One common theme in the emails I get this time of year is the cost of wrapping paper. Many people find it difficult to swallow that they’re investing $15 to $20 into paper that’s simply there to cover a box and will be torn to shreds on Christmas morning – and, frankly, I don’t blame them. For us, that means supplies for multiple homemade gifts or even a moderately priced store-purchased gift for someone. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather give a gift than give some shredded paper.

So, what can we do about it? Here are some options to consider. I have used all of these at various points.

Plain brown paper This is an old standby, of course. It creates a classic look for packages (“little brown packages tied up with string…”). You can easily jazz it up a bit with a stamp and some ink, covering the paper with little red candy canes or other festive shapes.

How can I get this inexpensively? The easiest way is to just request paper bags at the grocery store. Most grocery stores will bag your groceries in brown paper bags upon request. Then, when you’re home, save the bags. When you’re ready to wrap, just cut off the bottom of the bag, cut a single slice through the side of the bag, then flip it over so that the bag labeling is on the inside of the package.

Newspaper When I was growing up, many of my relatives would give gifts wrapped in the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper. They’d just save them throughout the year and use them as their gift wrapping for all gifts. I actually thought it was incredibly cool at the time, especially since the relatives that did it usually gave interesting gifts. When I was in college, one friend of mine would wrap all of his gifts in old issues of The Onion that he’d get from his parents.

How can I get this inexpensively? There are lots of ways to get free or discounted newspapers. For instance, one local gas station will give away old newspapers if someone is willing to take them, so I would often get the Sunday paper for free there early on Monday morning (for the coupon flyers, if nothing else). You can also keep an eye on recycling bins or else pick up copies of the local free newspaper.

Themed magazines A few years back, I started saving old magazine covers for a project. I simply asked some friends if I could have their old unwanted magazines and saved the covers from them.

When it came time to wrap gifts, I took covers from magazines associated with the gift itself and used it for the wrapping paper. For books, I used things like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. For CDs, I used covers of Rolling Stone. For an article of clothing that I gave to a female, I used a fashion magazine (I think it was W). For a piece of sporting equipment, I used Sports Illustrated.

How can I get this inexpensively? Tell your friends that you’re working on a project and you’d love to have any old magazines they have laying around. You’ll be surprised how many magazines come out of the woodwork if you ask. Then, just save the covers from them throughout the year and try to associate them with some of the gifts you’re giving.

Children’s drawings If you happen to have an excess of children’s art, this can make a perfect wrapping paper for gifts for the child’s grandparents or doting aunts or uncles. I can certainly say that we have an excess of children’s art around our home.

How can I get this inexpensively? If you have a child in preschool or elementary school, chances are you’re going to wind up with more art than you know what to do with. Just save some of the more charming pieces (that you’re willing to part with) and use them to wrap gifts.

Plan ahead If none of these really appeal to you, the best way to inexpensively wrap gifts is to simply plan ahead – way ahead. Just after Christmas, wrapping paper is usually on deep discount at department stores, so that’s the best time to buy yourself an abundance of the stuff.

How can I get this inexpensively? Take a bit of time to buy some paper between Christmas and New Years and stow it away in a closet for next year. Problem solved.

Throughout the fall, I ran a series of posts on homemade gifts with enough lead time so that interested parties could make some of the gifts on their own if they so chose. I wanted to top off the series by listing all of the items in the series, showing off the small mountain of stuff we made, and providing some pictures of some of the ways in which we packaged items.

Here are the homemade gift items we covered in the series:
Vanilla extract
Homemade soap
Caramel apple jam
Homemade beer
Wine jelly
Meals in a jar
Crocheted hat and scarf
Personalized cards and stationery
Handmade ornaments
Homemade cookies and gift bundling
Photo cubes

That’s our collection of completed gifts. A few of them (some of the beer and a few of the jars) had already been given as gifts when we took this picture.

As you can see, we made quite a bit of everything. The handmade greeting cards are the one thing that’s not very visible here – they’re in the white boxes near the back of the picture, with white ribbon (which I’ll show again below).

Beer and ornaments

As you can see, we made custom labels for the beer, depicting me with a Santa hat drinking a pint. We entitled the beer “Nit Wit,” mostly as a self-deprecating joke but also because the type of beer we made is a witbier.

Since we were reconstituting six pack boxes for this, we simply took extra Nit Wit labels and affixed them to the side of the carriers.

Also, something worth noting with the homemade ornaments: we’re using a ribbon to attach them to some of the jam, jelly, soup, and brownie mix jars that we’re giving as gifts.

Vanilla and mailing

We found some food-safe jars for the vanilla from an old friend who had extra jars from a food laboratory that were never going to get used. They hold eight ounces of liquid with screw tops.

For them, we made up labels entitled “Super Joe’s Super Homemade Vanilla Extract” (referring to our oldest son’s superhero alter ego).

A few of our gifts are traveling through the mail. For those, we’re packing up the soup in Ziploc bags so that they’ll ship easily.

Handmade cards

For the greeting cards, we wrapped each bundle (we made two bundles of 38 cards each) in tissue paper as you can see above, then sealed each bundle with a small snowflake sticker.

We then put these bundles into small garment boxes, closed the boxes, and wrapped some red ribbon around them, creating an understated look.

This was actually my favorite packaging of all of the gifts we made.

Soap

As we had a wide variety of soap sizes (including some “ball” soaps, which are something of a part of soapmaking tradition), we packaged them in different ways, as you can see above. Three soap balls make a cute little snowman!

Around each soap bundle, we wrapped a small piece of paper entitled “Princess Katie’s Handmade Castille Soap” (after our daughter).

We actually ended up with a lot of these, so there are many people who are getting two or even three bars of this soap as a gift.

Final thoughts
My wife, Sarah, deserves a lot of credit for helping all of these gifts reach completion. Some of the gifts were largely her project (like the scarves). Others were almost entirely my project (like the greeting cards). Others required both of our efforts (like the jams and jellies).

In any case, these gifts were made as a team, and without working together, we would have never been able to complete so many gifts.

This is a last-minute extra addition to the homemade gift series. Sarah and I have gone back and forth for a long while about whether to post this one in the series, but when we showed the items to several people as we were making them, the comments from them were almost universal: “You need to show this to your readers, Trent!”

Why didn’t I want to do a post about it? More than the other gifts in the series, Sarah and I both feel that these gifts will be cherished by the recipients. So, yesterday, I contacted the recipients and asked them to not read The Simple Dollar for a few days – I know the recipients, and I’m quite sure they won’t if I ask them not to.

So, what did we make?

We made photo cubes (or, in our case, not quite cubes – I’ll explain below) for home decoration use or paperweight use! The cubes are made out of cedar, though most woods would also work easily for them.

We got the idea from this post at the wonderful alphamom blog and more or less followed the procedure outlined there. I’ll reiterate it here, with some details on our own experiences.

I should note that in the below procedure, I’m often stating “we” for tasks both Sarah and I did individually. She put forth quite a lot of effort during the making of these cubes; in fact, I’d easily say she handled most of the work here, particularly in terms of putting more coats of Mod Podge on the cubes throughout the day.

What You Need
The materials you need are largely straightforward.

A cube-shaped block of wood – or two, or three
Sandpaper
Six photographs
Mod Podge
A sponge paint brush
A spray sealant for the finish (to prevent tackiness from the Mod Podge)

On acquiring the wood cubes We went to Home Depot, selected a cedar 4″ by 4″, and asked them to cut the board every four inches, making (theoretically) 4″ x 4″ x 4″ cubes. I should note here that we tried both Home Depot and Lowe’s for this purpose – the people at Lowe’s wouldn’t cut the board to our specifications and basically acted as though we were a bother, while the staff at Home Depot were very helpful.

The problem with this cut is that the cubes didn’t turn out to be perfectly 4″ x 4″ x 4″. After cutting, the cedar had dried and shrunk a small amount, so we ended up with blocks that measured about 3.5″ x 3.5″ x 4″.

We had two choices at this point: we could either shave 1/2″ off of one end of each cube or we could simply go with the slightly rectangular blocks. Our decision was made after mocking up a few of them – we decided to go with the oblong ones. We found that the slightly askew blocks made for much more interesting stacking possibilities if done in multiples.

If you want cubes, ask for a tape measure to measure the 4″ x 4″ before they cut it for you. Make sure that it actually measures 4″ by 4″.

On acquiring the Mod Podge, sponge brush, and spray sealant I went to a local Hobby Lobby intending to just pick up the Mod Podge and the brush, but the person there seemed fascinated with the project. She warned me that the Mod Podge might wind up being slightly tacky when we were finished, and she suggested a clear spray-on finishing spray that would eliminate the tackiness.

Both Hobby Lobby and Michael’s were very helpful during our various homemade gift projects. I never went away from either store with disappointment with their prices, product selection, or customer service.

Choosing Photographs
Choosing the photographs made for an interesting experience, too.

We decided to make photo cubes themed around our children. In the example above, for instance, we’ve chosen pictures for a cube full of pictures of our daughter.

Now, it’s easy to choose 4″ x 6″ snapshots of your target that are wonderful pictures on their own, but you quickly begin to realize that when you’re cropping them down to fit on the face of a cube, you’re shaving off a lot of the context of the picture. This can quickly make wonderful shots unusable or greatly reduce the likeability of the shot.

In other words, when you’re choosing snapshots for such a cube, choose ones that have a lot of potential space to crop away. If a photo is filled with your target, it’s not going to work for a cube face unless you shrink it down to the cube’s size.

If you do as we did, which involved selecting photographs out of a big box of prints, this is a really important factor to think about, and considering it up front will save you some effort in finding great pictures that work on cube faces.

Making the Cubes

As is often the case with projects like this, we put the cubes together during a family arts and crafts session, in which the children were making their own projects at the same time (hence the colorful doodles next to the cubes above).

We used scissors to trim the photos down to an appropriate size for each cube face. This was more of a process of repeated trimming and comparing to the various faces of the cube until it looked appropriate.

At the same time, the cube faces were a bit rough, so we sanded them down a bit. The faces themselves do not need to be perfectly smooth as they will be covered with photos, but the edges should be smoothed down to a nice rounded edge, depending on how exactly you want your cube to look.

The photographs were attached to the cubes using Mod Podge that was allowed to dry. This worked very well for directly attaching the photos.

Typically, we attached three photos, allowed them to dry, then attached the other three photos. This enabled us to not have to sit a drying photo on the bottom side of the cube, which might have caused uneven drying or warping (better safe than sorry).

After the photos were attached, we gave three faces of the cube a coating of Mod Podge. When you first put the Mod Podge on, it’ll look like you just coated the face with something white and it’ll look frighteningly bad.

Just wait. It will dry clear and look glossy.

We applied three coats to each face of the cube. We would coat three faces, let it dry, rotate the block, then coat three more faces and allow those faces to dry. Repeat that procedure three times and you have a finished cube.

Usually, we had several cubes going at the same time, so we would put another coat on several cubes all at once and let them dry all at once. Honestly, if you’re going through the effort of making one cube, the additional effort to make more is much less – the leap from one to two cubes is much less than the effort for just one cube.

After we had three coats on it, we sprayed the cubes with a clear finishing spray so that they wouldn’t be sticky over long periods. If the cubes are stacked, for example, we don’t want them to become stuck together in a tower.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, remember you can make cubes of any theme you’d like. Friends have suggested cubes made up of your favorite sports team (perhaps using cropped baseball cards), cubes of the home where you and the person you’re giving the cube to grew up or spent time together when you were younger, cubes depicting a trip taken together, or so on.

If you know of a person’s passion or something they care about deeply and that can be represented visually, you probably have what you need to make a photo cube for them that will touch their heart.

In a few days, I’ll have a final “homemade gift” post that shows what we did to package many of the gifts.

In the coming week, we’re going to be giving a few early small seasonal gifts to people, so with that in mind, we put the final finishing touches on our first gift basket, utilizing some of the items we already made.

One component of many of our baskets this year is going to be cookies. Sarah is a spectacular cookie maker and she delightfully packages them up for people as well. This year, she decided to use a peanut butter-based cookie recipe for her cookie bundles.

In the picture above, Sarah is making cookies using tofu as an egg substitute – these actually turn out really well and were well liked by someone who thinks tofu is disgusting, so it works. Here’s what you need.

6 eggs (or 1 1/2 cups whipped tofu)
2 sticks margarine or butter
3 cups brown sugar
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups peanut butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
12 oz. chocolate chips (milk or semi-sweet, as per your preference)
3/4 cup chopped nuts (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
1 1/2 cups M&Ms (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
9 cups rolled oats

Making cookies is easy.

Mix together the butter/margarine and the sugar. Then, add the eggs/tofu, vanilla, and peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add all remaining ingredients, then mix well. Shape into small balls (about the size of a golf ball) and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 F (175 C) for 8 to 10 minutes. They’re done when they hold together but are still really chewy.

Naturally, we wanted to package these fairly nicely. Sarah’s simple solution was to take a large square of clear Saran Wrap, place three cookies in a stack in the middle, draw the Saran Wrap up around the cookies, twist the top, and tie it with a ribbon.

Quite nice! Of course, you might want to just make big batches of these cookies for any family events and dinners you have coming up, either at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.

We wanted to give some of these cookie bundles away as part of larger gift baskets that incorporate other homemade gifts. Over the last few months, we’ve been searching a wide variety of supply stores looking for small gift baskets, eventually finding a large box of them for about $0.40 a basket.

Here’s the basket we prepared.

This basket contains a cookie bundle, a jar of the wine jelly, and an ornament hand-painted by our daughter (who likes blue and purple). It’s nestled on a piece of blank newspaper from our end roll.

This is a small example of the gift baskets we’ll be giving out this year. Some will be larger and contain other items that we’ve made, and I’ll show you some of these later.

This may be the last entry in the series. We may be making one more item – if we do, we’ll show it to you in two weeks. There will also be a final post showing some of the packaging that we’re using for these gifts.

This year, we decided to make a big batch of handmade Christmas tree ornaments for our home, just to make some “homey” Christmas items to decorate with. We decided to make them in the style of Christmas sugar cookies, with dough that would harden and look roughly like such cookies.

As we were making them, though, Sarah had the brilliant idea of making extras and giving them away as “add-ons” on some of the gifts we’d already made. “We could just put a ribbon through them and tie that ribbon around a jelly jar,” she suggested, referring to the jellies and jams we had already made for gifts.

Sounds like a good idea to me!

The ingredients for the dough are simple enough. One cup salt, two cups flour, five teaspoons of cinnamon, and 3/4 cup water (with maybe a bit more).

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the water slowly. Mix it together until it forms a ball, like so.

If you find the ball to be crumbly, add a bit more water, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. If you find it to be sticky, add a bit more flour, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. Eventually, you’ll find a happy medium – not too sticky, not too crumbly. That’s just what you want.

A note on the cinnamon: it’s added mostly to give the “cookie” ornaments a cinnamon smell. I felt that the five teaspoons didn’t give a very strong smell and if we were to make another batch of cookies, I would use at least ten teaspoons of cinnamon.

Once the dough is ready, wrap it up and put it in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to stiffen the dough. Then, roll the dough out to roughly 1/2″ thick (about 1.25 cm) – you can be approximate on this – on a lightly floured surface.

Use cookie cutters to cut the dough into shapes, then use a straw (or another device) to make a small hole on the top of the ornament shape. Then, bake until dry at 325 F – this usually takes about an hour. I recommend using parchment paper on top of a baking sheet to bake the ornaments.

We turned the leftover dough – the pieces between shapes that didn’t quite amount to enough to roll out again – into candy cane shapes for our own use.

Most of our ornaments were snowflakes, which we chose (for the time being) not to paint. We could have painted them white, of course.

The kids painted several of the ornaments, which turned this into a bit of a family art project. They went pretty over the top with the colors, though, which means these will make good additions to our tree and perhaps the trees of their grandparents, but maybe not the trees of others…

After the ornaments were painted, we sprayed them with a matte finish sprayable varnish so they would keep for a long time. We then slipped ribbons through some of the holes to look at our finished ornaments.

One important thing to note – these ornaments are actually surprisingly sturdy. One was dropped from a height of six feet onto a hardwood floor and as it fell, we fully expected it to break into bits. It seemed almost completely unharmed by the drop, perhaps losing a tiny crumb.

We look forward to tying these onto some of the handmade gifts we give out this year – and we also look forward to putting some of the ornaments on our own Christmas tree.

A few years ago, Rachel gave my wife Sarah a wonderful Christmas gift: some beautifully-constructed stationery with photos of her own choosing placed on the front of note cards, along with envelopes to mail them in. Here are three examples that Sarah has kept:

As you can see, there’s some variety in the cards – the border colors changed, some of the photos are in color and some are grayscale, some depict nature and others depict family. The full set, numbering about 25 or so, included a wide variety of pictures and colors.

Simply put, this was one of Sarah’s favorite gifts she’s ever received. Some of the cards are nice enough that they could easily be framed for home decorations. Others are so aesthetically pleasing to Sarah that she simply can’t bear to part with them.

When we first started thinking about doing homemade gifts for people this year, these cards were the first thing that Sarah mentioned. We should make a batch of them for a great gift for someone.

Our first step was finding the elements that we needed to pull this off. The things we needed most were the material for the cards themselves, some additional craft paper for the borders, and the photos we wanted to use.

For the card material and the craft paper, we simply checked flyers and waited patiently for a sale. We watched craft stores like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby, as well as art supply stores and paper stores. Eventually, we found some huge discounts on just the items we wanted, picking up big piles of both craft paper and cards for a pittance. However, even if you do buy them at face value, the cost for 20-30 cards’ worth of material is $10-15 if you shop around.

What about the pictures? This is something I’ve been dealing with lately and deserves a full post on its own. However, my rules of thumb are this:

If you need just a picture or two, home printing is probably worth it.
If you’re printing ten or fifteen, the local department store is probably the best place.
If you’re ordering a lot of pictures (enough to get free shipping – say, 100+), there are online sources that take the cake.

Now, what about assembling a card?

Here, I just chose a black and white snapshot of my youngest son (actually taken by my niece). The simplest thing to do, of course, would be to simply paste it to the front of a card without any border at all. It’s quite simple and works, but I want to add a bit more panache to it.

My next attempt was to add a brown frame to the picture, using craft paper and scissors. Since the card is 5″ by 7″ and the picture is 4″ by 6″, I cut the paper at 4 2/3″ by 6 2/3″, making a thick brown border and a thin white border around it.

Do you like that one? I did, but I wanted to keep going.

I then cut out a tan craft paper rectangle measuring 4 1/3″ by 6 1/3″, then placed that between the dark brown rectangle and the photo, creating a “multi”-border effect that I quite liked.

As you can see, there are infinite options here and you can make whatever you like – different colored cards, different colored borders made out of craft paper, different photographs. They all result in different effects.

What pictures should you choose? I would suggest using prints that would have some personal meaning for the recipient: family members they care about, locations that have meaning to them, and things like that. You can also choose some of your best natural shots as well to give the card recipients some variety in the pictures.

Another note: I think the cards look better if the edges on your own work aren’t absolutely perfect, so don’t obsess on straight perfection. A little tiny bit of skewing adds a wonderful handmade flavor to the cards that can’t be duplicated.

One final thought: if you send out holiday cards to your family and friends, consider making some of these instead. They will really stand out from the pack.

My wife, Sarah, loves to make homemade functional items, particularly ones that give her hands busywork when she’s doing something like watching a movie or rocking a baby. Thus, it’s not surprising that crocheting is a natural match for her.

This year, she elected to make a crocheted hat and scarf set for one particular relative (and is considering making a second set). Below, you can see our daughter modeling the output of this work, which took Sarah about eight hours to complete.

Obviously, you don’t need too much in terms of material to crochet – just a needle and a big pile of yarn. According to Sarah, it’s not too difficult to learn how to do it, either; you just need to know five or six simple techniques, then you just repeat them over and over again.

She recommends Lion Brand Yarn’s crocheting tutorial website for those who are interested in learning how to get started.

Another element that’s necessary when crocheting is to have a pattern to work from. As you can see in the picture above, Sarah made the hat based on a free pattern printed from a website (here’s the exact pattern she used).

One particularly great source for crochet patterns is Crochet Pattern Central, which offers a small mountain of patterns. Of particular note in relation to this post is the hat pattern list and the scarf pattern list.

Sarah did not use a scarf pattern and instead did it solely from memory, as she’s made scarves in the past for gifts (like the one I often wear in the winter).

The finished pair will make a nice gift for someone this Christmas.

Sarah is considering making at least one more hat-and-scarf set for the Christmas season. She estimates that each item took about four hours of nonstop work, but it’s work that can easily be done while watching a movie and can be set aside at almost any point so you can engage in other activities.

This is a gift that turns something very inexpensive and ordinary (yarn) into something beautiful (crocheted garments), with just a little time and care added by the gift giver.

A simple picture will probably explain things better than any introductory description could.

The jar on the left, obviously, is a “Rainbow Brownie” mix, to which you add just a couple liquid ingredients, pour into a pan, and bake at 350 F for 30 minutes. The one on the right is a soup mix, to which you add 6 cups of water (and, optionally, 1/2 lb. ground beef) and boil in a pot for 45 minutes (or in a crock pot for an afternoon).

The nice thing about jars like these is that you can easily mix the ingredients for yourself and keep them in a jar or a baggie for future use. They won’t look quite as pretty as these jars, but they’ll certainly be functional (see below).

Let’s take a peek at the contents of the two jars.

Soup Jar

In the picture above, we made a pint jar, which is a half-batch of what’s described below. That’s because we’re giving that jar to a couple with one very young child. If you want to give this to a larger family or want to ensure that the recipient has leftovers, make the full batch, as described below.

1/3 cup beef bullion granules
1/4 cup dried minced onion
1/2 cup dried split peas
1/2 cup twist macaroni
1/4 cup barley
2 cups dried lentils
1/3 cup long grain white rice
1 cup uncooked tri-color spiral pasta

We added these ingredients to a quart jar, going right down the list. As you can see above, Joe helped with this.

The finished soup jar has a nice pretty layered look to it, something very cute to put into the cupboard that’s also functional, too.

Of course, if you’d like, you can make the same mix for yourself and keep it in a baggie or a jar. We added all of these ingredients to a few baggies for our own use. A quick labeling with some identification of the contents and some instructions and we have some good meals ready to go for later this winter.

Brownie Jar

We followed a similar procedure with the brownie jar. You’ll need the following ingredients (and a quart jar, of course).

1 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2/3 cup cocoa powder
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup pecans or chocolate chips or M&Ms

First, mix the flour, baking powder, and salt together before putting them in the jar.

After that, you’re just going to be adding powdered ingredients to a quart jar. We started with the flour layer, then put the cocoa on top of that. At this point, spend some time to pack down the flour and cocoa mix with whatever you have on hand to push down on the powder; otherwise, you’ll run out of room before you can put in all of the mix-ins.

Put in the sugar next, then top it with the mix-ins (pecans or chocolate chips or M&Ms).

Finishing Steps

On the top of each jar, put an ordinary lid and a ring so that it can easily be opened later. We also put a sticker on the bottom of each jar listing the ingredients (in case recipients have allergies).

We also bought some bulk cloth at a fabric shop and cut it into large squares (5″ by 5″ or so), then tied this piece of cloth to the top of the jar with a ribbon.

To that ribbon, we also tied instruction tags. One side describes the item, the other side explains what needs to be done.

Here’s the text for the soup jar tag:

In large kettle, brown 1 lb. ground beef (optional). Remove tri-color pasta and reserve. Add rest to kettle with 12 cups water. Let come to a boil and simmer for 45 minutes. Add tri color pasta and simmer 15 minutes more.

Here’s the text for the brownie jar tag:

Preheat to 350 F. Grease 9″x13″ baking pan. Empty jar into large bowl and stir to blend. Mix in 1 cup melted butter, 3 eggs, and 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Mix thoroughly. Spread in pan. Bake 25-30 minutes. Cool completely before cutting. Optional but recommended: replace 1 cup butter with 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup applesauce.

In the end, you’ve got some cute – and highly functional – gifts to share whenever you need them.