Painful typing and a cute gift bag

Random, I know.....
And now it gets even worse.
I was going to start a diet with some ladies from church. You pay 10 bucks, weigh in in front of them (while at least one of them gasps...), and the first person to lose 10% of their body weight wins all the money. Two things have prevented me from joining. The first is that part in italics above and the second is that Nick said he wished we had carrot cake.
So I decided to make carrot cake instead of starting a diet. YUM! :)
But I do not have one of these:

so I ended up having lots of these:

and typing is so painful.
But the cake (with cream cheese frosting) is DELICIOUS....

On to the more useful part of this post.
I made a going-away gift for a friend last week and when it came time to wrap it up, I just didn't find any gift bags around the house that did it justice. I could do the dollar store but, eh, those didn't really fit either. And the idea of paying $4 or more at Target didn't thrill me.
I have a bunch of really cute shopping bags saved up for no apparent reason and it occurred to me that if I could just cover up the store name, one of them would be perfect! It was pretty and substantial, and had wonderful grosgrain ribbon handles. But what to cover up the logo with...
I decided to go with the old stand-by.....tissue paper flowers!

I love how it turned out. It took about half an hour to make and assemble everything, but so worth it. In fact, I love it so much I'm going to have to do more clothes shopping so I can get more bags! All in the name of saving money on gift bags, right?

Here's how I did it:
1. Cut out squares of tissue paper. I used about 8-10 squares for each flower. The smaller flowers had more than the larger ones because I just cut as many as I could get out of each sheet of tissue paper. The smaller flowers were probably around 4x4, the largest maybe 5 1/2?
2. Stack the squares and accordion fold them.
3. Tie the folded paper in the middle with a string . (You could use a pipe cleaner if you wanted a stem)
4. Trim both ends of the folded paper. I rounded mine, but you could achieve a different effect by making them pointy.
5. Begin to separate and lift/fluff each layer of tissue paper to form the flower. Since mine were going to be glued on the bag I only fluffed in one direction, but you could fluff all the way around and make a puffy little carnation if you wanted to stick them in a jar.
6. Glue them on the bag.
7. If they don't cover the logo entirely, cut out some leaves to cover the rest.
8. Be sure to tell the recipient how you "upcycled" the bag so she'll think you're really awesome. :)

What is in the bag? Well, that's another post....
p.s. If anyone is looking for a good gift for me, it's called the Pampered Chef slicer/grater. Just sayin'.