kattitudes

Grab a cuppa and have a seat, because we are going to chat a bit about how to afford to make our own gifts. It can become wildly expensive, but is does not need to be.

When I make gifts, I do not go out and spend a whole chunk of change at once. Because I know this (gift making) is my fantasy life, I plan ahead for all the gifting we like to do. For example, I love to give drink mixes (the Russian tea mix is a personal favorite). When I gift it, I make it in huge quantities, and split it up into odd and various crystal containers that I have collected from tag sales, shop clearances, specialty clearances and the sort.

EBay was created for Kattitudes, I swear. I regularly cruise through the site, looking for cut crystal containers for the express purpose of giving away the friendship tea mixes. I set a budget (never more than $5 a crystal container) and stick by it. I have found absolutely fabulous pieces for give away prices.

It is all a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The trick is that I set a budget before looking and keep on task. No matter how lovely the piece is, if it is over budget, it is off the shopping list. The lovely thing about eBay is there is always another cut crystal container that is perfect for the tea mixes just around the corner.

OK, what about jewelry? Think about all the broken pieces of jewelry you have throw away over the years. Keep it! Keep it all organized in a nicely labeled box in your craft closet. By doing this, when you get the urge to make your best friend a piece of gorgeous jewelry as a special birthday gift, all you need do is pull out your broken and dented jewelry pieces storage box, dig out the pieces you like and fill in the blanks to create a whole new piece. If you like to cruise through yard sales or thrift stores, keep one eye out on the jewelry pieces. A broken string of pearls can yield enough pearls/beads that will allow you to create a brand new bracelet or a new style of necklace for next to nothing in terms of cost.

Say you decide that you want to start sewing some of the adorable ideas you find here on Kattitudes, but the cost of fabrics is outrageous. Yes, I agree! The trips to the fabric store have dwindled to next to nothing around here. How, then, do we get around the high cost of supplies? Well, remember all those clothes that you outgrew, ruined, stained or just cannot wear anymore? We have gotten used to giving them away to charities, and while that is such an admirable idea, what about keeping them for YOU to reuse, re-purpose and recreate with?

Gone is the day when families would rip out the stitches of one worn out piece of clothing and resew it into another piece. Now we toss it into the give away pile. Well - STOP that! Start keeping those favorite old clothes and use them to cut up to make pillows, Christmas stockings, scarves, shawls, blankets, linens, you name it!

There was a time when quilts were made from various pieces of favorite old clothes that could no longer be worn. Can you imagine the joy on your children’s face when they receive a bed quilt that they can keep forever, made from the fabrics of 10 of their outgrown favorite outfits? Start re-purposing items from around your OWN house. Why pay the high cost of fabric when you have more fabric around your own home than you probably know what to do with!

When we were growing up, we had in our house what we called “the rag bag”. It was a huge old pillowcase kept in the hall closet, and all old, unwearable clothing went in there. When we needed fabric for any purpose, we knew that we could go in there and pull out cotton, wool, silk, a veritable plethora of fabrics that were already preshrunk, firmly color-set and perfect for what we needed.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Those words are never more appropriate than when we try to make gifts for those we love. Why must we rush out and spend more money?? We want to show our love by the labor of our hands, not the money from our wallet. Use your resources. Use what is available around your home. Use your imagination, your creativity and your common sense. Find new uses for old items in your home.

The last comments I will make on this subject is the importance of organization! Yes, saving items for reuse is wonderful…but if hundreds of little pieces live underfoot all the time, you will find yourself slowly going mad and in a moment of weakness, you will sweep the entire lot into the bin just to reduce the clutter. So, in order to have an incredible stockpile with which to make these amazing handmade gifts, organization is vital.

In the Kattitudes office, there lives a very large wooden armoire picked up in our travels, full of drawers and hidden cupboards. The entire armoire is the crafts storage. When I find a $5 cut crystal container on eBay in the middle of June when no one’s birthday is near, it goes into the armoire for safekeeping. When yet another piece of jewelry breaks (I have a special talent for breaking jewelry it seems), into the jewelry storage box it goes and that box gets put into the armoire. Thusly, when I feel a creative urge to make jewelry, I know I can walk to the armoire and pull out a single box and find all of my resources in one single place. Organization is vital!

If you cannot dedicate a piece of furniture to your storage, keep a box in your closet. If that will not work, use a suitcase in your garage, or a bag in your attic. Just keep all your pieces together in one place, so that when you get struck by the creativity bug, you can find all of your resources in the same place.

Set a budget and never break it. Keep your own hand-me-downs. Keep broken pieces for re-tasking. Organize your parts and pieces. Before you throw something away, stop and consider “is there a piece or part of this that I could use to make a gift for someone?”. These small suggestions will help you to afford to create your own incredible extravagant yet affordable handmade gifts.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 4:14 am and is filed under handmade gifts, kat chat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.