Yes! You Can Afford Your Latest Craft Crush

It’s pretty obvious that I’m a big fan of the craft store coupons that the local big box craft stores publish each week. Why else would I devote a blog post to those coupons each week? Would you believe it if I told you that until just recently I had never used a craft store coupon? It’s true! In the past I shrugged them off as not being worth the trouble, my thinking being that 40% off one item wasn’t going to do me much good. How wrong could one girl get? Really, really wrong.

You see, I used to look longingly at my latest craft crushes, particularly the expensive ones. I was convinced that shelling out $30, $40 or more dollars for a craft tool just wasn’t a good ROI. That’s Return on Investment, a term I became all too familiar with when I became a business owner. I remember thinking the only way coupons worked for people was if they were like the ones on TV that made couponing a priority. I was never going to be that person. Besides the craft store coupons always seemed to exclude the really expensive items like Cricut and Minc. Until the day I realized I could make craft coupons work for me without all the time and coupon clipping.

That realization hit me when I found six packs of Copic Ciao markers at my local Michael’s. At $35 for six markers, it was way out of my price range for markers, no matter how much I’d been lusting after them after seeing their blending capabilities online. And then my phone dinged with a Retail Me Not alert. 50% off at Michael’s on one non-sale item. $17.50 wasn’t cheap for 6 markers, but it was what I considered acceptable to try them out Now, months later I’ve used craft store coupons (and competitor coupons) to save on more Copics, craft storage, Dylusions ink sprays, Tim Holtz items, expensive art mediums, a planner and more.

Take this past weekend for example. I’ve been wanting the Crop-o-dile Big Bite for quite some time. I love the look of eyelets and grommets in my art pieces, but pounding away at them with a hammer is a pain…sometimes literally. And haven’t we all wished we could punch a hole in the center of a 12 x 12 piece of paper at some point? Without folding it I mean. Yet every time I considered buying it, it just seemed wrong to pay $40 for such a specific use tool. This wasn’t a die I could use over and over, or a stamp set that could be used for cards, scrapbooking and mixed media artwork. This weekend with a 50% coupon in hand I decided it was finally time to invest in what I hoped would be a great addition to my craft tools. Of course, while in the store I decided I should probably check to see what other coupons might be available and was pleasantly surprised to see a 30% off entire purchase coupon as well. I grabbed a jar of Faber Castell Glaze Medium, and then happened to notice the $1 seasonal stamp bin had been reloaded with Christmas stamps so I grabbed 5 of them.

I ended up saving $24.20! My total for everything was about $10 less than purchasing the Crop-o-dile at full price would have been. You can see why I’ve become such a fan of craft store coupons, right?