Ridiculously cheap dew drops at Michaels

I'm sure most of you are familiar with "dew drops" that are used on cards. Some places sell them as card "skittles". I've even made my own in the past from a glue stick and hot glue gun (thanks to Lindsay Weirich for the idea). But a few gals on Splitcoast mentioned finding a product in Michaels that was the same thing as the dew drops you can buy, except they're clear.

Most of them found these "dew drops" in the floral arranging section, since that's one of the uses listed on the packaging. I looked several times and never found them at my Michaels - until today. As I was looking at the new MS PATP punches (admiring the iron gate punches!), I saw a clip display of these for $5.99:



They didn't come in that jar. I wanted to get a picture of the packaging before I tore into it, but in my excitement to count them, I forgot and tore into it anyway. :) That jar is a recycled peanut butter jar, and it's not the 18-oz size, either. It's bigger. But that is the hang tag from the package sitting right in front of it. They come in a clear plastic bag with this hang tag attached to the top. (Unbeknownst to me, my son had put a red paper in the jar. They're really not tinted pink when you buy them.)

With my 40%-off coupon, I got the whole package for $3.60. I couldn't wait to get home and count them all because I knew there were several hundred of them in there. (Yes, I'm a math geek and always have to figure out the unit price of everything I buy.) Imagine my surprise to find, not just a few hundred, but a few thousand of them in the package! 3200, to be exact. Umm, I think that's about four lifetime's worth of dew drops ...

At any rate, once you do the math, you can see that you're getting 100 of them for $0.11. How much are the colored dew drops you can buy at craft stores? How about 100 of them for $9.49? Don't believe me? Go check it out! For that price, I'll gladly color them with my BIC markers to have just the right shade for my project! (And that only takes about two seconds for each one.)



I got a few dew drops as a thank you gift with an online order I had placed last year, so I pulled them out and put them side by side. There isn't one difference, except for the color, and even some of the expensive dew drops are clear anyway.

This probably isn't quite as cheap as making them with hot glue (or is it?), but since it requires no effort and no mess, I was interested. :) Besides, these won't stick together in a bottle like some of my hot glue dew drops have done.

Anyway, if you want to look for them in your Michaels store, check out the hang tag in the picture. It's a brown kraft-type paper, and they are packaged in a clear thick plastic bag. Here's the information from the front of the label:

"Decorative Accents, Net Wt. 12 ozs."

And the back label:

"Item #72079, Acrylic Discs, Panacea Products Corp."

It says you can use them for florals, crafts, parties and weddings, so your store might put them in one of those sections. It's worth a look!