beach party favors: the coloring book and pencils

i mentioned last week that alex wanted a beach birthday party also (in addition to her beach themed room). her birthday party at home is family but she wants very much to give something to her friends at school in addition to bringing cupcakes so we started some goodie bags. i think these bags are going to end up being pretty darn fun. so, the first thing i started putting together for her friends is a coloring book and colored pencils. i had actually drawn up some items that i planned on painting in her room (which i mentioned was really scaled down later) so i started with those, converted them to outline form, added a few more drawings and printed them out on regular printer paper. i created a color cover, cut them all out, sorted them all in order how i wanted and then went to assemble. i have a long arm stapler but it doesn't work very well at all, jamming all the time. i tried the stapler first but that was doing more damage than good, so i decided why not stitch the books. i had orange thread, which matches the color theme and i just stitched down the middle. the first time i tried my needle was too big, but i switched to a smaller needle and they turned out great - they're almost perferated but are holding together so far. to go with the coloring books i found these super cute mini colored pencils in tubes. they're so tiny and cute, each tube contains 12 colored pencils. they had some cheesy label on them when i received them, but those came off fairly easily. i printed out the drawings in full color on sticker labels and stuck those on where i took off the cheesy labels. so far, so good; and this is only one part of the goodie bags.