How to make your gift bag go from blah and boring to fun and fabulous! or "I've been watching too much HGTV, I think!"

The title probably says it all....some nights before bed I watch those shows on HGTV - home decorating, staging a house to sell, that sort of thing. I think it's seeping into my subconscious!

We were invited to a birthday party this past Saturday, but as you may have read, we were all still pretty sickly and noone wants a party guest with a drippy nose, and they surely don't want a whole family of them! So, we stayed home. However, the noses were better Sunday, and we did not forsake the gathering together of the saints to worship. As a result, we saw the birthday girl and were able to take her the gifts we had gotten.

Back to Saturday evening, I was tasked with the wrapping since we just didn't have a chance to do it before the children went to bed (they had wanted to help) and I was SOOO glad for the Wal-mart trip a few months ago when CKB and I had the foresight to get some extra gift bags to "keep on hand" so I wouldn't have to make a trip to the store just for gift wrapping stuff in the future! (every once in a while we're on the ball!).

So, we actually had the right size bags, colors that matched the gifts, no less, AND tissue paper. Hooray! As I was returning the tissue paper to the corner of the room where I found it...I spied some artificial flowers I had on hand from my Mother's Day project and thought hmmmm...those might look nice (I didn't have any ribbon handy)...so I spread out the stems and stuck the bunch of flowers in the top of the bag and wonder of wonder, they were the right colors as well to match everything else! I joked with my friend when the gifts had been given that the stars were aligned that day - joked - we laughed and I'm sure it'll probably never happen quite the same again, but for once, it was nice!


So...here are the gifts before......



and after....




Feel free to share any great tips you have been keeping to yourself!