An inexpensive gift idea...

With a large family and a school aged daughter we get a lot of birthday invitations and lots of birthday parties mean a lot of birthday presents. As a one income family, I am always looking for ways to be more budget conscience and let's face it, things are expensive these days! Well, I am going to show you an awesome, inexpensive gift idea with limitless possibilities. My version was for my teenage cousin but, this could be done for any age range, girl or boy.

All you need is a vase {or any type of container that would go with your theme}, a piece of styrofoam, filler {can be anything that fills your container and covers the styrofoam}, and dowels. I bought the first 3 items at the Dollar Tree for $1 each and I found the dowels at Wal-Mart for .97 cents.

When you have all of your items and are ready to start putting them together, cut the styrofoam to fit in your vase and cover it up with your filler. I found it easier to attach my items to the dowels before inserting them into the styrofoam so that I could arrange the items according to size. I also adjusted the height by cutting the dowels at different lengths. Another tip is to put heavier items on shorter dowels, closer to the vase. For lighter objets, attaching them to the dowels with hot glue works great. The heavier items I had fell off the dowels when I used only hot glue so I wrapped clear packing tape around the item and the dowel. It held perfectly and you couldn't see the tape. Once you get all your items arranged the way you like them finish it off by tying some ribbon around the top of your vase.

This is my finished product. My cousin is a huge Florida Gator fan so I went with an orange and blue theme. Since she is also a teenage girl I went with a pampering theme as well. I used face masks, nail polish, polish remover, a foot soak, toe separators, a gator bath poof, lip gloss, foot lotion, eye shadow, and some candy. All items were puchased at the Dollar Tree or Walmart and all items were $1 or less. Total price for this fantastic gift: $15.00 and it was a total hit!

Now, as much as I would love to have come up with this all on my own, I didn't and it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Connoisseur of Creativity is where I found my inspiration for this gift.