the baby shower before the actual baby shower, so you get the tutorial after the baby shower.  I'll post pictures this week sometime on everything in action.

Initially I had this idea to put blue and brown M&M's in baby food jars and relabel them for the shower.  All of my friends are either pre or post baby food stages though, so baby food jars were hard to come by.  I know I can buy them, but I was looking for a resourceful way of doing the favors (I mean, isn't the shower about the Mommy and Daddy to be anyways?!), so I nixed the baby jar ideas.

The next best thing that was just as economical was making thank you bags with the M&M's.  The individual little bags you get at the craft store weren't any better than what I could make myself, so I went the homemade route for this too.  Here's the full tutorial!

1.  Get a giant bag of M&M's (I love the peanut ones...it fills the bags better) and separate the candies into the color groups that you want in baggies.  I initially just did blue and brown, but as you can see from the brown bag, they were quite lacking, so I mixed in orange (it IS a Gator baby after all) to do blue and orange thank you's as well.

2.  Next, I got the same number of cups as bags I planned on making and distributed my M&M's into these cups evenly.  I started with 5 per cup and worked from there.  My husband wants to know why I'm only OCD when it comes to my crafts and projects and not cleaning the house, doing the laundry, etc..  Um, because the fun factor in all of the chores is zero, and I'm purely motivated by fun factors.

3.  Ignore this cute, but pathetic looking face as he tries to nose your M&M's.  Chocolate and human food in general is not for you Kodi-man, sorry!

4.  Find label toppers that you like.  I took these cloud ones from Tart Workshop and edited them in Paint to say Thank you.  I only printed out the blue and brown ones.

5.  Cut your papers.  Remember to use your paper cutter instead of your scissors!!  Saves SO much time!

6.  Take a roll of Clearphane and cut it into strips wide enough to make baggies.  Error on the side of too much, you can easily go back and cut off the excess later.

7.  Using your labels as a guide, cut your strips again.  You want your strip to be slightly smaller than your labels.

8.  Fold your strip in half.

9.  Staple both sides of your strip to form your bag.

10.  Dump M&M's in.  Pat yourself on the back for this actually working.

11.  Take your label and hold it on top of your bag, making sure to line it up.

12.  Staple the sides, bottom, and top of your label.

So the finished product looks like this:

and this from the back (but not sideways...sorry, ran out of time to edit!) :

13.  Repeat a million more times.  I found it easiest to cut all of my labels, then cut all of my strips, then staple all of my bags.  Doing it one by one seemed to take a lot longer.

14.  Admire your pretty, economical,  Thank You bags!!

They went in a pretty bowl for the actual baby shower...this Tupperware container was just for transporting.  Stay tuned to see the entire baby shower all put together!

Happy Monday!

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