Tuesday Tutorials: 100th Post!!! Whoopie!

It's my 100th post! So excited! I wanted to share with you an idea that works great for party favors or a fun birthday gift and is quick and easy to do! I always like to have hard candies on hand for sucking on if need be and was trying to find a place to put mine and it dawned on me that I had this empty plastic Starbucks cup sitting on my window ledge and I thought, maybe I can use that. While out shopping on Saturday I wandered into a candy shoppe and lo and behold the idea I had had already been taken so I just had to buy one of these gorgeous cups!

Here they are for you to see:

The one on the left is from Bruttles Gourmet Candies and Treats & the one
on the far right is my Starbucks cup I decided to reuse. The tray is also from
Starbucks.

Taffy in the Bruttles cup and Jolly Ranchers in the Starbucks one.

So, this project is a reuse/recycle one. I took my Starbucks cup and washed it well with dish soap (the straw too), rinsed it and dried it completely. Once it was clean I just filled it with the candies as shown and voila! Instant gift or party favor! The tray was from my brother's last trip to Starbucks and I snatched it up thinking I might be able to use it. I think if you have some or even save a few they would make a great way of displaying party favors and people can take them off the trays as they leave and you will have them to use again for another function. So, it's quick, easy and affordable! Hope to see you all create some with your favorite candies!

Cheers!

Tuesday Tutorials: Decorating a notebook with gum wrappers...

That's right! Tuesday Tutorials are back in action! Late but nevertheless here. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a chewing gum addiction that I just can't seem to kick! Everytime I chewed a new piece of gum I wondered what I could do with the wrappers and started saving them to see what I could come up with...the gum wrapper decorated notebook was born!

I took the following materials and embellishments to create my recycled work of art:

All the materials...

• Composition Notebook
• Various sticker packs
• Paris Rubber Stamps
• Stamp pads
• Gum Wrappers (kept inside 5 Gum box)
• Contact Paper

Using a normal glue stick I began to glue the colorful gum wrappers down in a pattern, like so:

The notebook, front cover

The notebook, back cover...

See how pretty it looks already? After having covered both sides with the gum wrappers I embellished another type of gum wrapper with a Paris Eiffel Tower stamp I have using the black ink stamp pad. The paper is patterned from Orbit gum. The rest of the embellishments are stickers but you can use cut outs, print outs and any thing else you can get your hands on. Get creative and go your own way! The main thing about this project is that you are reusing wrappers so they don't go to the landfill!

Paris stamp on patterned gum wrapper paper...

Finished front cover....

Back cover shot...

Once you'ved finished emellishing the notebook as much as you want you can go ahead and cover it in contact paper so that the embellishments and gum wrappers remain neatly on and don't start to peel off. If you decide to make this project I would love to see what you come up with! Please link back to this post and let me know what you have made or place photos of your own creations on the wall on our Facebook page.

Tuesday Tutorial: Reusing Plastic Gum Containers

Just a short tutorial for today, been quite busy lately and had very little time to do much for today's post! About a year ago I bought some gum that came in a plastic container and when all the gum was gone I decided to keep the container to use it for something else. I'd been using it to tote around my rechargeable batteries (2 at a time) but it was looking a bit bland all white, so today I decided to decorate it.

For this project you will need an empty gum container:

I used an old ice breakers cubes gum container.

Also, some embellishments, glue, scissors and whatever else you might need:

I used embellishments in the form of cut-outs

from my PB Kids catalog

First, cut-out and collect the embellishments you wish to use. They can be anything from stickers to magazine cut-outs. Second, paste the cut-outs on the container using a decoupage glue or make your own with glue and water, apply with a paintbrush.

A few of my embellishments

I love the woodland theme that is so popular

at present!

Little flowers on the back...

Don't forget to brush over top after you've added all the embellishments you want to add. It should look gorgeous and a bit shiny! You can store any small things in it. I use this one for batteries but you can use it to store needles for sewing, loose change, even gum if you do not want to deal with all that paper stuff!

Cheers!