Crafting with Carolyn: Santa Treat Bags

Hello all!! The REAL countdown to Christmas begins today don't you think? 10 days!! 10 days to get all those gifts brought, wrapped and under the tree! 10 days to get the cookies baked, Christmas cards in the mail, house cleaned and it's not done until after 12:00am Christmas morning ... am I right?! Then you can take a deep breath and say you've done all you could do and you can and will enjoy Christmas day with your family!!

This year my kids have asked for my help to make treat bags for their classmates. We took a peek at supplies on hand and came up with an adorable Santa Treat bag. We've seen this idea floating around Pinterest and several of my friends have done something with this same look to it. My husband actually came home from work and looked at my bag and came up with the same idea on his own just from the design of the bag. I don't know the origin of the design but I tip my crafter's hat to ya! You've inspired me.

I used my Cricut and the Close to My Heart Artiste cartridge to cut out the bags and mittens. I got the bag to be as big as it can fit onto a 8.5 x 11" bag so it is 10.68" wide. The mittens are 1.5" tall. The white part of the bag is a bit tricky, I copied the original bag and using my Gypsy I arranged it on the screen so that the majority of the bag was not on the mat - only the flap was seen. Then I copied the bag and positioned them around the 12x12" mat so that I ended up with 10 "flaps" to cut.

As you can see there are only the handles of the bags on the screen. I'm not sure if you can do this with Cricut Craft Room as I don't use it as often but if you find out feel free to post it in the comments!

After I cut these out I just cut the edges off and now have a 8x8" square that I will use in future crafts - SO no paper wasted!!

I got all the bags cut and I felt it was easier to use my Martha Stewart scoring board to help with all of the folds in the bag than to try to just fold them. That was probably the most time consuming process! I put the bags aside and got to work on the little things. I cut everything out for all 50 bags first before assembling.

The belt that I made is a strip of glittery black ribbon found at Michaels and a silver paper for the buckle. I cut the silver paper just a little bigger than the ribbon and then using a craft knife I made two slits on the left and right of the silver square to slide the ribbon through. I cut Santa's pants from black paper. These I cut 1.5 x 3.3" (or so!) - to save yourself some trouble you might want to resize your bag so that the pants are an easier size to cut! Using the scraps from the white paper I punched out a bunch of holes and use those as buttons on Santa's suit. The kids (all 3 of them) and I and even my husband later - all debated the buttons on Santa's suit topic and finally decided that since none of us have ever seen the REAL Santa we could interpret him however we chose. We decided to go with the buttons since they were there. After I had all of my small bits cut I started gluing them on. Pants first, followed by belt and last buttons.

After letting them dry all night I finally was able to assemble the bags using my Scotch ATG. The final steps were filing the treat bags - I bought some candy, some little toys and a foam craft to put in the bags - then using white thin ribbon I sealed the bags and glued a mitten to each end of ribbon. My son and daughter wrote From: (their name) on one mitten and Merry Christmas on another mitten before gluing to make things easier. We didn't write a TO ... anyone because it's easier to hand out than to make sure right person gets the right bag.

If you have any questions please ask away!! Merry Christmas!!

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