Enrichment

Hard to believe these started out as boring old paper bags.

Here's the inside. You can fill the pockets with tags, gift cards or pictures. Or you can put a few bags together to make a photo album.

Last night was one of our quarterly enrichment activities at church. The leaders made one fatal mistake - they asked everyone to bring a paper bag meal to trade with someone else. I didn't want to make anything, so I picked up a mandarin chicken salad from Wendy's on the way there. I thought I was super early because I was the first to arrive, besides the relief society presidency. But as time went on I was still the only one there. Eventually, three more people showed up. Then the two girls teaching the craft came, but they had already eaten dinner. So we decided to all just eat our own food we'd brought. The craft was making paper bag cards, where you take a brown paper bag, fold it in half, and glue cute scrapbooking paper onto all the sides, bind it with paper and tie it with ribbon. I know that sounds confusing, but they were actually pretty easy and fun to make. As I was making it and wondering who the heck I would give it to because I'm not much of a fancy card person (I always think they are very cute, but then what do you do with them? I'm not a keeper of stuff. In fact I like to throw everything away. So when someone gives me a cute card, I'm torn between wanting to throw it away and yet feeling bad that they put so much time into making it just to be thrown away), when someone had the idea of giving them to their kids' teachers for end-of-the-year thank-you cards. What a great idea, I thought. Teachers love cute things. So I made 3 - one for each teacher and one to keep. We had a lot of fun visiting, laughing and munching on cookies late into the night (I stayed until 9:30). It was kinda nice having a small group because it felt more intimate and we got to make more cards.