Homemade Gifts - Parties for Pennies

Hey party people!
Hope your week has been full of drinking & merrying. 🙂
Did you know that the average person will spend over $800 on Christmas gifts this year? That is a lot of pennies! I like to try & find ways that you can save some of those pennies. One great way to do that is by making Christmas gifts. This week, I’m going to show you some gift ideas that you can make for way less than $800!
My first idea came about because of a personal need of mine. Every time I’m out at a store, I want to buy a dish towel. There are so many cute ones & we need more. My husband does not agree with this. He thinks we have plenty & so what if they’re mismatched or holey…they fulfill the purpose. Dishtowels are like shoes…you can always use more and you need them in all different colors and for different occasions. Can I get an amen? (ps…that wasn’t a dig on my husband, we joke about it)
These kitchen towels would make great gifts for your neighbors & friends and of course be great hostess gifts.
These are the materials you should gather:

Flour sack towels (mine are from Target & were $3 for a 4-pack), wine cork, paint and/or fabric paint pen and, if you’re using paint, fabric medium (not pictured).

I know this is kinda small but this was my inspiration for my first towel.

It’s really easy to mix the fabric medium with your paint. Just add equal parts of each. I used silver and red acrylic paint to create a holly branch-like pattern.Using a thin paint brush I created the silver stems and I used a homemade leaf stamp from foam board (sorry I didn’t get any pictures…and just a tip…a sponge would’ve been better than the foam).

For my red berries, I simply used an old cork as my stamp.

Okay, so it doesn’t look exactly like my inspiration photo but I like how it ended up.

Once you’ve completed your pattern (you can replicate this one, another one I’m about to show you or use your own creative genuis), allow it to dry for 24 hours. Then place an old t-shirt or towel over your artwork and iron for 20 seconds. Move the iron around by picking it up and placing on each area you’re working on. This heat sets the paint onto the fabric.

Now you’re ready to, in the words of the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give it away, give it away, give it away now.” For my neighbors, I’m going to use this to wrap up some antibacterial hand wash soap for the kitchen sink. I love baking things but 1) I get anxious that my neighbors won’t like what I make and 2) sometimes we get soo many goodies over the holidays that I like to do something different (still inexpensive).

Now to my next little kitchen towel project. I saw something from Joss & Main the other week that I swooned over. They were kitchen towels that had an outline of a state on them with a tiny little heart within the state. I LOVED them. Sad thing? There were no state of Georgia towels and most of the ones they had were sold out. The happy thing?

These are sooo stinkin easy to make!

Here are the steps:

1) Print out a picture of your state from your computer.

2) Slide the picture of your state underneath the towel & using a fabric pen, outline the state.

3) Using paint (mixed with fabric medium) or a fabric pen, make a little heart inside the state. The print out I used had the placement of Atlanta (my hometown) so I just stuck my little heart right there. With a pencil, I drew a heart and then filled it in with my red paint. I’m no artist but a heart, I can do.

4) Heat set using an iron (as the above directions say), after drying for 24 hours.

Boom! You’re done. I think it took me 5-7 minutes to outline the state and add the heart.

I adore this towel. This will be my inexpensive gift to myself. ;p

Total Cost Breakdown:

Towels – $0.75/ea

Paint – already had (but about $2)

Fabric Medium – already had (Hobby Lobby has it for $4.99)

Wine Cork & Foam board – already owned

Total: $0.75 per gift

Since I already had a lot of the stuff, it didn’t cost me much at all but you can pick up all the supples for under $10 and be able to make your whole neighborhood gifts for about $1/each! ;p

Here are a few other designs I tried out, in case you wanted something different. The first & the third are my favorite.