Personalised Cards & Gift Tags

I love sending (and receiving, but no-one ever does! :-(   )  personalised presents and cards.  When I gave my cousin the mini photo album of her son taken over 20 years ago, she was absolutely delighted.  This is why I will be making the majority of my presents & cards in a personal way this Christmas.

I was delighted to find that the HP Creativity website have got LOADS of items to personalise (free) including these gift tags that I have made.   (Some of the options incidently, use Smilebox technology, which is a program that gets put on your computer. There are other options including Disney Xmas - these are on the theme of 'A Christmas Carol' but you don't have to use these).

I also used something else 'free' to make these pictures:

and

The background papers were 'free' as in they came with a cardmaking magazine this month, 'Papercrafting Essentials'.  You can, of course, get papers free on the internet if you hunt around.  Crafting can be an expensive hobby, so its good to keep the costs down when you can and 'free' and 'personalised' feel good! 

Thanks for looking and for any comments,

See you tomorrow,

qwiksave

Personalised pens

On the crafty forums of  MSE (moneysavingexpert.com) we strive to find gifts and crafts that don't cost us too much money, and obviously making our own handmade gifts is a good way of achieving this.  The crafters amongt us also like to source craft supplies that also don't cost us too much either so we are always on the look out for sales and bargains which we like to tell each other about!  (Come and join us on the 'Moneysaving Special Occassions Board' and swap some of your crafty ideas, its very friendly!)

Today's activity uses something I paid very little for, it is a 'Personalised Pen'.  I'll be honest, I had to make something very quick and easy today because we had visitors.
In our local cheap shop called 'The Depot' they had in the children's craft section, some  'Make your own Glitter Liquid Pens':

What you are meant to do with them is to put glitter, sequins and water (!!) into the plastic tube of the pen and close it up.  (I did actually try one of them for research purposes and it came to no surprise to me that it leaked!) I can't imagine these working in the hands of little ones, as I could see glitter and water going  everywhere!  Not such a good idea, but then for 99p for four what can you expect?  Actually, I didn't expect the biro part of them to work at all and was pleasantly surprised to find it did!  Which is why I used them for my project.  I found some decorative paper and, covered it with some very small stickers (an old range called  'Monstars,' from Paperchase), rolled the paper around the inside of the tube, put the top and bottom on and there you have it, a BIG personalised biro (they are 9" long).  You never know, it might even encourage my boys to write more and that is a BIG task too! lol.

You could also make a theme with them, valentines, easter, or match them up with notebooks, files etc.