Home made gift ideas
Holidays are approaching! Something home made, from the heart, can make for a very special gift for loved ones. You can create thoughtful, useful, and memorable gifts usually for much less than what you’d pay for something in the store, too. This can help keep your holiday spending budget under control. Also, keep in mind that the holidays are not the only time you can make homemade gifts! Birthdays and anniversaries count, too!
If you do a search online, you’ll come up with a TON of home made gift ideas. Here are a few to get you started:
- Kitchen accessories for the ladies in your life. Tube-shaped grocery bag holders, placemats, silverwear holders, cute dish towel racks, etc.
- Home-canned jams, jellies, preserves, salsa
- Create a “homecare” basket with home-made cleaning solutions, soaps, detergent and write up a booklet full of other cleaning recipes and nontoxic cleaning ideas.
- Sew clothing or accessories (bags, purses, decorate belts, etc.)
- Home-made household notebooks, pregnancy journals, “baby’s first year” or “school year” scrapbooks for the young and school aged children (made for their parents to write in, of course). Many free forms and templates are available online, or you can create your own.
- For the kids: bake up some home-made dough threading items, big beads for threading, puzzles and geometric shapes. Create a felt board or a flannel board (view my personal blog to see how I did it) complete with a set of felt or flannel board peices. Sew up cloth diapers for a new baby in your life. Dollhouses, dollhouse accessories, wooden trucks and a toolset (created out of tools you no longer need) can make nice age-appropriete gifts, also.
- Mason jar mixes: dry cookie and soup mixes make for nice, easy gifts.
Make a list of the people you need to shop for. Then list their interests, wants or needs. Then search for gifts you think they’d enjoy!
What have you done, or plan to do?
September 10th, 2007 at 6:50 am
I have a homemade coffee mix that I’ve made for about three years as “hostess” gifts and gift exchange items at Christmas. … but not everybody likes it. So last year I didn’t make as much and only gave to people who raved about it in the past.
In general, I’ve found even when making handmade items, there is still an expense involved with getting Mason jars, plastic tubs or tins, the ingredients or fabric supplies you need and such. Sometimes it does cost less to create handmade gifts; sometimes it is not worth the tradeoff.
Example: I made handcrafted greeting cards throughout the year for birthday, get-well, funerals, special occasions. This is much cheaper than paying $1 to $8 for a greeting card.
But at Christmas, I buy manufactured cards. A box of printed Christmas cards costs the same for what I can get a box of blank cards. It wasn’t worth the additional investment of my time for the two years I handcrafted Christmas cards when I wasn’t saving money.