Decorating With Class

An Elegant Christmas Gift That Won't Break the Bank!

Visit the VictoriaLarsen.com website for lots of ideas for creating the home of your dreams with no experience and little expense!

Looking for a Christmas gift that you can make for literally anyone? This one is a dilly and actually a lot of fun!

The dollar store is filled with plain, ceramic coffee mugs that come in delicious colors such as black, deep green, red and dark blue. Buy 4 of them and stencil a design in a contrasting or coordinating color on the front and back of each mug using paints such as Delta's Permenamel Paints.
These paints are wonderful and don't require baking in order to be permanent and washable without the design coming off.

Choose a simple stencil design. We have many in our Raised Plaster Stencil collection that are small and perfect for the job or dash out to your local craft store and find one there.
Time restricted? Cut a simple heart out of construction paper (or any heavy paper for that matter) to use as your design.

Stencil the cups then let them dry overnight. Tie a small ribbon around the handle of each cup.

Purchase a small bag of designer coffee from your local super market, or select specialty tea bags to include with your cups and maybe throw in a few Hershey kisses to add the the brewed coffee.

Nestle them inside a box on top of shredded newspaper or tissue paper, then wrap the box.

Every time I have given this gift, the person just loves it! It's hand made, it's inexpensive and it's totally usable. Especially when our cup collection consists of mismatched cups!

This is a great gift for any occassion. So keep it in mind for the future as well.

Inexpensive Christmas Gift YOU can make

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More Hand Made, Inexpensive Christmas Gifts that You can Make

In my quest to get back to a "hand made" Christmas, I remembered one year, long ago, that a girlfriend and I decided to make something very unusual for our friends and family for Christmas.

Neither of us had much money but we were determined to create gifts of elegance and fun. And we were going to do it "together" which made it an even more memorable experience.

We perused the library for days in search of liqueur recipes! We had as much fun hunting for them as we did making these delightful gift bottles of home made liqueurs. (Non-alcoholic, related gift ideas below).

Naturally, we needed bottles. So we headed to a number of thrift stores and scored lots of very unique and beautiful bottles in which to house our creations. What a blast.
We were able to find new corks at the kitchen store (later realizing they also carried them at our local craft store much cheaper!).


We then cleaned and boiled the bottles to sanitize them.

I designed a "logo" for our bottles, cut the design out of mylar (one of my earliest stencil creations!) and we etched it on every bottle as our trademark with etching cream from the craft store. It looked FABULOUS on bottles that were made of colored glass.


The recipes wound up being so easy and inexpensive! Pour a bit of this, and a bit of that and wha la! We even changed some of the recipes and came up with our own unique flavors which was so much fun!

We wired colorful ribbon around tiny pine cones (from my yard) and attached them to  the neck of each bottle, then attached a gift card that we had rubber stamped and embossed.

Our gifts got RAVES from everyone who got them.

I found two GREAT websites for over 60 different types of liqueur recipes that you will enjoy:

http://www.drinksmixer.com/cat/6/

http://www.liqueurweb.com/

For those of you who prefer not to give alcohol related gifts, try creating your own flavored syrups for pancakes and ice cream instead. Try these websites for cool recipes to try: (Some are highly unusual and interesting!)

http://recipegoldmine.com/syrup/syrup.html

http://www.homemade-ice-cream-desserts.com/flavoredsyruprecipes.html

A $10.00 Gift for Christmas That Will Become a Family Treasure

Visit the VictoriaLarsen.com website for lots of ideas for creating the home of your dreams with no experience and little expense!

A $10.00 Christmas Gift That Will Become a Family Treasure


I have a wonderfully dear friend who belongs to the upper crust of Palm Desert. For 12 years I've fought with myself over what to buy for this great man that he doesn't already have or would really use.

This year, I decided to do something truly special for him. Something that will touch him deeply (since he's the sensitive sort who treasures family and friends). Something he will put away in to a special trunk and save for his old age.

I purchased a beautiful hard bound journal for a mere $10.00 at the stationary store....and I began writing. To make it easier, I made a check list of all of the events we have shared to keep me on track.

Things like meeting him for the first time, what a treasured time it was to have him walk me down the aisle when I married my husband Dana, remembering our long talks together.

I started with the day we met and how I had no clue that we would become such close friends. Every little thought about that meeting that came in to my head, I jotted down. I wrote as if I were writing him a very long letter.

As I wrote, more thoughts came in to my head. Like the time he flew my girlfriend and I to their beautiful Palm Desert home to surprise his wife with her two best friends for her birthday. Or like the time we met him and his wife Laurie in Las Vegas and were awakened in the middle of the night by fire alarms at Caesar's Palace and had to dash out in to a dreadful storm only to go back in through the lobby to find we were the ONLY floor that happened to! (It was a false alarm).

I described my feelings of deep friendship for him and wrote about all of his most wonderful qualities. Before I knew it, the book was filled with memories we've both treasured over the past 12 years of our friendship.

I then began adding cut out and glued photos to the book. Visual memories of our times together. Stickers of colorful phrases like "Friends Forever". A rose bush still blooms in my yard and I picked buds and have pressed them within the pages.

When I told his wife what I had done, she simply said: "Aw, he's going to just LOVE that!".
And I know that he will.

For you, consider doing the same for your husband. Romantic memories of times you've shared. How you felt the day he proposed. The emotions you shared when your first child was born.

Make one for your grown daughter, giving her details about things you remember about her grandparents, aunts, uncles, family history. How it felt to watch her get married.

For your younger child, consider writing about the day they were born, how you felt, how you treasured this new life and how much they have been loved their whole life. Write meaningful things and memories that will stick with them...things they might have never known. Remind them of funny things they have done that made you laugh. I'll bet it something they still have in their 40's and beyond.

For your parents, write of how it was growing up with them and various memories you had as a child of them, of family outings, holidays or vacations together.

Memories have no price tag. They cost nothing to reproduce. But the emotion they evoke is absolutely priceless. And the gift will be one that will always be a reminder to them of your closeness.

I am one that keeps every meaningful card from family and friends. I rarely keep the ones that are simply signed with a name, but rather, the ones that have a hand written note with sentiment that really means something to me. Those are truly special. Those I will keep forever. And what I wouldn't give to be given such a journal as a gift. I think it's one of the most loving things you can do.