This is a pretty quick and straightforward "hack," but it worked so well, I have to share. Our younger son decided he wanted a Nintendo theme for his birthday party this year. A trip to Party Express revealed to us that there were no licensed favor bags or other decorations available for purchase, so we decided to do it ourselves. The boys had already received "How to Draw Nintendo" books for Christmas (the How to Draw books from Scholastic are a fantastic series, btw), and so we started there. We had the boys trace out their favorite characters using good old tracing paper and dark pencils. I plopped each tracing on the scanner with a piece of white paper as a backing, just in case (may not be necessary, your mileage may vary), and set the scanner to black and white. And voila, perfect printable line-images. The boys are going to hand color each one in, and cut them out to be stapled to normal brown-paper lunchbags to make the favor bags. A great way to make hand-crafted party decorations at home!
Update: Here are some pictures of the final product, handed out at the party this weekend.
