During the last few years, within the extended family we agreed to give money instead of buying Birthday Presents.
It's Dad's Birthday this month and he'll get money too. He's really good and when he spends the money he makes a point of telling us what he's bought. He never lets it be absorbed or just disappear into the household budget.
There's good and bad to this system. Good because it's so easy for the giver.......no trawling the shops wondering what to buy and will he/they like it etc etc...but it's bad because I always feel a little guilty at the lack of effort required on my part and maybe it's a tad boring for the receiver.
To ease my guilt I always try and wrap the money nicely, so it looks gift like rather than money just shoved in a card!
Dad follows the stock market so I based my wrapping on the share price page from the newspaper. I made a gift bag from an A4 copy of the page (the actual newspaper was a bit flimsy to use), and copied a second page to make the gift card and Heart. Trimmed with red card and sealed with a red paperclip, it's all set to go....as soon as I put the money in it, that is!
I've really enjoyed looking through all the paper craft blogs to get gift wrap ideas. I'm going to try not to use any commercial gift wraps this year.
I found two versions of the Gift Bag Tutorial,
here where the sample is a music score/page and
here where they've used pages from discarded children's books. And while I'm throwing links around, here's a
Paper and Craft Paradise where I've dropped quite a few hours - enjoy!
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