Merry Christmas to all!

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas! We have enjoyed this wonderful week full of family time in our hometown. It has been nice to enjoy this break here. We traded our usually busy busy home for our small and quiet little hometown. The week has included so much good food and company, and of course gifts! We are so grateful to recieve everything that we did, and were so excited to give the little that we could. Being college students, and broke ones at that, we had to get creative this year for gifts...which I didn't mind at all! I prefer the handmade or thoughtful gift compared to ones that cost more money. Although I am so appreciative for whatever I receive, I wouldn't want someone to pay too much to try and make me happy. I am a simple girl, who loves simple things. This year I was so lucky to get lots of goodies for my kitchen, which is my favorite place to be! We just cannot wait to get back home and play with all of our new suff...we're just a couple of kids! :)

I wanted to share with you the gifts we gave, now that it is over and everyone has already seen them!
First up, are all the cute little hair accessories I made for a few of the little girls in our family, and ones that I nanny for:

 I LOVE making hairbows. I used to make them to sell a while ago, but it just got overwhelming with school and such. And, I would rather make them for fun rather than work.
Some of these are just your traditional bow, or pinwheel...like in the last pic..others are fabric flowers, and one felt rose. I had so much fun making all of these, one day I will post tutorials on how to do hairbows, I always forget to take pictures of the process. When I am making them I kind of just go off into some other world and let the ribbon or fabric take me where it wants to go!


The other gifts we gave were relaxation gift bags to the ladies of the family:

The bags were all stamped with the custom labels I made and Christmas tree name tags!

The homemade item of the bag was a simple sugar scrub. I wanted to make the bag full of handmade items, but the end of the school year was just too busy.

I also made labels for these, but stupidly made them the same color as the scrub mixture! :)

Sugar Scrub Recipe:

1 cup of raw sugar

1- 3 drops of fragrance oil

1 tbs of safflower oil

coloring, optional

lemon juice, optional

-This is enough to fill at least 2 of these containers-

Mix all ingredients, and voila! I made them in 4 different flavors made by mixing different fragrance oils, listed as same as in picture above:

Mango Melon Martini- 1 drop mango, 1 drop melon, 1 drop lemon juice

Coconut Cream Pie- 2 drops coconut, 1 drop vanilla

Blackberry Cupcake- 2 drops of blackberry, 1 drop vanilla

Pink Grapefruit Lemonade- 1 drop grapefruit, 2 drops lemon juice

I made some for myself and it makes your skin so soft! Just rub on your trouble spots in the shower, and rinse off! And, the containers were bought at World Market, they are normally used as spice jars...but perfect for this too!

I then made each bag different with some items like the ones below, based on the girl I was giving it to. I also tried to go with a color scheme based on the scrub flavor given so that I could have some sort of direction. It would have been so easy to just give everyone the same thing, but I wanted to make sure they knew it was all selected for them especially!

Also added to the bags were the ingredients and directions, which I printed off on cardstock in the specific color scheme!

And finally, our Christmas card was added!

These gifts were affordable an thoughtful. I plan to do different types of gift bags/baskets for many more gifts in the years to come, I love them! I hope you can use some of these ideas in your future gift giving as well.

Enjoy the rest of your holidays and have a very happy new year!