After yesterday’s drive through the neighborhood, we were inspired to make these gift bags with printed holiday lights on them. We used brown paper lunch bags, and we found that they are the perfect size for holding small mason jars of homemade peppermint hot cocoa mix!
First, cut a potato into the shape of a light bulb for your string of lights. Use washable paint to stamp your designs onto the bags.
Stamp using one color at a time. It works best if you rinse off the potato in-between color changes.
When the paint is completely dry, outline the lights with a black marker and add swirls of “wire” to make up the string of lights. We loved swirling the wire all around in our designs!
Wrap up your gifts, and finish with a bow!
Very cute idea. Love it 🙂
LOVE it!
So cute! You guys really are an inspiration. I think the cocoa is a fantastic gift idea and the bags are adorable.
So cute! I love it!
very very cute!
These are adorable!
I just love these! I never come out of my reader to comment, but these are too cute "not" to comment on.
Wheres Marks comment?? lol. I LOVE the look of this Valerie! Your awesome.
Your gifts have the cutest wrappings. I would hate to open them!
So festive!
So cute!! Great idea.
Beautiful! We made our own gift wrap lately too. We have some brown bags like that in the craft cabinet. We'll have to do some potato stamps with them. Great idea for small gifts.
We have done this, it is allot of fun and they look really cute.
i've always wanted to try potato stamps. 😀
Love it! I'll add this one to my list.
Very cute. You keep giving me ideas for the Holidays. Thanks.
!!! So cute!!!
I love this idea! I was wondering where you were going with the seed shaped colored stamps! 🙂
Dear Valerie,
I sincerely hope that was not the last potato.
I am Irish, after all and I expect that to be in my stocking. Talk about FRUGAL!
Love,
Mark
That is ADORABLE! You are amazing Val. Seriously!
Love Val
What a great idea.
Hi Valerie
Who wouldn't love to recive such a fun and festive gift bag. They are perfect for Christmas.
Oh my gosh, how cute! What a great idea!
too cute!
super cute idea! how can I email you. I got your email addy off of your profile and sent you something ut it didn't go through? I just had a question for you!
Perfect and so creative and CHeap 🙂
I love how it looks and it also looks like fun too.
Just as cute as a button! Thank you for continually sharing your frugal family fun ideas! Such an inspiration…
You've done it again! Perfectly cute, frugal and re-purposed wrapping paper. Absolutely fab. 🙂
I love this and your snowflake wrapping, too. BTW, I just ordered your ravioli and noodle sets from etsy! 🙂
The bags turned out fantastic! The bold lines of the black marker made such a difference. I am going to make that cocoa for me! Thanks for entering the Barefoot Books giveaway and good luck!
i really like the way that the bags turned out. i bet it would look cute to outline in black any shape that was stamped on the bag!!
I am so behind on reading I just wanted to tell you this is so cute. I wondered where you were going in the beginning. It ended up so cute.
I am going to try to make the cereal box mini boxes have this pattern on it for gift boxes! I'll link to you if I get it right. 🙂
Love Val
@ Val in the Rose Garden — Oh, I hope they turn out nicely for you! Can't wait to see, and thanks so much for the link! 🙂
Oh my more fabulousness! You are so creative and everything always turns out so cute. Do you EVER have any misses? Everything always looks so great!
@ Katie — Hahahaa! Mark was joking one day about doing regular "guest" posts with behind the Frugal Family Fun Blog scenes. I totally think he should do it! I would say for every decent project, we have about 5 not so great ones. But we ALWAYS have fun, and I suppose that's what matters. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. 😉
See, what is amazing to me is that you have kept this up for so long. I have been in that mode for the last 4 months or so… and for every craft that goes bad, one gets enough of an ok to go to a post. But I couldn't imagine doing this for a year. Although… who knows. The craftiness really does feed on itself. 🙂
That is so cute!
Thank you for this wonderful idea. My kids and I made these to wrap up jars of homeade jam for their teachers for Christmas. They turned out great and look so cute!
I used this idea to make bags for my preschool class at church. They turned out super cute and I was totally impressed with how easy it was. I love your blog…I check it nearly every day.