DIY Hand-Stamped Favor Bags

Thanks for all your great comments about Maura's birthday party!! Wanted to share a little bit more about the goodie bags I stamped..because they were really fun to do, pretty easy and this technique could work for lots of things (although these pics are really bad cause I was working on them in the middle of the night).

Since we only had 6 kids, I thought it would be cool to make the actual bag the goodies came in a favor in and of itself (hopefully they can each use theirs for safekeeping some kind of small treasures). I started with 4 x 6" plain, cream cotton muslin drawstring bags from The Cotton Bag Company.

First I picked a single color for each child and then stamped their name on the bottom of the bag (oops, totally forgot to take a photo of the text stamps, but as you can tell from the alignment, they're just individual letter stamps - always start with the middle letter in the center and work your way out on both sides from there). I used acrylic paint because its what I had lying around.

For Kiley and Morgan's bags, I used wooden block stamps that I already had (they were a gift from a friend who got them overseas).

In order to get the pattern to run off the bag, just cut up a piece paper and insert it partway into the bag to catch the excess paint.

 

After I had used my two girlie, floral stamps, I was sort of out of options.  That's when I decided to get really creative:) For Jack's I used a Q-tip, started at the top of the bag and dotted a row of paint all the way down the bag. I purposely didn't reload on paint until I was done each strip, which gave me that sort of faded, gradient look as you go down.

Then I grabbed a fingerling potato I had lying around and went old school for Ava. Remember potato stamping? This bag might be my favorite, the organic shape of the potato when cut in half made these really cool, large bubblie blobs, and as I went I kept rotating the potato so that they are not in the same orientation throughout.

After that I was a bit more stumped. And I had to work with what I had since it was like midnight at this point. This is where I'm really giving myself a pat on the back for pulling two really cool patterns out of nowhere:) And of course, I did not take up close in progress pics of these cause I was just so excited and into it that I couldn't stop!! For Mason's, I took the cap off one of the tubes of acrylic paint to use as my stamp. Since the cap is hollow, when I dipped the bottom of it in the paint and stamped that, I got a really neat ring shape (the middle of the circle is negative space). And lastly, you know how rubber stamps have a block attached to them that you hold when you're stamping, and on the top of it is a picture of the stamp? Well, I took one of the letter stamps and basically dipped it upside down in the paint, so the top of the stamp that had the pic of the letter got covered and used that to make a square shape in a repeating grid for Sean. Go me!!

Anywhoo, the point is, stamping is fun! And you can stamp whatever you want with whatever you want! Go out and try it:)