Any ideas for homemade gifts ds and I can make for grandparents etc which are 'nice' and not a bit, well naff??

[punchandjudy]

Have done simple things like shortbread, saltdough christmas ornanments, gingerbread men, foot/hand print pictures, raindeer food etc in the past, and I'm now stuck for original ideas.

So, any original ideas anyone?? Want to get started asap!

TIA

My friend last year gave lovely little homemade gifts, me and my Mother are going to try to copy her.

1/ Buy cheap tall glass (ikea)
2/ half fill with coloured glass pebbles
3/ fill a few weeks before with small bulbs (I think she used narccisus (sp?) a small daffodil typr flower)
4/ when star blooming tie a lovely ribbon round the glass.

They looked beatiful, she reckoned only cost a couple of pounds each and lasted for a few months.

you could make bath bombs, you could prob find a recipe on the net, depending on the age of child, you could make wind chimes, as you would need to threading,

My genius idea one year (and it went down a storm) was to get DSs to use a soft pencil to draw a picture on a cheap white plate or mug. I then went over the lines with gold 'resist' in a tube (part of a pottery painting kit).

Let that set/dry, then get them to paint the colours in the gaps. You then bake them in the oven to set the colours.

They did pictures of the GPs. Blubbing all round. No major expense. Result!

Oooh tell me more about the windchimes? Yes I had thought about bathbombs...how long do they keep? Could Imake some now, and then leave until christmas??

And the flowers sound nice too.

Keep them coming!!

VW thats a lovely idea too. Where did you get the pottery kit??

Homemade chocolate truffles. So cheap, so easy and yet so good. The only real expense is the packaging - pretty little boxes or just cellophane wrap tied with ribbon.

Made cookie mix in a nice jar last year - all ingredients in layers so it looked pretty, jar decorated with ribbon and card containing recipe, which was just add oil and milk or something)

Looking for link...

It was muffins!

if you get one of those enbroidery rings, they come in lots of different sizes, then get different lengths of string, ribbon, wool.

Then gather together beads, buttons, painted pasta tubes, anything that is pretty that you want to hang off, create lots of pretty hanging strings then attach them to the ring, you can thread what ever you want onto the string, it can just be eye catching or noisy, whatever you like really.

Then attach some string in three different areas at the top and bring together so you can hang it, and if you want you can either paint the ring, wrap ribbon around it, cover it in glue and pour glitter, or just leave it bare.

does that make sense?

My ceramic paints were a kit by Pebeo which included tubes of the gold and silver stuff to outline with, and about 10 little jars of paint. Think I bought it from Hobbycraft...?

take a look at this thread for some more ideas

Dd used to love collecting pine cones then we would dip them in lard and roll them in bird seed mix.
My Dad enjoyed watching the robins, etc feeding at the window.

Thank you Eddas for linking the 2 threads Some lovely ideas on both.

Baker Ross do some nice bird boxes which little ones can paint etc....

I know this thread is 2 months old, but had to resurrect it to say

WILF!

Thank you SOOOOOOO much for the painting pictures on plates tip - I bought a kit off ebay and DD did the drawings today on porcelain plates from Wilkos - she loved the idea and can't wait to paint them tomorrow - in the meantime they look well good with the gold outlines alone - am anticipating major welling up from GPs on Christmas Day!

Thanks again