✨ DIY Gift Ideas for CHEAP! 🎨💸 Thoughtful & Easy Gifts that everyone will love!

Want to know how to DIY every gift into a meaningful gift? Stay tuned. Hey everyone, my name is Courtney. Today I'm taking a different approach and sharing a little more of my life with you by sharing tips and tricks on DIY gift giving that will help you make your gifts extra special. So I'm going to start with this first hack and that is a box. Now, maybe you need to give someone a present and put it in a box. I am making a care package for my daughter Bailey. She is in college and at out-of-state university, very far away. She is truly my mini-me and so I want to pull together this birthday package for her. And here's my tip, reuse those boxes. Grab your heat gun and you can easily pull off the tape, pull off the labels and use that as a way to package up your gifts. Now we want to schnazz up this box. Now, I used to put stickers and things on the outside of the box, but unfortunately due to stolen mail packages and things being broken down into, I don't really like to advertise on the outside of the box that there's something special inside. So I take all that energy and put it on the inside of the box. So I'm measuring the inside of the box and what we're going to do is start by just putting a fun piece of birthday themed scrapbook paper at the bottom of the box. I do want to secure the box a little bit extra, so I do take some packing tape and make sure those flaps are nice and secure. Then I'm going to take a piece of scrapbook paper that I cut down and take a glue stick and just glue that down to the bottom of the box. Now the flaps, when you open up the box, let's make those fun too. So I'm going to take scrapbook paper again that I trimmed down and I'm just going to use a regular glue stick and glue pieces of scrapbook paper to all the flaps. So when you open the box, you get this nice birthday vibe look. Now you can apply this to any holiday, whether it's Valentine's Day, anniversaries or even Christmas. Here is my other gift giving hack when it comes to packaging. If you have a paper shredder, make your own paper shreds. You can grab whatever color type paper that you want for anything, run it through the paper shredder and voila, you've got your own colorful paper shreds to help with packaging, to help with just filling bags, anything you need it for. An easy gift idea is some type of sweet treat. Now, I don't like just to throw a candy bar in there or, you know, some type of little plastic jar of candy. My daughter absolutely loves these chocolate almonds. Now I could certainly just put this in the gift and leave it as is, but no, we're trying to make this a more meaningful gift that looks like love was put into it. So I grabbed some fabric and I cut out a tag and had the Cricut write yum yum on it. Just very simple. You just use some card stock and for the fabric what I decided to do was just to lightly tack it to the middle of the lid because let's be honest, you probably won't want to try to open this with a thing of fabric every time she opens it. So I just did it in the center and then using the twine that is attached to the tag, I wrapped it around, double wrapped it around the lid of the chocolate covered almonds and tied it off with a bow. Then to finish off the fabric because it's all in the details, I grabbed some pinking shears and just trimmed the edge of the fabric and now that boring plastic chocolate almond thing has turned into this cute little whimsical fun gift. Jewelry is another great gift to give someone and my daughter absolutely loves gold jewelry. I actually picked this necklace up at Pinners when I went there with Jennifer, Whitney, and Shannon and of course, I want to make this a little more personal. So I just took some card stock and using my Cricut, I used one of the designs that was already there so I didn't even have to reinvent the wheel or anything like that. I simply had to just click my pin in there so that I could write happy birthday on the jewelry holder and get this necklace attached. Now the easy way that I usually do this is once I get attached, I use washi tape and I get a small clear bag and I take the clear bag to the back, put the extra chain in there and then secure it with some washi tape and then take the whole thing and put it in another clear bag just to keep it nice and secure. But this is so much better. It just customizes this really pretty necklace and I can't wait for Bailey to see it. So Bailey's passion in high school was color guard. She did it all four years, was a lieutenant and then also the captain of the color guard team and once she graduated and got into college, she found the love of ballroom dancing. She goes to ballroom practice Monday, Wednesday, Friday and competes once in the fall semester and once in the spring semester. And so I wanted to make her a personalized custom tote bag that when she goes to practice she can put her shoes and all the things she needs for ballroom practice in that bag. And so this was just a very simple easy project. You just need some iron-on vinyl and a heat press and then of course your iron-on blank and I simply applied the pressure, got my iron-on transfer to the tote bag and then to finish it off I did add a red chiffon ribbon because her school colors are red and finished it off with that. But I cannot wait for her to see this bag and I hope she loves it as much as I love watching her dance. Now gift cards are another very popular gift to give someone and you guys always know I'm trying to find creative ways to give gift cards. And so I decided to just simply take some cardstock. I found a design and Cricut design space which made it really easy, cut out the cardstock and then just quickly assembled this gift card holder. Now I will say when you're working with paper crafts, I absolutely love the barely glue. It comes with these fine point tips. It's very easy to work with. So doing all these cardstock and paper crafts when you're assembling things, that's a great glue to have. And all I needed to do was just attach my gift card. Now I was looking for a glue dot. I was out of those. Looked for some double-sided tape. I was out of that. So I ended up taking a piece of tape and folded it and put it on the back of the gift card just to secure it in that gift card holder. But again, here's a much better way to give a gift card than just using one of those boring brown envelopes. Now one tradition I have is every year my kids have a birthday table and it's a whole little spread. It's got their gifts on there. I do some decorations, but since my daughter's not here I definitely wanted to include some decorations in her box. So I made these pennant flags. I just grabbed some cardstock. I took a triangle as you can see and then added kind of a rectangle to the end of the triangle that will help secure it to your dowel rod. And then I just grabbed some designs in Cricut Design Space and had the pen do the work. Now on the 20, the candle, I wanted to add a little bling. So I pulled out my gemstone blinger. I will have everything from today's video linked down below in the description box for you. So just check down there for anything you're interested in. And I applied the gemstones to that pennant flag. Then to get my dowel rods attached, I simply used a little bit of hot glue and just curled and wrapped that flag around that dowel rod. And to finish it off, I picked two ribbons and some rickrack and just tied them to the base of the pennant flags. And then now there's a little bit of decoration for her when she opens up her birthday box. Now I want to share a fun gift wrapping hack. So you want to take your box and your paper and you want to make sure that when you pull the bottom piece up, it goes about covers two thirds of your box. Then taking each of the sides, you kind of push into the middle to where you end up with triangles. Once you get your triangles on both sides, you simply fold those in towards the middle of your package, securing it with some tape. And then on the end, you simply again kind of push in the edges and secure it with some tape. So I'm not sure how to explain this, but I'll just let you finish watching how this turns out. That will wrap up today's video. Let me know down below which one of these, let's call them zhuzhing up ideas, did you like the best to make these gifts feel a little more meaningful? Also, if you have a suggestion for a way to kind of take just a plain gift and do a little something to it to make it seem a little more special, please share that idea down below. Thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. Here are some more videos you might want to check out and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!