I wanted to share with you some fun and easy homemade gifts your kids can make and give to their grandparents, teachers, bus drivers, or whoever! Grandparents are great. And no matter what your kids make them, they’ll love it. I think homemade gifts are so much more meaningful and appreciated than anything you could buy them. Especially when you think they already have everything they would need or want.
Family Photo Calendar
These make great Christmas gifts just in time for the new year. You can design your own cover photo, and we like to put in the photos from the past year according to the months they were taken. We make one of these every year for each set of grandparents. I get ours printed at the Walmart Photo Dept. Simply go to Walmart.com then follow the links in the Photo Dept. page to create your own photo calendar. They are much appreciated by the grandparents who live far away, and don’t get to see their grandkids as often as they would like to.
Shadow Silhouette Picture
This is a relatively easy gift idea, and gives a classy and homemade look to the pictures of your kids. First, take pictures of your kids facing to the side making sure they’re about the same size. Next, print the pictures out, and carefully trim around their heads. Use the printed out pictures as a template to trace them onto paper. We used fancy scrapbook paper to trace the silhouettes onto. Carefully trim out the paper along the lines you traced. (This is the hardest part. I had my artistic daughter do this step for me.) Trim, until the silhouette looks like that of your child. Mount with a thin layer of crafting glue onto paper that complements the paper you chose for the silhouette. Pop them into a nice frame, and your done!
Scrabble Art
Use Scrabble letters to decorate photos or just make a cool design out of your kids’ names and frame it. You can also make things out of the Scrabble letters like coasters or small boxes. This time of year, you can usually find Scrabble games pretty cheap.
Hand Print Art
This is a sweet gift for grandparents when your kids still have cute little hands. You can take anything from towels to a T-shirt and decorate it with your child’s hand prints. There are some cute patterns you can do, or just a random one looks cool. Be sure to use washable fabric paint so the grandparents can actually use them and wash them. Another cute idea is to use your baby’s foot prints for this project.
Homemade Ornaments
We’ve made these in past years using pictures of the kids as part of the ornament. I used cookie cutters in Christmassy shapes to trace and cut out of cardboard. I also used popsicle sticks to glue together in a star shape. Once I did this step, we glued on the pictures of their faces, then I gave them the freedom to decorate them as they liked. You can use things like glitter, jiggly eyes, pom- poms, cotton balls, etc. Then you glue on a ribbon for hanging. Now the kids’ grandparents can see the cute little faces of their grandchildren every time they decorate their tree.
We’ve also made ornaments out of cinnamon and glue which worked out beautifully. Get my recipe for Cinnamon Ornaments!
Yummy Stuff
We like to make homemade candies like toffee and fudge, or just a sampling of our favorite Christmas cookies and put them in a festive tin. The kids can help out with the mixing and cookie decorating. We’ve also made gingerbread houses for the Grams and Gramps, then on New Years Eve, we come over, and help them smash it and eat it. Gingerbread House Recipe.
Whatever you decide to make, try to let the kids do as much as possible to really make it be from them. It might be hard not to step in and make it look perfect, but the receivers of their gifts will know that it came from the hearts of the little ones they love.
HomegrownGrins 