How to Make Candy Sleeves

Some of my favorite candies growing up were sixlets.  You know those small, candy coated chocolate candies that come in a skinny plastic sleeve?  Those plastic sleeves make it really easy to just push all the candies into your mouth at one time!  Well, I still love sixlets and instead of the boring old colors, like brown, green, yellow and orange they had back in the day, they come in some really awesome colors!  I wanted to use some of those fun colors to attach to my business cards for a blog conference I was going to.  I bought a bunch of candy in colors that matched the color scheme of my blog.  Then I needed to figure out how to attach them to the card.  That is how I came up with how to make candy sleeves to fit the sixlets I wanted to use.

The first thing I did was head to Hobby Lobby to look for a bag I could use.  The smallest I could find in the candy aisle was one that was about 3 inches wide and 4 inches long.  I didn’t want to have to fill that bag.  Considering I was wanting to make about 50 “special” cards with a treat attached.  That would be a lot of candy (and $$$).  I needed to find a way to make them smaller so  I went ahead and bought those small plastic bags.  When I got home I got out my food saver vacuum sealer.  I actually use my vacuum sealer a lot.  And not just to vacuum seal.  I use it to seal the tops of chip bags, salad bags and any other plastic bags that I want to keep the contents fresh.

I placed the small bag I got from Hobby Lobby onto the heating strip of the food saver about 1/3 of the length down.  Then I closed it and locked it into place and instead of using the vac seal button, I just used the seal button!  When it was done I had a nice sealed edge.

I was able to do each bag 2 times in the food saver.

Then using scissors, or even a paper cutter, I cut down the sealed area, creating 3 plastic sleeves from each 3″ x 4″ bag.

I filled the sleeves with candy.  The candy slide right down in the sleeves.  It looked just how I imagined it!

From there I trimmed the tops and then attached them to my business cards with a staple.

I didn’t seal the tops of the candy sleeves that I attached to my business cards, but I did in the ones pictured below.  You just follow the same steps that you used to make the seal using the food saver.

These were a little time consuming to make but I thought the personal touch was extra fun.  I was so set on finding the perfect size bag or sleeve to fit this certain candy and when I couldn’t find it, I made it work.  Now I know I can use this process in the future for party planning or gift giving.

Who knew my food saver would be a great crafting tool?!?!

Happy Crafting!

Liz