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:)
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