Thrifty Valentine's Day Gifts!

What do you do with all your filler items that you accumulate when you are doing a hundred small transactions per month at your local Walgreen's and Rite Aid? Like 100 Nestle Crunch bars? You make Valentine's Day hand-outs for the kids!

True Story!! Actually--the Nestle Crunch bars went on sale with a weekly in-store coupon and that were usuable in combination with another coupon from a month-long ad booklet. So between the coupons, they were 25 cents, of which I paid pennies for because they were acting as filler items on my transactions that I used register rewards as my form of payment. There was a method to the mass-purchasing madness....

Because I saw a great idea for making homemade candy bar wrapper labels by copying a picture of a child holding a sign indicating the purpose of the gift.

(Thank you, pinterest...for inspiring the frugal, crafty-side of my mothering experience!)

I took a 33 cent piece of white poster board and painted the token message and took a picture of each of my kids. The madness had a very basic formula that went like this: 100 almost free candy bars+100 classmates+4 digital pictures of kids (made into 50 copies)=100 VeRy CuTe Valentine's Day treats!

The most time consuming part of the whole gig was waiting for the printer to shoot out the copies.

We put two 4x6 prints on each copy and cut them into a 5 1/2"x 5 1/2" square. They fit around the candy bar perfectly and were secured with a piece of scotch tape.

No fussing about filling out the cards this year. No remembering names or finding the list that the teacher sent home. Easy, Peasy, right? It took us about 20 minutes to assemble the slew chocolate bars. I was very pleased with the results...and will be looking out for another great filler deal to make next year's hand-outs with!

[Just a side note, or in this case, a "bottom" note: this is not a "thrifty" project if you don't get your candy for a great deal or have access to a color copier. If this were done at regular retail with the chocolate bar costing 69 cents, the color copy at 39 cents, tape, and sales' tax...each hand-out would cost just over $1 each. That makes a $3 box of cheesy Valentine's seem like a screaming deal. So-check the cost variable first, before you are soaked a lot of cash for something you thought would cute on the cheap!]