I am just thrilled with the way this years Valentine treats turned out for my daughter’s class. I can not take credit for design however. Let me tell you the whole story about these treats. It started in January of 2009 when I picked up the froggy cello bags from the dollar spot at Target. I had nothing special planned for them, just put some candies in them and add a little V-day bag topper and send them to school for V-day treats. Well for some reason I decided not to use them (or perhaps by the time I got around to doing the treats I had forgotten about the bags I had bought a month earlier). Whatever the case, they were still in my cabinet a year later and I had not given them a second thought. That is until I was scanning my blog line feeds one day and came across a project that not only used the very same frog baggies, but had made a matching bag topper that was so irresistibly cute that I had to lift the idea.
There was just one small tiny problem. I didn’t know what size punches she used to make the frog and I don’t have punches in various sizes, so I had a hard time gauging the size of Mr. Frog. Thankfully, there were only 3 different shapes used to make the frog (circle, oval, flower), all of which my Cricut can cut. The problem is that my Cricut only cuts the 3 basic shapes from 1 to 5.5 inches. After cutting a circle for his pupil at 1” it was obvious that it was going to be too big. So I had to be a little more creative. I had the right punch to make the ovals which were for his mouth and legs so really it was just the 4 different size circles that were going to give me trouble since I only had a circle punch that would be the right size for the one on his belly.
To make the other 3 circle sizes I used the In My Garden cartridge. If you have that one you will see that the flowers on the top row of the key pad have various size circles for the inside of the flowers. Since the actual flower would cut at 1”, the inside will cut smaller of course. So I played around with the different circles and different sizes and was able to come up with the right size for the remaining 3 circles. Brilliant I must say!! (and also a little bit of a pain in the arse as well.)
The toes for the frog were also cut from one of the flowers on the same cartridge. This wasn’t too difficult to figure out because I had seem people use flower punches to make toes several times before. It was just a matter of looking at the different flowers on the cart. to see which petals made the best toes. I was able to cut both sets of toes from 1 flower.
So, I got the shapes figured out and the frog put together to closely match the example I had. I used some pop dots for the body/mouth for a little dimension. I cut a the hart with my Cricut as well and stamped some little swirley things on the cardstock with a retired SU background stamp. The “Hoppy Valentines Day” was printed on a clear label because I didn’t feel like fussing with trying to print it on the cardstock. All that was left was to fill the bags with some heart shaped candy. I went to Wal-Mart in search of some hearts and while looking in the V-day aisle I saw some cut pink animal marshmallows. I think they were cats, but that doesn’t really matter. Behind those were some blue ones that may or may not have been puppies. Again, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that behind those I found the green frogs!!! How perfect do these frog marshmallows match the whole packaging I just made for the treats?!?! I was amazed at my luck. So I snatched up several of the 3 pack marshmallow frogs and a bag of chocolate heart candy because I new there was going to have to be something else in the bag with the frogs, or the frogs would have be lost in the cello bags.
While assembling the treats I was a little disappointed to discover that a green frog printed on the cello bags was in just the right spot to cover up much of the little candy frog. I wanted the candy frogs to be clearly visible in the bags, so I did the best I could and placed a piece of white cardstock in the bag and used double sided tape to stick the heart to it and placed the frog along side the heart. This allowed for the frog to be moved over enough so that the frog on the bag was not “toad”ally (get it?) covering the candy frog.
I folded the bags up tight and small so that the frog wouldn’t have a lot of room to move during transport and used some green staples to attach the bag topper. On the back of the topper my daughter wrote each child’s name along with her own.Labels: Treats, Valentines
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