FTC Deal

This ended up being such a good deal that I couldn't help but share it! At FTC (Family Thrift Center) this week they have a deal where you get $10 off when you buy 6 participating General Mills Cereals. They also give you coupons for $5 off eggs and milk for your next visit. Since I had some manu. coupons for General Mills cereals I ended up paying about $3.60 for all of this cereal!


Here's the Deal:
2 boxes of Fiber One cereal about $3.80 each
4 boxes of MG Cheerios at $3.50 each (I bought all they had ;-) )
Total $21.60 - $10 off coupon in this week's ad
$11.60 - $3 in coupons (coupons were at coupons.com and were for $1 off when you buy 2 GM cereals)
$8.60 - $5 for future purchases of milk and eggs
= $3.60 for 6 boxes of cereal or about $.60 each!

I just thought this was too good of a deal to not pass along. Happy Breakfasts to you!

#1 Nativity Blocks

And my #1 craft is this set of adorable nativity blocks! We had a lot of fun working on these blocks over two MOPS meetings. We spent the first meeting painting them (they needed 2 layers of acrylic paint) and then at the second meeting we did the sanding, stickering, and Mod Podging. We finished them up in December and our speaker's topic was sharing Christ at Christmas with your children. It was so neat for everyone to have a nativity to take home that their kids could play with and not worry about breaking. The trickiest part of this craft is finding someone who can cut the blocks for you. I am blessed enough to have an awesome father-in-law that spent countless hours cutting out over 500 blocks for our MOPS group. The stickers were from Current but you could use different ones or maybe even print out clip art and color it yourself? My favorite tutorial for this type of block is here at Bucket of Cherries. Thanks for taking time to read about my favorite crafts, hopefully you will be inspired too.

#2 Beaded Spoon

This is my #2 craft only because some of the mommies had trouble getting started. Once everyone was started it was a super easy craft to put together and everyone's looked great! I personally love that however you put your beads on the spoon ends up looking great. I am sure that my mommies loved doing something different than painting, gluing, or scrapbooking. I bought cheap serving spoons from Wal-Mart for 4 for $1. This really helped to offset the price of the beads and I stayed within my budget by buying all of the beads when they were 50% off at Hobby Lobby. It worked out to be about 20 of the larger sized beads per spoon and then about 10 seed beads. I connected the wire to the spoon by hot gluing a large flat bead to the far end and then wrapping the wire around a few times and curling it in the back. When I got to the end by the scoop we again curled the wire and hid it on the back. One downside of this craft is that the spoon is not dishwasher safe but that didn't seem to bother anyone in my MOPS group. There is an old MOPS forum for this idea here. The name is life and the password is together. We did this craft over a year ago and I still have people mentioning how much they enjoyed it!

#3 Decorated Journals

Just last month we put together these journals at our MOPS meeting. They were a huge hit and it was a good thing that I had ordered extra! We used scrapbooking paper and Mod Podge to decorate the front and back. Then we used Mod Podge to put ribbon on the front, followed by hot glue to attach flowers and sequins or buttons. They were also very pretty with just sequins on the ribbon. I found some sticky sequins at Michael's that matched our papers really well. The only tricky part was making sure that you did not accidentally glue your cover to your pages. :-) I ordered the journals from Oriental Trading and they were very sturdy and just the right size (4"x6") for $12.99 per dozen. I've done fabric on a composition notebook as well but these were more useful since they would fit in your purse, glovebox, etc.

#4 MOPS Reminder Calendars

We have a tradition of making a calendar at the beginning of MOPS every year. This year I mixed it up a little with this great calendar/post-it holder magnet.

In order to expedite the process of putting this together I had all of the paper pre-cut into the right sizes and the circles I cut with my Creative Memories circle cutter. I also printed and put together all of the calendars so that all the mommies had to do was add the stickers on the days that I had pre-marked for our MOPS meeting dates. I put as many of our events as I could on the calendar as we had planned for the year. The overall cost of this project was pretty minimal and we only used part of a post-it note so that it would not be too heavy. I would suggest making sure that your magnets are strong enough to hold up the whole weight of the calendar and post-its. Here is the link to the old MOPS forum where I got this idea from. The name is life and the password is together.

#5 Celebration Plate

I love Nikki's blog, Whimsy Love, she has such great ideas and her tutorials are very thorough! Her tutorial for a Celebration Plate has me inspired! I am really excited to do this craft with my MOPS group this May. I think they are really going to love it and it's so much cheaper than those pottery painting places where I made my first Happy Birthday plate. So, the things that make this easy are drawing on the top with a dry erase marker before you paint on the back and using the "air dry" method so that you don't have to bake everybody's plate. (We don't even have an oven at the church where we meet!) Be sure to plan a little extra time for this one if you can and remind everyone that whatever they paint first will be "on the top". I found the plates at the Dollar Tree for $1 each and the paints are at Michael's and Hobby Lobby. Be sure to get the paint that says it is for painting on glass :-) Happy painting!

#6 Cupcake Potholders

Here is the cupcake towel that I made as a sample for our MOPS group.


We ended up doing this craft on potholders because they were easier to find 60 of and much cheaper. (2 for $1 at the Dollar Tree) This was a great opportunity for us to use up fabric scraps from various projects we had already done but I did go ahead and buy a few different fabric pieces so that they would match the potholders we bought. It didn't take very much fabric at all and they were cute with little red circles on top for cherries too :-) For the most part, I followed this tutorial from Flower Girl Designs. It's a pdf so if you can't open it try going here first. We did the frosting and the base as two separate pieces that were both ironed onto the potholder. I provided the mommies with HeatNBond - UltraHold so that it would be a no-sew project. A few of the women went ahead and embroidered around the edges and that gave it a nice finished look but it definitely wasn't necessary. I love my potholders but they'll probably just be decorative for my kitchen since I also love my silicone oven mitts!