How to make Birthday Bags on a Budget

How to make Birthday Bags on a Budget – it can be done!

My son recently had his birthday and a part of me was disheartened by the fact that I couldn’t afford to throw him a birthday party, one where his friends could come. We had family things going on all week but nothing with his school friends.

After talking to him about it one afternoon a week before his birthday, I asked him if he would like to do anything for his birthday on the day besides attend school, He said that he would like to share his favourite things with his school friends. I thought it was a lovely idea so we chatted about what sort of items he would include. After a lengthy conversation I decided we could do some birthday bags, and I hunted around for the best bargains. I was on a strict budget to I checked where things were on offer and started making a list.

So how do you make up a birthday bag?

You need either a birthday bag or a party bag, there are many varieties available online. You can get them usually with a handle so they are perfect for little hands to hold.
I also chose to buy the plastic cones because I didn’t want Oreos to break up and/or go stale in the bags. This worked perfectly to break things up into sections, the Edibles and the Toys.

How do you stick to your Budget and get the best value?

✩ Sabrina’s Top Tips ✩

There are several ways to stick to budget and also find the best deals, here are my tips.
1. Decide your budget and make a list of what you need to buy.
2. How many are you buying for? Sometimes it’s cheaper to buy 50 bags than 20, bare this in mind.
3. Watch out for “lowest price in 30 days” and other useful slogans on offers.
4. Compare supermarkets online before you go out to do the shopping.
5. Use supermarket offers if you have a discount card with them.
6. Visit budget stores and compare the items you have seen online.
7. Always read the online reviews and filter by most recent as well.
8. Bulk Buy – Depending on whether you can reuse an item in the future for something else or even sell the remainder of the items on, bulk buying can be beneficial. (For us the Oreo’s were cheaper to bulk buy and so were the party bags). My son will happily eat any leftover biscuits let me tell you.
9. Work out the maximum you would like to spend, divide that by how many you are buying for, let’s say it’s 20 children. So divide your budget by 20, and you will understand how much it will cost to do a bag per child. Once you’ve made some essential purchases work out what is remaining of your budget and only spend what you have left. It might be that you have to buy a massive bag of sweets and divide them by hand into little sweet bags like I did with the Oreo biscuits.

Think smarter with your money and not buying things simply for convenience.

Why did we choose the items?


Picking for a mixture of genders is always tricky, but I don’t know a child who doesn’t love stickers and sweets / chocolate biscuits. Oreo is the choice because my son has food allergies but luckily he can eat original Oreo. The cars were because they were pull-back and super cool but also a car is gender neutral in my eyes, same goes for the bouncy balls. I asked all the parents (or my son told me) what peoples favourite colours were, and then labelled the bags and added the toys in accordingly. If I had someone who loved Red they got a red tie on their biscuit cone and they got a red car and a red ball. I would’ve loved to have included bubbles too but they would have sent me over budget. You could swap the bouncy balls for bubbles if your child would prefer those.

What did we include in the final bags?

20 Pull Back Cars cost £7
35 Bouncy Balls cost £7
Stickers cost £2.00 (50 sheets)
Oreo Biscuits cost £4
22 Haribo Sweets (Individual Packets) cost £3
100 Sweet Plastic Cones cost £3
40 Happy Birthday Bags cost £4

I divided the stickers between the children’s bags and kept the rest for my own reward charts at home, meaning each sheet only cost me 4 pence. Bargain!

Total Spent: £30.00
Total of Children: 16
Cost per Child: £1.79

I don’t think this was too bad, 16 happy children for less than £30 (as we had leftovers) and it was much cheaper than throwing a birthday party. My son got to share his favourite items with his friends too!

We have also got left over bouncy balls, birthday bags, cone bags, 6 sweet bags and 4 cars. The leftover pieces we can use whenever we like or give away at other occasions.

At the end of the day you can’t put a price on a child’s happiness and my son was over the moon to help me give out these little bags of joy to all of his friends at school, so that they could all celebrate his happy birthday together.

Thank you for reading this blog post today, I hope you have found it interesting and perhaps got a few useful tips in case you ever decide to do bags for your child’s birthday or a birthday party.

I hope I see you here again soon!

 Sabrina 

Are You Looking for Personalised Stickers? Do you want High Quality and a Unique Style? Then you should consider Sticker Market UK

Sticker Market is an online custom sticker printing provider in the UK. We are a one-stop-shop for stickers, labels, postcards, business cards, magnets, swing tags and many more.”

This month I am collaborating with the UK business Sticker Market UK. I was approached by them due to my honest reviews and already having worked with many UK based businesses. Thank you for choosing and trusting me to give your business the shout out that it so definitely deserves.

I have been really looking forward to bringing you this blog post, I have had lots of fun designing, and then testing and photographing this particular unique product. As someone who likes to stay organised I am always using stickers, be it on my wall planner, journal, calendar, reward chart for my son (the list goes on), but to be able to design and have printed my very own sticker, now that was something I had never done before.

Sticker Market provides printing for your own custom designs and can print a wide range of sizes and shapes to suit your needs. I chose Circle stickers for my set, however Rectangle and Square are available too.

Some of the types of stickers available include Art Paper Stickers (in Gloss/Matte/Uncoated). Kraft Paper Stickers. Standard Vinyl Stickers. Bumper Stickers (available in PVC Gloss/PVC Matte/Transparent Gloss/Hologram).

Sticker Market pride themselves on offering Cheap Personalised Sticker Printing in the UK and offer competitive prices. They also do Business Cards.

What Did I Design and Why?

I have designed my own personal Sticker so that I can easily organise my sons school items, water bottle, lunch box, snack box etc. It’s so much faster than writing out a label and sticking it on, it’s neater and far more legible too! Plus my son chose stars on my design so he knows that it is “his” sticker. I have also used them around my home for items that only my son uses such as his nature pot which houses all the rocks we find on walks and days out. As well as his lunch items I labelled his tray that we use for school paperwork every week.


Stickers are a fun and easy way to keep things organised and in this case so that people know what item belongs to whom etc. I chose to use this collaboration for my sons benefit, but during the product photography I found myself dreaming up all sorts of ways you could utilise this type of product.

So my final design reads “This belongs to Arlo” and my son chose stars as a symbol to make it his own.

When I realised I was able to design my own sticker it took me a few hours to consider that I was better off designing one to make my life easier. And that’s why I chose to make one to label all of my sons belongings that will be heading to school with him in September!

It took me a couple of hours to nail the design that I wanted, and then another hour to knock it out on my Photoshop software – bearing in mind I had to Google how to do a few things because I only ever use the basic editing tools for my photography like the brightness! – but making my own sticker was lots of fun!

I showed my son the final product and he read his name out loud before giving me the thumbs up. It was a simple yet effective design that I hoped he would soon learn was just for his items. After emailing it in and receiving the final proof from Sticker Market, I was very happy to go ahead and they got to printing. The whole start to finish was slick and I was well informed of the progress right up to when they shipped the box out to me.

Products in Use and Product Testing

Once the stickers were in my possession I found it really useful that they were cut individually, and not in sheets. This saves so much time and also storage space by having them in a neat little stack this way. Sheets take up so much more room I think (and yes I’m a parent with many sticker sheets and reward charts!). The Sticker is printed Bright and Bold and Sharp. My Sticker design looked just like it did on my screen from when I created it, I was very happy.

Now the time had come to get peeling and get sticking!

I gathered all of the items that I wanted to place stickers on to, and began to photograph them as well as test out the stickers durability by handling the items the stickers were attached to. I was impressed with how sticky they were on the variety of surfaces that I chose to use them on.

As you can see in my photography the Stickers I created stand out on a variety of different coloured surfaces and I was happy with their overall look. I chose my background colour so that it would stand out against many things. Knowing the lunch boxes were all blue, I didn’t want anything that would get lost against their vibrant colour. People need to bear these things in mind when designing their own stickers and think, what am I going to use them on. You might also consider whether or not you will need waterproof stickers and other aspects too.

My Overall Opinion

From start to finish this collaboration has been smooth and the customer service has been excellent. During the design process every question that I had was answered and my needs met.
Delivery was fast and I was kept up to date with regards my stickers being printed and posted. I was also sent an email with a proof of what my sticker would be like which was an excellent feature.

The quality of the Art Stickers that I chose are excellent, they are sharp and the colour is bold, the text is easy to read and the sticker itself is printed smoothly, there are no definitive lines from the printing process. I would definitely use Sticker Market UK in the future if I wanted any stickers printing.

As I mentioned earlier I was imagining lots of ways these Stickers could be utilised in daily life, so here are nine ways I have come up with, in which you could use Sticker Market products.

1. Weddings – Personalised Stickers for Wedding Favour Bags or Gifts or even sealing Invitations
2. Birthday Party – Design your own Stickers for a special birthday party or for Party Invitations
3. School – Whether you’re a teacher or a parent you could design a personalised set of stickers for your child/children or for saying “Great Work” to your class.
4. Keeping Belongings in Check – you might have several children with similar items, by designing their own stickers that they can attach to various items, nobody will argue again over what is there’s.
5. Holiday – Going on Holiday? It’s a good idea to mark up personal items and stickers are a fast way to do just that.
6. Small Business – Do you send out products as a small business? You could get business cards or seal packaging with your own unique stickers printed by Sticker Market UK.
7. Journals / Planners – You could design yourself a motivational sticker “You’ve Got This” and stick them where you need extra motivation to achieve, you can design many possible combinations.
8. Calendars – Need Stickers with peoples names on OR activities such as Swimming or Music Lesson, to save time writing it all out you could use stickers to keep track of your busy schedule.
9. Work Space – People in the office always stealing your stapler or holepunch? Not anymore because you can get your name put on some unique stickers and then put them on everything.

My Product Testing Ratings

Overall Appearance When in Use 5✩
Overall Product Quality 5✩
Customer Service 5✩
Delivery 5✩

I have based these ratings over a week worth of product testing including the sticker holding in place while objects are used and handled. I am satisfied with the durability and overall look of the stickers and rate this service as a 5/5.

Where Can You Find Sticker Market UK

If you want to find out more and browse products and current prices for yourself then please visit any of the following links I have supplied below. The website is your first port of call, because you can see exactly what is currently trending and any offers available. You can also contact Sticker Market directly from the website for any queries you might have.

The Sticker Market UK Website is Available HERE
The Sticker Market UK Facebook Page HERE
The Sticker Market UK Twitter Feed HERE
The Sticker Market UK Instagram Reel HERE


Below are some examples of the types and styles of Stickers available at Sticker Market UK.

Sticker Market Quote “Premium Experts in sticker printing with endless product labelling possibilities. Premium quality custom stickers at the cheapest price.”

How I Created This Review

I have been provided with a sample of Stickers in order to provide this Review. Product Testing and Honest Reviews are what I pride myself in giving my readers. Compared to other collaborations this blog post is slightly different, I was first asked to design the sticker that I wanted. That way it was more personal to me, as if I were an actual customer. So I did this, emailed it over and then this design was printed and sent out to me in order for me to test it. I got to keep the product (stickers) in exchange for this honest blog post and the product photography. The company outlined below contacted me directly for the purpose of this review.

Sticker Market, 8 St James’s Square, London, SW1Y 4JU.

Thank you for choosing to read Severn Wishes Blog today, I hope that you have found this review interesting and insightful. I certainly learned a lot more about the types of stickers that were available nowadays through exploring what Sticker Market UK had to offer.

I hope to see you again soon for my next product review, you never know what I might be asked to test next! How exciting!

Have a wonderful final few days of June 2022!

✩ Sabrina ✩