It’s all in the box

When I was growing up most of the socializing our family did was with family and a close-knit group of friends. These are the people you are closest to and so bringing a hostess gift and sending thank you gifts wasn’t part of the deal. The result is that I’ve always felt just a little challenged by the “small gift” concept.

One of my favorite things to do for a small gift is to bake. Of course, then my upbringing rears its head again and I feel like I have to give everyone an entire batch of goodies. Well, that makes the gift giving process a little too labor intensive.

I recently discovered a pretty and fun solution to my problem – candy boxes! My girls needed to mail thank you presents to a couple of people who went out of their way to help them with a Christmas present. They decided to bake for them and settled on a bar candy that everyone loves.

I thought it was a great idea but we were having trouble figuring out how to wrap it up. So off I went to the local craft store in search of a packaging solution and that’s when I found candy boxes. They are these wonderful small boxes that will hold 1/2 dozen of these fabulous bars and they look great!

The girls are thrilled and I am happy because we were able to package up the rest of the pan and share them with neighbors. A perfect solution.

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A classic gift – the bookmark

One of the gifts my girls made for me was a fabulous multi-ribbon bookmark. They used one foot lengths of several cloth ribbons, glued them together at the top, then glued fabric flowers on either side of that glue spot as well as some tiny flowers at the ends of the ribbons.

It’s a great bookmark for me. I love the frills and colors – it makes me feel good when I use it. On a practical note, it lets me mark off all those pages I want to go back to as I read a book. I am always finding things I want to check out, revisit, or write down, and this bookmark handles it all! Best of all it’s a constant reminder of my little angels working together to make a gift for Mom.

A note from Tom: This is one of the first gifts we ever made when the girls were quite small. Definitely a one-of-a-kind bookmark!

We’ve tweaked this idea over the years and made a few bookmarks for other people. We’ve used just a few ribbons, made them shorter and added other embellishments to adapt them to the taste and needs of the person receiving the bookmark. This is a simple and easy project for anyone of any age. It’s also a great little gift for Valentine’s day, Christmas thank you’s for your service providers, and even a little hostess gift. If you do paper crafting there are some fun tools out there for adding metal embellishment that look really nice.

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