Presents, presents & gift bags!

Christmas...Birthdays...Showers...Weddings...New babies.  There are so many events that call for you to give a gift.  But, you're trying to save money and while you were so excited to get that really special gift on sale, now you are stuck having to spend money on tissue paper and a bag.  Items that before didn't seem so bad, but that $1.99 bag and $3.99 tissue paper adds up quickly! So what can you do, how do you still save money, but still be able to give a gift?  Easy!  First of all, I'm not sure who it came from originally, but I learned about it from my Mother In Love.  More than likely, it is in the Tightwad Gazette, because again, that's my Mother-in-Love savings go to.  

My Mother-In-Love taught me this trick right away.  Whenever you receive a gift from someone in a gift bag, save the bag and re-fold up the tissue paper and save as well.  Do this for every event that you get tissue paper and bags from.  Your wedding, wedding shower, baby shower, birthday, Christmas and so on.  It doesn't take long to add up, and you will be thankful for your free stash of tissue paper and bags for all occasions.  Like I said, my Mother-In-Love, taught me right away, and she helped me save all our bags and tissue paper from our wedding gifts.  Since then we have saved from birthdays, Christmas, my daughter's baby shower, her 1st birthday paper, and many other smaller occasions.  

As you have seen I'm sure, things come in groups, after our wedding we went to half a dozen other weddings within the next 2 years ourselves.  Boy did those wedding bags come in handy to re-use!  And by the way we still have some bags left for weddings :)  Then shortly after we had our daughter, we had dozens or more other baby showers to go to as well...again, thankful for those baby shower bags I already had (especially the neutral ones).  Now, there will be times you don't have a bag that works and need to buy one, but in all honesty my husband and I have been married for 5 years this past year, and have attended  at least 6 weddings, 12-15 baby showers, and who knows how many birthdays, and I have bought 2 bags, mainly because I wanted to follow a theme for them.

Now I mostly talked about gift bags but the tissue paper comes with it, and it's super easy to store as well.  To make sure that I don't go over board and run out of room for my stash of bags and tissue paper, I have come up with a system.  I only allow my self one tote for bags and one tote for tissue paper.  One tote for bags, fits a lot!  For the tissue paper tote, I divide my tissue paper up into colors (the art teacher in me), in shoe boxes.  I have one shoe box for warm; red, orange & yellows, one shoe box for cools; green, blue & purple, and then a larger box for white and fun style tissue paper.  All those boxes are in one tote along with bubble wrap and other packing items, in case I need to wrap a gift up to be more safe.  

You can get packing items and  bubble wrap for free as well.  Order any thing online, you usually get your item shipped in a box (that you can save as well if you have room), with bubble wrap or plastic that is a filler.  I save these as well.  I don't save them as much because I don't use them as often and again I don't want to overload my tote.  One thing about saving things is you need to do what works for you.  I have room to save my bags in a tote and tissue paper/bubble wrap/filler in another tote and still not feell like I'm cluttering up my house.  

So there you go a way to save on all those events that you are already trying to save on!  I hope that it helps you, and I apologize for how long this post was.