Present Giving

In an attempt to find inspiration for blog post, I trawled through the photos I have stored on my phone. I came across this picture of the gifts I gave my three sisters for Christmas last year. So what are they?


On first inspection it's rather obvious they are paper dolls with wardrobes of paper clothes, all hanging with little wooden pegs on little plastic coat hangers. I was very lucky to find this part of the gift, one doll plus clothes was $2 at a craft shop, including the little pink hangers (I bought 5 though for variety in the clothing items). The little pegs were a similar price and I've seen them a lot of places.

So far the gift has cost less than $5 and I'm usually very generous with my sisters and buying presents (I spend more on them than I do myself!) so this was well below my budget. Closer inspection of the wardrobe will reveal clothing items not made of plastic, but made of... money!!!

I had decided I wanted to give them money to spoil themselves on clothes and I didn't want to risk their tastes/sizes on too many items (we frequently buy clothes, but usually only here and there) so this was the perfect solution. After googling 'money origami' I found a really easy way to turn money notes into very cute little shirts. It was a bit of an effort with out plastic notes, as most of the sites are for US paper notes which fold a lot easier, but I performed one fold at a time and left the notes inside a large heavy book for hours in between each.

And voila, a great way to give money while indicating what you'd like it spent on. Two of my sisters still have their 'wardrobes' intact, preferring to preserve the money shirts until they find something worth unfolding them for :-)

I gave them $100 all up (1x$50, 1x$20, 2x$10 and 2x$5) as it gave me a nice round number and lots of different coloured notes. The present would have worked just as well with a smaller total value though.
Now, how do I top that for this year?!?!

EDIT: Since my phone camera really isn't that great (everything is always tinged blue...), here's a pic I swiped from my sister's Facebook page.  Which she captioned with 'Best Present Ever!!!'