Need gift ideas

[dyno]

I am going to have to have a very inexpensive Christmas this year. I am sure in this economy I am not going to be the only one.

I am trying to get some good ideas for creative, inexpensive gift ideas...lets see what we can come up with.... thanks!

[kadi]

1. Fresh baked pumpkin, pear, or banana bread.
2. Homemade granola in a mason jar with ribbon & recipe attached.
3. Decorated candle with something the recipient likes - I used rub on metallic decals to decorate a midnight blue candle with golden dragonflies for my SIL.
4. A journal with a handmade bookmark with the recipient's name on it (one of my favorite gifts I received).
5. Photo of a special event or person in a simple frame. (One of my relatives gave me a photo of my grandmother in a maple frame - special because my grandmother had passed away that year & because my bedroom set is maple.)
6. Homemade Xmas ornaments

[dyno]

Great ideas, if someone has a favorite jar recipe maybe you could share that too.

I forgot to add that I have young grandkids, both girls and boys from 1 year to 6 and then a 10 year old girl. Kids, boys and girls in their twenties and my mom in her early 70's.

[anewday]

My daughter is 6 1/2 and recently got her ears pierced. She is tickled pink w/ inexpensive jewelry! I can go to Claire's in the mall and they usually have buy 1 get 1/2 off or similar deals on just about everthing. She loves the breacelets, necklecaes, hair clips, headbands, etc. Also the little makeup sets (lipgloss, body glitter). My son is 2 1/2 and is fascinated w/ anything with wheels! If you have a Target nearby, my local Target has a section of DVDS (it's located in a different spot from the regular DVD's) that is mostly kids' stuff. They are $5.50 each, they have everything from Hello Kitty, Barbie, Bratz, Strawberryshortcake, to Barney, Thomas, Carebears, etc. My kids love those DVDs.

I am going to be ordering calendars from photobucket.com for a lot of relatives. I made one for my husband for his birthday and it is great-he shows it to everyone. It is a full size 12 month calendar. YOu upload your pictures onto photobucket, then place them on the pages and order. I did 4 pictures to a page. It was about $25 , and is a great sentimental gift. They also have cheaper things, llke mugs, keychains, photobooks, etc. I was very, very pleased with the quality, especially for the price. I did themes- pics of us and the kids and pets- Christmas ones for Dec, Halloween ones, each kids had their own months, their birthday months had pictures of them only- I even had a month dedicated to the pets :) He is a police officer and he has dragged that calendar into court to show the ladies ther and everywhere else. I was very happy with it, if you can't tell, lol.

[ICNDonna]

For your mom --- write a check payable to something like "my wonderful Mom" and instead of an amount, make it for taking her someplace special, washing her car, or ?.

And books for the kids with personalized book marks.

Donna

[mary124]

In our family we are picking names for the older children and adults (limiting the amount to $25.00). For the kids under 10 they are getting something simple (and inexpensive as well) Back in January the Disney store closed at the mall and I picked up the 3 princesses ( 3 dolls for $1.99 each they were $14.99 regular price!) and a Micky snowglobe for $10.00 which was another steal.) - I have somewhat started my shopping- picking up small things here and there- I somewhat think that Cold Winters and Christmas goes hand in hand-- of course, here in Austin we don't usually have cold winters-maybe a handful of days and that is usually late January/early February. So doing Christmas shopping when its 75 degrees out and warmer is hard to do even though I been doing this mostly all of my life. (of course there will be a lot of people who will disagree with me on that issue!!)

[Goldfinch]

My SIL always bakes and gives a variety plate of goodies--cookies, candies, etc. tied up with extravagant ribbons. Everyone in the world loves getting this. (Except I don't care because I have no sweet-tooth. Means more for my husband.)

We have made jam and also given olive oil as a gift and that goes over well for people who like to cook. Buying a bottle of pricey oil can be prohibitive, but we found that if you can locate a very large can of really good olive oil for a good price you can decant it into nice bottles, slap on a home-made label, and it isn't an expensive gift. We used to make flavored vinegars, but being on the IC diet doesn't exactly make we want to mess with a bunch of vinegar.

Find out if any of the kids or adults are left-handed. There are several good on-line sources for left-handed stuff. We gave my nephew a really nice pair of left-handed scissors and he was more excited about that than any of the toys he received. If any of the grown-ups are left-handed, a left-handed soup ladle is about the most useful left-handed object there is. Another good gift for kids is an origami set--a book and papers. I'm always surprised how many boys actually enjoy this. Also great for kids is that "Make-a-plate" thing, where you send in a drawing and they send you back a plate with your drawing.

[yvette]

One of the ideas I will do (and have done in the past) is make goodie bags of gourmet chocolate I've bought in bulk and them separate into fancy boxes or bags that I've either made or decorated my self. The boxes can be fun if you can find them at a paper/artsty craft store.I have left over tissue paper, bows and cellophane bags from last year, too! :)

For my friend who is a hair stylist: she's giving her clients gift certificates (for a small amount like $5 or $10 towards their next service) run off her printer. We'll find fancy gold or metallic paper at Staples ---they had it last year and then we'll find matching envelopes. And them we'll just add some stickers and address them with fancy markers or metallic pens. You could do what Donna mentioned and make gift Certificates for anything from taking someone out to lunch, babysitting, to cook someone's favorite dinner....whatever makes the recipient happy.

Look at the dollar stores and see what you could come up with. You could make up a small gift pak. of fluffy socks, a couple packs of hot cocoa, a book (my dollar store sells novels) nail files and polish. For $5 you could make a "girl's nite in" gift pak.

Dollar stores will now have fancy cookie tins or Christmas themed dishes, plates. You could get oreos and and hand dip them in chocolate (half milk and half white or dk choclate?) and put them on your fancy dollar store platter and they can keep the whole enchilada! I've used colored Saran-Wrap and wrap those items upwards, use curling ribbon and snip off the excess afterwards so it looks all professional, neat and tidy :D

You could give some people wine....certain trader joes stores carry their wine "Charles Shaw" (it's also known as *2-buck Chuck* --b/c it costs $2 a bottle!) Don't let the price fool you....it's flavor and quality rival those that cost 40x more!! Saw that on the food porn channel once..LOL! :lmao:
But you can buy pretty decent wine for $5 to $8/bottle at the local packy.

If I can think of anything else, I'll come back and post :)

[yvette]

Ok the kids: Again the dollar store...You could get a tin, put some Markers, glue googly eyes, buttons, pieces of felt, pieces of yarns, ribbons etc..what ever you've got on hand even. And 1 or 2 plain white tube socks. They can each get their own kit to make sock puppets! They can all be busy creating and the adults can have their coffee and dessert in peace :smile tee

[dyno]

Great ideas! Now something hit me today as I was making my hour plus ride to work I was looking at some "country" magazines that have crafty stuff in them.

Is there a way I can take old photographs, small ones taken with a camera, scan them into my computer, print off the picture onto paper and somehow put it onto some type of heavy poster board or something to make a picture collage?

I got this idea to make my mom a picture of us kids growing up and some of the old family pictures I have but to have it all on one neat picture. I think she would like it since my dad, brother and sister have all already died and it is just her and I now in our immediate family. I would then frame it with some type of simple frame.

[VickiB]

Is there a way I can take old photographs, small ones taken with a camera, scan them into my computer, print off the picture onto paper and somehow put it onto some type of heavy poster board or something to make a picture collage?

That's a great idea! Foamboard would be an ideal support for this. Perhaps some of your office supply stores offer wide format printing. Then you could design the entire image to size on the computer, take it in, and have them print it.

When my budget was strapped I always gave homemade baked goodies as gifts. People tend to get company over the holidays and it gives them a variety to offer guests. Sure wish someone would give that kind of a gift to me!

Kids are hard though. I really like Yvette's idea of putting together an art kit for them.

Vicki

[yvette]

Oh definitely! Vicki is right, you can get foam core at office supply stores and craft stores. I've seen people do christmas decorations with photo transfer paper and they make puffy little pillows on the tree with family pics iron-on'd there. of course depends on how much you want to sew...me not so much :)

[ICNDonna]

Talking about pictures made me think of something I had my Brownie Girl Scout troop do for gifts for their mothers. We cut out a picture of each girl and used melted wax to stick it to a bar of soap --- then we "painted" melted wax over the picture. They were really cute. The children on your list just might like bars of soap with their very own pictures on them. You can also take a picture to a copy place, like Kinko's, and have them copy to an iron-on --- then put it on a T-shirt. I did one for a grandchild using a picture of her with one of our sheep and she totally loved it.

Donna

[SharonA]

If you live close to your Grandkids...You can write an IOU for a "special time with Grandma" might be fun for the older Grandkids. You can print something along these lines...

Grandma will pick you up...
Take you to the Dollar Store and give you $XX.00 for you to buy anything you want.
Take you to... (their favorite fast food place)...
Then you will go home with Grandma to spend the night.
You and Grandma will spend the evening baking cookies, watching a video, reading out loud, coloring, telling stories, etc...
The next morning, Grandma will make you French Toast for breakfast.
After breakfast, Grandma will take you home.

[dyno]

How would one go about making some kind of vinyl placement with the hard vinyl bottom and then have the kids pics on the top and laminate it or something so they could have personalized placemats?

[dg2901]

Jolene--Photobucket has numerous items they can make from prints you provide. Qoop is another site that does the same.

[dyno]

Thanks! I hope we will get some more good ideas, these have been great. I know a lot of people are hurting financially this year and I am sure others will be looking at this thread too!

[ICNDonna]

I have a heat laminator that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. Last summer I actually made place mats at the summer reading program at our little library. The little kids made pictures and then I laminated them. I think you can get a heat laminator fairly inexpensively.

Donna

[VickiB]

I know our office supply store in town will laminate items. It wouldn't surprise me if the big stores like Office Depot, Staples, etc, didn't offer this service as well.

I can't imagine it's very expensive. Placemats would be a nice idea! -For kids and adults both!

Vicki

[Marilyn Rute]

I make a photo album for each grandchild, using pictures of the past year, events, holidays, zoo visits etc. I use the small flexable albums with maybe 24 photos or so ( Walgreens used to give them out with your photo order) I laminate a good picture of them on the front cover. My grandchildren are all under the age of 5, When they reached 1 or so, I made an album with all of their relatives, near and far, I even included a picture of their recently deceased Great-grandmother and Uncle. Now when they won’t corporate for picture taking all I need to say is “ This will be in your album” ..all smiles

[BrittanysDance]

Any tea or coffee drinkers? Here's an idea I am doing this year.

Find inexpesive little tea pots (decorative is fine or get ones you can actually put hot water into, but not boil in) - and fill it with tea bags of all types. I've found quite a few for less than $3.00 actually that you can actually use (not just decorative purposes! I went to the dollar store and got very pretty chargers / trays ($1.00) and set the tea pot on it and plan on surrounding that with homemad goodies, some teaspoons (also dollar store) and maybe even 2 pretty teacups! If you're one who loves to antique like myself, try to find antique teacups in the thrift stores that are in MINT condition (they have them at Goodwill or Salvation army even for less than $5.00 each and that includes the matching saucer!). You can use those too - and fill those with teabags, a little matching spoon, etc. They also have those little gormet bags of coffee now too.

The sky's the limit on this and for a family gift (think neighbors, church pastor, friends) - you can do it all for less than $20.00 as a "family gift" - for individuals, even less than that!

Hugs
Brittany

[dyno]

I know I am doing placemats with some of my scrap sewing material. I may try some of those hot pads too with the spices in them, again I have tons of scrap material.

This weekend while working at our other house, I tried working with some foam boards, fabric and some laminating pouches. I may be able to make those work for small placemats for the kids. Now while I am at our home with my main computer for a few days again I am going to try printing off some pictures.

I also brought home some pears from our pear tree and going to try making some pear butter or pear jams, that might be a good thing in a gift basket.

Just a few weeks ago my daughters fiance asked if I still make that beef jerky I had made in the past, so I may make up some of that too as part of his gift.

I love this idea of making home made gifts, I think it brings back some of the old time values.

[bluetou]

I have not had a chance to read the rest of the responses to your inquiry.

But this is what I do for a nice inexpensive but very thoughtful and kind gift.

I will buy a very nice good quality candle (at Halmark), (usually can get great deals this time of year, buy one get second half price). I then match it up with a nice herbal tea and a quality truffle of chocolate.

What more do you need, a peaceful lit candle, sipping on quality herbal tea, with a smidgen of a special treat. What more do you want.

I even sometimes will BURN a FAVOURITE CD of mine and include it in the gift.

AND .....I always add a little quote with my gifts.

Peace

:pray: