An Easy Frugal Gift Idea

My in-laws are visiting us this week, which is nice – we hadn’t seen them since October.  My mother in law’s birthday was last week, and I decided to make her a gift.  Her grandkids are a huge part of her life, and I’m a pretty good scrapbooker, so I thought I’d incorporate those two things to make her birthday gift.

I had my husband’s sisters email me pictures of their daughters, and I picked out a photo of our son that I really like.  Then I changed all the pictures to black and white (to avoid problems with clashing colors), and spent a dollar to get prints of all of them.  I had cropped them so that the people took up most of the picture, and once I got them printed I cut out the people, so that I could make them all fit on one page.  I fit the pictures together along the bottom of the page, and popped them out from the page using a sheet of foam.  I glued them to the background papers that I had made, and added some paper embellishments.  I printed a quote on vellum, stitched it to the page, and put the whole thing in a frame.  It was a $20 frame, specially designed for scrapbook pages, but I got it on a half price sale.  So the whole gift cost about $12, including tax and the photos.

My mother in law loves her gift, and has commented on it several times since they arrived.  With three kids and six grandkids and lots of extended family, her walls have gotten pretty crowded with pictures over the years.  That’s why I wanted to make one frame that included pictures of all six grandkids in it – wall space is valuable real estate in her house!

I’ve made entire scrapbooks several times as gifts, but they take a long time to complete.  This page only took me about an hour to make, and it turned out great.  Easy, cute, inexpensive, fun, and very much appreciated by the recipient!