Blue Monday #14

It is time for Blue Monday again! Thank you to Sally at Smiling Sally for hosting Blue Monday for us once again. Be sure to visit others who are posting for Blue Monday. This time it is the last one for 2009. Today I am sharing with you gifts I made for family members for Christmas.

First up even though it has no BLUE, I am showing you the book I got the two recipes from for these gifts. This is Book 4. I also have Book 3 and now I am wishing had the other books too.

Here is the Onion Soup Mix recipe. I made 3 of these for 3 families. I doubled the original recipe. You can see here the Blue bowl I was using to stir these up before dumping it into the containers I had gotten at our local Dollar Tree store.

The other recipe I used was Cake in a Cup recipe. Sounds yummy! I made these for my nieces and nephew and also for one of my brothers.

After mixing up the cake mix part, I had to divide them into baggies. I also made labels for the baggies, so the recipients would know which was the cake mix and which was the glaze for the cake. Behind the baggies you can see my finished Onion Soup Mix gifts.

Then I moved on to make the recipe cards. There are 3 different recipes for using the Onion Soup Mix. You can see here that they are: Roasted Potatoes, Onion Dip and Onion Soup. The recipes were printed in the book. I used our copier to make a page to check it out first. Then I recopied onto card stock. I colored in the little stars and then I mounted them onto more card stock. You can see some of the card stock is a light blue.

Here they are! The recipes are tied together with ribbon. I didn't have any blue ribbon, and that made me blue. So the next best thing was to use green ribbon. I stuck labels on the containers too.

When I started to type up the recipe for Cake Mix in a Cup, the monitor went blank. The computer is fine, just our monitor is going cuckoo. That is going to be our gift to each other this year, a new monitor. A flat screen one. But we have to wait until next payday to get one. Hope we can find a good one on sale. Anyway, on with Blue Monday. So I put a sheet of paper on top of lined paper and wrote the recipe by hand. Using the lined paper really helped to keep it straight and neat looking. Then I had to make copies onto card stock which is what you see above.

Then I rummaged around in my scrapbook papers and found some blue and some red paper to use to mount the recipe cards on. They need to know what to do to make the Cake Mix in a Cup.

Then I mounted it again on solid blue paper creating a matted look. I am pleased with how that turned out! Here are the cups I used to put in the cake mix and glaze baggies. I found them at Ross!! Yay! Oh and look at all the BLUE in them there cups. Heehee.

My next dilemma.....how was I going to wrap these? We have been using fabric bags that my aunt or I have made. Those bags get passed around every year it seems. But none of the fabric bags I had worked for these gifts. So I checked my fabric stash and found this Christmas fabric. And look, very carefully, there is even (gasp) BLUE in them (another gasp). Yes there is! Click on the picture and you can see it. It is the little packages on there. Perfect for what I need and plenty of it too. I should note that I did all this on Christmas morning after hubby and I opened presents while on the phone with our daughter. Talk about waiting until the last minute. But then again , that is typical of me. I was putting the buttons on the sleeves of my wedding dress the night before the wedding, after the rehearsal and dinner. Crazy! Story of my life. But that is not what this post is about. Back to the subject at hand here! I need to stop getting distracted.

And here we are! The finished bags with the gifts. I made bags for the Onion Soup Mix things too. So how many bags did I make on Christmas morning? Eight! Yes, eight bags. Whew!! Then with hubby's help I put together the Green Bean casserole. Remembered to get dressed, grab all the gifts, the green bean casserole, my camera, my purse, and I think that was it. But when we got to my mom's house after a 1/2 hour drive, I walked in the door and realized I forgot the salad fixings. No way were we going to drive all the way back home to get that. We made do without the salad. Just as well, there was plenty of food anyway. And I even had left over green bean casserole to bring back home. Yummy!

I will probably see those bags with something else in them next year. A great way to go GREEN and not use as much paper.

Happy Blue Monday everyone!!!