Cheapo, Easy Peasy Luggage Tags!

Our Family is preparing to take several trips this summer. Unfortunately one of them is by air ( I HATE flying!!!). So in a better effort to be prepared, and not have to fill out those annoying little tags at the airport, I whipped up some Luggage Tags.

Here are the gathered supplies:

Some scraps of Scrapbook paper, Scotch Laminating Pouches, Card for smoothing, Printable Shipping Labels, Crop-A-Dile, and optional corner rounder punch.

Now I figure that most people are at Wal-mart enough that have seen these awesome little pouches. But encase you are like me and don't spend enough time perusing the office supply aisle there, here is a close up:

These are less than 2 bucks for a pack of 5, and are self laminating (NO machine required).

The tags were all made by simply printing off my info on the shipping labels (which had to be cut to size & corner rounded them), and then adhering them to the scraps of  paper. I sized my paper 3 1/2 by 2. but you could totally eyeball this part. Then I stuck the paper on the pouch and followed the 2 step directions for sealing it. And VOILA! and cute little tag. I then used my crop-a-dile to punch a hole through all the layers to thread a ribbon for tying. You could try a regular hole punch, but the pouches are pretty thick...

Aren't you jealous of my awesome tech skills that caused me to use a bright orange post-it to safe guard my personal info?!? Alas that is SO not my thing:/

Here is the trio of them, ready for me and the kiddos to attach to our duffels and go:) Not my best work, but definitely some of my easiest and quickest! These literally took me 10 minutes start to finish:)

My Van Basket- Or what you need when you constantly run Errands!

I am an "On-the-Go" kinda Gal. We are in our vehicle running around town, doing errands at least 5 times a week. So I have learned that a few necessities are in order, so that I am not constantly buying things that I already have at home.
I own a Nissan MiniVan. It has a handy little "table" that sits in between the 2 front coach seats. This is where I keep my little basket of goodies. However I am sure there are plenty of spots in other vehicles to tuck such a thing.

This is what my basket looks like:

It contains 5 Main Components:

1) The First Aid! The School Size box in the back contains first aid supplies:

Nothing fancy or expensive here. Everything came from Target or a Walmart, and most is "travel" size. I have Tums, Tylenol (Both Adult & Children's), Dramamine, Benadryl, Single Packets of Sinus Medicine & Advil, Children's Benadryl & Zyrtec Single Serves, Band-aids, Gauze, Alcohol Pads, Hand Sanitizer and Kleenex. Some Odd Ball items are Bug Spray (for impromptu outdoor outings, and Tweezers for Splinters & Ticks). I usually keep a Travel Size Sunscreen in there also, but I had run out and hadn't replaced it at time of photo.

2) The Fun! The slim green box contains a few items to keep the kiddos entertained for those times we are stuck waiting in the car.

Again nothing special. I got all items except the travel "Whoonu" game at Target. I snagged the Tic Tac Toe at the little dollar spot, The Wooly Willy boards and Stretchy Caterpillar are from Party Supplies, while the Squinkies were actually from my stock pile but of course you could get them in Toys. The Travel Whoonu Game came from a kids meal!

3) The Food! The tiny clear case contains non-melty snacks.

We honestly eat in our Van a ton! So I felt no need to stock pile a great deal of snacks. I simply threw in some hard candies & some teeny packs of fruit nuggets.

4) The Paper Products. What vehicle that regulars shuttles children would be complete without the Kleenex and Wipes!

My kids are older now, so I just keep a travel pack of wipes for sticky hands. However I have a some what "snot nosed" 9 year old, so I need a full size box of Kleenex!

5) The Oddities. These are items that we simply cant do without, however I doubt most people would need to add these items to their Vehicle Basket.

The yellow capped tube is an Epi-pen. I have a severe allergy to shellfish, and while this is never a worry at home, eating out can be more dangerous. So I keep this in my van at all times. The weird black thing is a convertor for our car charging ports. It makes any port in the van (we have 3) compatible with a regular ole cord. So my kids can use their DS chargers or watch our Portable DVD player.

 It all tucks nicely and neatly in my Little Longaberger Lunch Basket!

So that wraps up my Travel Around Town Basket. Hope you got a good idea or two!

Tiny Toy Travel Tins

My Gilly has 2 sweet friends that are moving to Germany. She really wanted to make them a gift before they left. However her overly practical mother wanted it to be something they would actually use, and something that their mother wouldn't inwardly groan over. I knew they would be traveling all over the country for the next couple weeks before their flight to Germany, so I figured travel activities would be appropriate. However I also knew that they already had reached their max on stuff they could/would drag around during their travels so it would need to be something small.

So my first thought was a travel game. But even the smallest travel games aren't truly "tiny". They are more backpack size not purse size. Then I was excited over the idea of paperdolls. But once I had that thought I realized I would at least need to include scissors and a zipper bag for storage, not to mention the fact that once I shopped around for paperdolls I wasn't able to find ANY in town! I would have had to order them online, so I scratched that idea.

On one of my many trips to Target, Gilly actually found these cute little tins in the dollar spot and begged to get them for her friends.

The Sharpie is there for size reference. The tins are a little bigger than an Altoids tin, just exactly the right size to fit a deck of cards. So my new mission became finding things to entertain 2 girls that would fit!

I started by heading to my local party store where I hit the jackpot. I found tiny packs of game cards (Uno for one of the girls and Old Maid for the other), little bitty Etch-A-Sketch, some stretchy caterpillars. They also sell all kinds of candy by the individual piece so we grabbed a jolly rancher because we happen to know they are one of the girls favorites.

When we got home I raided my stash of stuff I keep for Gillyan's "GrabNGo" bag (that is a a post for another day) and found some "party favor" packs of paper dolls. Each doll came with a sheet of reusable stick on clothes. I also had hoarded these fun little packages of Squinkies that came with a little cardboard pop up playset and a little squinkie person. We added an additional squinkie pet with hair just cause we have squinkies come out our eyeballs around here:P

This rounded our little kit out pretty well and so all that was left was to cram all the goodies in and make sure it all fit! We started with the flat things, the paper dolls and squinkie playset, and then layered the other items on top. It fit beautifully!

Gilly was thrilled with the results and wrote a sweet note to her friends on the bottom of each tin with Sharpie. I was pretty thrilled myself but mostly because I have a slight obsession of tiny things that I inherited from my mother;)

The whole little package cost about $5 if you average out the cost of things that came in sets like the paper dolls, caterpillars, and tubes of plastic ballons. The little etch-a-sketch was the most spendy item (around $2 each). Although I did acquire the squinkies at our local PX on clearance so the cost on those is probably not a good "average" either:/ I wasn't complaining though, and I don't think the 2 little recipients will be either:)