Thursday night I'll be demonstrating a little craft as part of a ladies' meeting at my church. They asked me to come up with a holiday gift for a neighbor or friend - something simple that doesn't take much time or skill, is inexpensive to make ($2-$4), and wouldn't be embarrassing to give as a gift. :) Tall order.
I tend to give neighbors baked goods or treats for the holidays, so I thought a pretty container could be a good solution. A mason jar is easy to dress up with a little bit of paint. On this first jar, I stenciled the word Joy using frosted glass spray paint and contact paper to cut the stencil. I'm working on another version of the gift jar using the Elmer's Painter pens, which I should have ready to show tomorrow.
Fill the jar with cookies, candies or other treats, and you have a pretty sweet gift. Jars can also be filled with delicious baking or soup mixes, or spools of thread and other supplies for your favorite crafty people.
We'll also be making these festive holly gift tags. They are my version of the Paper Treats tags, which I found instructions for on Martha Stewart. The instructions call for lots of paper punches. I don't know about you, but I don't have a holly leaf punch laying around ... but I do have scalloped scissors. By simply using the scallop scissors upside down, it is easy to cut these little holly leafs. They don't turn out as perfectly perfect as the Paper Treats tags, but that is fine by me. Let the holidays begin!
