Party Bags

[Boe]

My daughter is 3 next week and we are having a party for her on Saturday. Thing is I have no idea what to put in party bags that is not going to cost me a bomb. What with legal fees and all that is going on in my life the last thing I can afford to do is spend loads on other peoples kids but I do know that hey will expect something.

Have so far thought of sweets, cake, bouncy rubber ball, lip gloss for girls but that is about it. Every party I have been to lately has ended up with us coming home with a super duper packed bag of goodies!!

how about a small book??
there are quite a few good books for only 99p or less for 3 year olds
sticker books in wilkinsons are cheap

we did that for dd's party bags for the last 2 years and were doing it again in August when she is 3
hope that helps, good luck with the party

Yes, stickers, book, crayons... The Book People are good for books sometimes although they have a long delivery day at the moment. If you're near an Ikea, they have some nice cheap things - packet of felt pens for 35p, 10 finger puppets for a fiver etc

Do you do the charity shops? If so you can usually pick up things from there and wrap them up prettily and make some fishing rods and they can fish them out of the heap.

I've been looking around too as ds will be 1 v shortly - found a web site that looks good. Now to try doing a link - here goes - BakerRoss - fingers crossed

How about This site for ideas. (I've automatically put you in on the party bag page btw)

Sorry I did not know that there was a party bag page.

Have kept all ideas for next year - but party is tomorrow and have to get things tonight or in the morning!!

the other thing you can do is not go for a back full of tiny things that get broken/thrown out immediately, but one decent thing - eg a lollipop, piece of cake and a mr men book, or one of those small playmobil people sets for £4. I find the small party favour things are incredibly expensive once you add them all up, better to spend £4-£5 on a single thing and then they feel they have got a present too.

Alternatively you can get A4 magic paint books (you know, that you paint using water and the colours miraculously appear) for 99p which always go down well with 3 year olds and are sufficiently big to fill up a bag!

BakerRoss are great for this sort of stuff - but probably too late for you this year Boe. I got mini magic painting books incredibly cheap this year. I also like to put in a little notebook and pencil. Some small sweeties and cake - but NO LOLLIES (my pet hate!)

If you want cheap sparkly stuff for girls, those high street shops are great, really cheap bangles, and such like. (Sorry, I've got boys, and I can't remember the name of the horrid place - might be Emma's World, or something like that - I'm sure you know what I mean!).

I budget just £1 per bag - the boys have had c.20 guests each this year, and by the time you've done the food and paid for the other entertainment, I think this is plenty - people don't expect more. I hate it when they boys come back from a party with a bag full of clearly expensive junk plastic ... They'd be just as happy with cheap plastic. And it all goes in the bin within a couple of days anyway

I'll second Wilkos. Or one of those cheap book shops that often have packets of pencils e.g. 20 for 99p, holographic.

DD went to a party recently where the mum had made cellophane packets filled with sweets and then tied with elastic and stuck a fancy pencil through the top like Dick Whittington's pack.

Kids only ever want sweets anyway and, to be honest, as a parent, I can do without all the tat that comes in party bags which is forgotten within five mins of getting home.

Buy cheap white t-shirts (£1.50 from Tescos) and some fabric painting felt pens - ideal quiet time activity after the food, and each child gets to take home their very own designer t-shirt .

Wilkinsons do bags of plastic toys that you put into party bags - I think it was something like 99p for 8 toys, which was a bargain as I had 32 bags to do.....

I also always buy the big size bags of sweets (Haribo mini bag things) and the cheaper version of milky ways, oh and a balloon in each too.

Hi Boe,

Do you have any cut price book shops hear you, like The Works? They often do very cheap things that are suitable. I bought of pack of glittery hologram pencils in there a while ago, it was about £2 for 20 pencils, so stuff like that works out very cheap. You can often gets packs of little rubbers shaped like flowers or animals or whatever that you can split up between the bags. Woolworths do things like packs of little Playdoh tubs, and they have a sale on at the moment, so that's worth a try. Someone's probably already said it but balloons and tubs of bubble mixture are also classics.
Hope the party goes well!

soothepoo, DD made a t-shirt just like that the other day. She was thrilled with it and wore it to school the next day which was coincidentally British Heart Foundation non-uniform day.

We did the T-shirt thing at DDs 1st birthday as they were all too little to do much else! and it gave the mums an activity. Went down really well.

Coming back to party bags though it can be a nightmare. We went to one a few weeks ago and they had beautiful hair bobbles etc and loads of stuff must have cost a fortune and loads of kids too. DS is having his entire class at his party so I want to keep it cheap: We are having cake, balloon, small snacksize sweet (or what about being healthy and going for a satsuma or something) and perhaps one other item. I fancy a pencil or pen as they are all just learning to write. Don't think you should feel pressured into getting loads of things and even small it soon ads up. Woolies have some good stuff or have you got a discount centre or something. Look for a set of bits and then split them - probably get better quality cheaper that way. I think hair bobbles or glitter is great for little girls.

SueW - she wasn't at a party near Tewkesbury, was she? That's where I pinched the idea from!

soothepoo, LOL, no.

I aw that Tesco had reduced their white t-shirts to 1.50 and decided to pick some up to play with. A friend of mine has just started doing batik and tie-dye personalised t-shirts for birthday presents and I thought something similar would make fun activity for the summer holidays.

Tesco kids' t-shirts are fab IMO. Very good quality for the price. I saw some for a similar price elsewhere this week (one of the cheap shops, Primark, Peacocks?) and they were horribly thin and nasty feeling in comparison.

Boe, I can't be arsed with party bags. Last year I bought 2 big bags of mini Mars bars/mini other chocolate and stuff and let them take something from each bag and a piece of cake. Crikey, parties cost enough I think without spending whatever it is a head on thanking the damn kids for coming But I do realise that I'm mean on this front!

Quite agree with you WWW. I used to do party bags (stuf like little notepads and crayons, or bubbles) but last time I spent a fortune on ds party, and decided that I wasn't going to do party bags at all. I just gave them cake.

Funny thing is, since then ds has been to a couple of parties that haven't given party bags - and both mothers have turned around to me and said how pleased they were that I didn't, because now they no longer feel obliged to.

I have done them, because it will be ds's first party where his little chums will be coming (last year was family only). I have put a balloon, a washable Crayola felt tip (from age 1 up), a party 'favour' from a multipack at Woolworths, a treat sized pack of Smarties and a mini pot of poster paint (12 for 99p). For the even younger ones, I bought 4 cardboard books at 49p each to replace the poster paints.

Am I the only food Nazi out there? Most of DS's friends are born October-December, and there was a definite season when 3yo DS (barely 3yo) kept bringing home party-bags full of sweets & chocolates after a whole afternoon of binging on cake, biscuits and squash. Not good. Just wish people didn't pack the bags out with so many sugary things.

Zebra, I only put chocolate in "my" party bags. It seems better than sweets for some reason! DSs never get to eat the sweets from any bags they get as I vet them. The unsuitable sweets get put in a bowl for Halloween trick or treaters I'm a cheapskate!

zebra I used to be like you but I've relaxed a lot more now.

I've found too that as DD has got older (they've all been 6yo parties this year) the party bags have got smaller.

Me too suew - Zebra, I swore sweets would never pass his dear little lips and he didn't know what crips were until he was about 3 I think. Now he eats very healthily 98% of the time but the other 2% I let him have cake, chocolate, sweets etc. We don't have anything like it in the house though so it does have to be a special trip out and he does have to have fruit/bread/yoghurt/pasta etc if he's hungry at home. At his 4th party I did optimistically put out huge bowls of satsumas and little boxes of raisins but they were almost all left so I put them in napkins with the pieces of cake to take home. Bet the kids weren't impressed when they got home! I've now accepted that parties are going to be fizzy sweet laden food fests and that's ok with me and how they should be I think. I also tell ds that no food is 'bad' - it just wouldn't keep you healthy if you ate it all the time so it's for occasional consumption only. Apart from Sunny D of course, which is the work of the devil