Some cook, I sew: creativity brings joy: Dollar store JOY

When my kids were young and money was super tight, Christmas was stressful. And then a friend introduced me to dollar stores. Oh, what a find!!!

I could take my kids Christmas shopping for their siblings without breaking the bank.

Fast forward to my youngest child in high school and beyond. She loves exploring the inner nooks of dollar stores more than most people. She LOVES to decorate for every holiday imaginable but she's careful with money.

Enter dollar stores. To be specific, Dollar Tree.

It's a beautiful thing because everything is exactly $1. So if you have $5 and change, you can buy 5 items. (Don't forget some change or you can only buy 4 items and still pay tax.

The addiction is real. I dropped in for posterboard today. A big sheet of white posterboard is only 50 cents. That's right. 50 pennies! If that's what you've got, they'll take the pennies. (Be kind to the cashier though and don't bring $5 of pennies!!! Take that to your bank.)

And today, you even get to feel like you helped the economy even more by putting coins back into circulation!

So what kinds of things can you buy? Everything! Here's what I picked up:

Lay's Stax. Because I have a canker sore in the back of my throat and Lay's helps clear those up. I picked up Barbecue ones for other family members because they like them! $1

Posterboard, but I found a package of 4 that were already cut down to the right size. I could have saved a bit by cutting it myself, but why? We'll use these in record our ideas of things to do rather than a white board right now. It will be messier, but we'll see what has been crossed off instead of erased! I already have markers!

A notebook for keeping my lists of things that I still need to get done. My to-do list, if you will. Arrow tabs to bookmark to-do, journal, or ideas that I record for easy referencing. Crepe streamers in pink, yellow, and purple to decorate our house as needed.

A pack of 3 small notebooks that will fit in a small pocket on my purse so I can record ideas and impressions whenever they come. Dollar Tree excels at keeping an excellent variety of stationery items!