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School is finally over and my third grader is having their closing party. Since everyone else pledged food and beverages, I decided to provide loot bags instead for his classmates. Loot or goodie bags now have more creative and fun designs than the simple plastic bags that we used to buy from the market. There are a lot of ideas that you can do yourself at home.

What I've picked is a chip bag layout. So basically, it's a loot bag with the packaging imitating a bag of chips, complete with nutritional facts and a barcode.

The materials needed for this project are very minimal. Some of the tools are scraper, pinking shears, crimper, and glue. But if you don't have these tools, you can do it with just a regular scissor and glue.

Selecting the ideal type of paper is also important. I used an A4-size thin specialty paper that has a glossy surface. I chose this because chip bags are supposed to be ripped off by hand and using thicker paper would make it hard to do.

For the layout, I just used Canva to drag and drop the details. The front image is just their class picture with the individual names of the students to make the gift a little more personal.

Once I'm satisfied with the chip bag layout, it's time to print a sample. Printers are the life and blood of paper crafts so having a continuous ink system is ideal to have.

Next, we're going to fold the sides with the help of a scraper. After that, we glue the bottom and run it into the crimping tool to have that crimped look that chip bags have. Finally, the pinking shears will create zigzag edges. And although a bit more tedious, if you don't have these tools, you can do away with the crimped effect and just create zigzag patterns with regular scissors.

Now for the fun part, we place the goodies inside the pouches and seal them off using the same methods we used for the bottom edge. The not so fun part is I need to repeat this about 20 more times for the entire class. Luckily, my wife helped out with the rest. I'm smiling in the picture because I get to eat some of the excess candies once everything is packaged.

And there you have it, my son is good to go for his closing party. I'm sure his classmates would be delighted to receive these chip bags especially when they see their names printed in the packaging.