Here are a few of my favorite kid made Christmas Gift Ideas that I have found cruising around the blogosphere!
Home Made Soap Shapes
You will need: one bar of Ivory soap;
1/4 cup water;
2 drops of food coloring;
cookie cutters;
kitchen grater.
This is such a simple, inexpensive and totally fun recipe for making home made soap shapes that it is one of my favorites! Grate the soap in a bowl, then add in the water and food coloring. Mix well and then spoon into fun shaped cookie cutters. Pack the mixture firmly and let dry overnight. A really simple version is to just shape the soap into balls. Wrap in netting and tie up with a colorful ribbon.
Adding a few drops of essential oil or soap scent if desired. Most craft stores will carry these items.
Hand Painted Key Tray or Loose Change Tray
This is a cute idea for A Handmade Christmas Present kids can make, plus it recycles those polystrene trays that things like fruit and meat sometimes come on.
Wash trays well!
Then simply let kids paint them! Grandma, Dad, Grandpa, whomever.... now can have a personal try for putting their keys, mail, loose change, or whatnot on when they come in.
Personalized Memory Books
All you really need to help your child make a personalized memory book is a 3 Ring Binder, Some left over fabric, fabric glue, ribbons/buttons for extra decorating touches if wanted, and some page protectors that fir in binders.
Help kids cut the fabric about an inch bigger than the binder on each side, and using the glue, cover the binder with the fabric. Decorate the front even more with lace ribbons, buttons, beads etc.
Then have fun picking out family pictures, school work, poems, paintings from the kids, hand written stories of favorite memories, and so on. You might want to leave some page protectors empty to be filled with new memories later on.
Hand (or Feet) Painted T-Shirts
Use simple plain T-shirts and fabric paint.
Kids can dip their feet in the paint, and make footprints
Or handprints
Or paint hearts ("My heart belongs to Daddy, Grandpa, Grandma,")
Or paint cookies (My Grandma makes the best cookies")
Ideas are pretty much endless for designing personalized t-shirts!
Make a Personalized Dish Towel
For this you'll need
Plain white cotton dish towel
plain white paper
crayons or markers
iron
Ideas for personalizing could be
have kids draw a picture of their favorite food Grandma makes, and then write their version of the recipe (there is nothing cuter than little kid's printing and their ideas of how cookies are made!)
have kids draw a picture of their favorite food they like to make and then write the recipe --
Just have kids draw a picture
Have kids write a poem
When the design is done, take the it to a copy shop and have an iron transfer made at 50 percent of the size.
Take home and you just iron on the transfer to the dish towel (or see if the copy store has an iron press and can do this step for you!)