Quick and Easy Summer Gift Ideas

Hello new Pebbles friends. Heather Leopard here today with my first project as a new Pebbles Design Team gal. I’m super excited to show you a quick gift I made to give to my girls. We love our beach vacations and I thought it would be fun to give my girls a little care package to document all our summer activities.

The creative aspect of this care package includes the gift bag and mini album / journal. These are relatively easy to make if you have a die cut machine or template you can follow. The Fun in the Sun collection is perfect for this project.

To get started, I knew I needed to begin with the beach bags. The bags needed to be able to hold the album and other little goodies so I made it fairly large, measuring at 6″ x 8″. Choosing a design that allowed for a 2 tone pattern gave it added interest. Then it was time for the really fun part – decorating!

Each bag includes buttons where the straps attach to the bag, a fun sentiment and a coordinating embellishment or two. You could also hang a tag off one of the straps but I am letting my girls decide which ones they want. Of course, I designed these with my girls’ style and colors in mind so we’ll see how it goes.

I designed the mini albums to be 4″ x 6″ to easily fit into the 6″ x 8″ beach gift bags. To create these, simply cut a 8″ x 6″ cover and several inside sheets measuring 3.5″ x 5.5″. I used 5 sheets for the inside to make 10 pages. Center the inside sheets so that there is an 1/4″ border.

Then I stitched it together in the center. Once the mini album is together, it’s time to decorate again! I added a tone on tone background to cover the album and then I used the fun sentiments from the 3″ x 4″ cards pattern paper, framed it out and then added a dimensional sticker.

I can’t wait to give these to my girls. We’re taking a road trip soon so I may even print out a few photos from the summer and put a little craft kit together to keep them busy on our way to the beach.