Frugal Gifts

Bill and I are sooo close to paying off our last consumer debt, and being debt-free except for the house! Woo hoo! We've been working really hard and he asked me not to give him any birthday presents. That of course was not going to happen, so I decided to come up with some very frugal handmade gifts. All in all I spent less than $40.

First I made a eucalyptus sugar scrub, for the dry skin on his feet. Here is the recipe I used, with eucalyptus oil from the hobby store added. It smells divine! (btw, I followed a reviewer's advice and used extra-light olive oil instead of extra virgin...it doesn't smell as strong, and it was a good way to get rid of most of the bottle Bill accidentally bought a while ago). I also embroidered two washcloths to go with it.

Then I got a cute heart basket from the dollar store, and filled it with six single bottles of beer I picked up from Central Market (Bill's already tried some of them so I only have two in the picture!). Central Market has a huge variety of unique imported beers by the bottle, and knowing nothing about beer I just randomly picked some out! He's enjoyed trying new ones that he might not have chosen himself.

The dollar store had a great double-sided picture frame that I painted and put two pictures of us in.

I also got a couple of cute little figurines of lions and a penguin, because those are our cheesy "special" things that we collect together.

And, I made him the obligatory "romantic coupon book" on pretty paper, only this one has a twist: I made up an alphabet code and each coupon was a "code" that he had to crack to know what it was. If you want to know the truth (TMI alert) I did this because I couldn't bring myself to actually write anything naughty on a piece of paper...having a code saved me from that kind of embarrassment :). He did seem to enjoy cracking the codes!

All in all I think he had a great birthday, and it felt great to be able to give him things he liked that did not break our budget.