Personalized Gifts

Ok, now that you have your gift giving list ready let’s get to the next step! 

You need to find a place in your home whether it’s a closet, or a portion of a closet/shelf,  or under your bed to store your gift station.  You can store the items in a box or boxes.  The first things you’ll need to get can probably be found in your home.  You know I’m getting my gift closet ready as we go through this and today I found and organized all my gift bags, tissue paper, gift boxes, ribbons and bows.  Now here is a tip you are going to just love.  From now on when you get a gift from someone I want you to keep your bags, bows, ribbons, and even the tissue paper.  I am a big fan of recycling gift supplies.  When I got married there were a few that thought I was crazy by keeping bags, tissue paper, etc but let me tell you I have not bought a wedding bag in the 7 years I’ve been married!  In fact I had to weed some out because you don’t get invited to weddings every month or every year.  I have not bought tissue paper since getting married 7 years ago! 

Here are the supplies you’ll need for your gift closet just to get you started, don’t jump ahead we’ll get to the actual gifts in another step! 

You’ll need:

• a pen
• a notebook
• ribbon (various colors)
• scissors
• invisible tape
• tissue paper
• gift bags
• small gift boxes

The pen and notebook will be for you to keep your gift giving list/occasion calendar and your inventory list.  Because once you get your gifts you’re going to wrap them before you store them in the gift station.  That way when you need the gift you will look at your inventory sheet first and then grab the corresponding gift and it will be ready to go. 

If you’re like me you can probably find most of these items scattered about your home and what you want to do is find these items and put them in one place.  Store them in a storage container for now or a bag (use one of the gift bags you find).  If you do save gift bags I want you to organize them by occasions so you’ll put all the wedding together, birthday together, etc.  and use the biggest bag to store the other same themed bags in.  I had 5 wedding bags left and I grabbed the biggest one and stuffed the remaining 4 wedding bags in.  You will keep all the bags folded up for easy storage and do this with all your bags.  Same thing with the tissue paper you have.  Sort them by color and then stack each color on top of each other for easy access.  If there are items on the list you don’t have Dollar General, Big Lots, The Dollar Tree and other like stores have great deals on gift bags, tape, ribbon, etc. 

When getting ribbon I’d get the most common colors and use curling ribbon to keep it simple.  The Dollar tree has a nice selection and you get quite a lot of ribbon for just $1. (red, black, white, gold, green, purple, yellow, pink and blue) those colors should cover just about any occasion and holiday)

You will also want to keep a few small gift boxes on hand for small jewelry you may purchase for your gift closet that doesn’t come in a box already.  You can get those in the gift section at just about any store for minimal cost.

Go get those basic supplies ready and our next step we’ll start talking about the gifts themselves!

Keeping it Unique,

Kristal