Easter Baskets

My belly dance troupe does a lot of performances for nursing homes and we always take a little something to give to the residents.  We are dancing at a local home at the end of the month so we decided to give them a little Easter basket with candy in it.  I've made 52 of them!!  Here are a couple of my favorites.

They don't have their candy in them yet because I can't be trusted with Easter candy in the house.  Those little chocolate eggs call my name and I answer!  Anyone else have that problem?

I used my envelope punch board to make these and started off with the basic tutorial from Diane Dimich.  Check out her video on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXn077wPKDw.  She does the best tutorials so I would suggest looking at some of her other videos as well.

I needed to produce a smaller basket so I cut my paper down to 6" x 6" (you can get four baskets out of one sheet of scrapbook paper or you can use paper from a 6X6 pad and you are all ready to go!).  I did all of my punching and scoring at 1 1/2".  That also means that when you flip the paper over to make the additional punches necessary that you don't have to score again.  That was a nice little surprise!

I used paper from an old DCWV Super Value Stack called Summer Dreams.  I have no idea if you can get it anymore but if you can, I would recommend picking up a stack.  There are 180 sheets and I've gotten tons of use out of it.  I have about 30 or so sheets left.  I cut my handles at 1" wide by 6" long and used some Aleene's Quick Dry Glue to put them all together.  I think they turned out really cute and were really easy to construct.  I don't think I've used my envelope punch board to actually make envelopes yet!  I'm very impressed at all the things you can do with it besides make envelopes.  I picked mine up at Hobby Lobby with a coupon so it was probably less than $10.  I think I got my money's worth on this tool!