Paint Your Way to Extra Income!
Have you ever thought about using totes to raise money for your organization? If not, you may want to give it a try. A tote bag is just an oversized purse made of canvas, often used to carry art supplies or groceries. A bag like this can be quite adorable in the right setting, and it is something that can sell well if it has some personality. Lucky for you, there are some simple things you can do to give tote bags personality and potentially sell them for a profit. This is a fun project to do, and it could be really successful in the long run. Here are some creative ideas to help you decorate tote bags for a fundraiser in the future.
Buying the Tote Bags
Before you can do any sort of decorating, you obviously need a set of tote bags to work with. You can buy blank ones at your local Hobby Lobby, or you could order a set of them online. They should be less than a buck a piece, so you can buy a huge set for a small amount of money. Get different sizes or colors if you want, but make sure to look in the clearance areas of any stores and websites you go into. They are sometimes the portals for great crafting materials in general.
Buying the Tote Bags
One of the easiest ways to spruce up blank tote bags is to add paint to them. They are made of canvas after all, so they hold paint really easily. If you have an artist or to in the group, you could have those people draw cool artwork on the bags. If you’re all a little drawing challenged, you could stick to handprints, words, shapes, and other elements that are simple to paint. Try to use paint for fabrics if you can, just to ensure that it is not going to bleed on you. If you get something that is somewhat thick, you should be able to make a good impression with your paint job.
Bedazzling the Tote Bags
There is nothing wrong with adding a little bling to your tote bags. You could buy rhinestones to glue onto the bags, and then they would be all shiny on display. You may want to put a picture of a crown and use the stones as fake jewels on the crown. Get creative with it, and bedazzle as much as you want. You are the one that has to be happy with it in the end.
Ribbon-izing the Tote Bags
One of my favorite things to do when I decorate tote bags is to put ribbons all along the side of them. To do this, all you have to do is punch a hole on the edge so that it creates a hole in the front and a hole in the back (not one big hole that spans the two). Then tie a ribbon through the holes in a cute little bow. If you do this all along both sides, you can really make a tote bag look like a million bucks.
Take some time to think of a really good decoration idea, and follow through with it. This may not be easy to do at first, but you should be able to find something you can do if you think hard enough. Worse comes to worse, just autograph the bags and try to sell them that way. Hopefully your group members will have enough stalker friends that will want to buy those from you in the future.
