Thrifty, frugal quick Easter cards!

I live in a small town and it's 30 miles to the nearest craft store. I decided at the last minute this week to make some simple little Easter cards for my step-granddaughters. Hum.m.m.m. no Easter paper, nothing with Easter bunnies on it and no Easter stickers or anything! What am I going to do?

I sure don't want to drive 30 miles one way for a couple of little pieces of Easter scrapbook paper!

Dollar Tree to the rescue.  I bought a little bag of 10 tiny 2"x2" sticker boxes for (of course) $1.00! I figured I could cut off the little fronts and backs and use them to decorate my cards.

 So I got together a little 6x6 book of patterned paper from Echo Park - I Love Sunshine, some different colored 5-1/2" x 5-1/2" plain cards that I'd gotten on sale a few years ago, my dies for cutting labels, my corner punch and some clear Stickles........... and went to work!

I needed to make 5 cards,,, even one for my son which had to be masculine. I began by corner punching the little 2x2 pieces I'd cut out, with my decorative corner punch. See top left below. Then I printed some Easter sentiments on my cream cardstock with pink color, and used my Hot Off the Press label dies to cut some labels for the inside. (See below)

I picked some pretty and bright papers from the Echo Park pad, cut them to 4-1/2" x 4-1/2" and adhered them to the front of each card. There was a little extra strip left for the inside.

I made a little label with the die, and use my tiny alphabet stamp set to stamp either "hop hop hop" or "peep peep" on little labels and a circle.

I put Stickles clear glitter in places like the bunnies' ears, chick's tummy, eggs, and on the labels around the edge.

These were SUPER QUICK and fun and easy to make and cost me the total sum of $1.00. I had just purchased the corner punch at JoAnn Fabrics with my 60% off coupon and was anxious to use it. It makes a plain square of paper look pretty fancy don't you think?

Here are the 4 feminine cards.

And I even made one for my son (who is my "baby" at 37!). I used some woodgrain backed paper from a Simple Stories Vintage Bliss 6x6 paper pad, added a couple of the little box tops to the front and a few stickers of the eggs, and I think it turned out pretty nice.. even for a guy.

If you don't have a Dollar Tree nearby, maybe another discount store or even the bigger box stores would have little packages of treats like this to use... especially if you're on a budget like I am. 

On the inside of each card, I put the little stickers that were inside the boxes, two little plastic butterfly stencils (again from the Dollar Tree), a piece of cardstock to draw on and a little notepad. So I guess the total cost for each card with the stuff inside was $3.00.

Think outside of the box when you're in a pinch and don't want to make the long drive to your craft store! Have you ever been in this situation and made do, and got a little creative with what you already had or could get for super cheap?

HAPPY EASTER TO YOU ALL!