Money Saving Amy: Top cost effective gifting and crafting ideas

Hello everyone. This week I’ve got some money saving gifting and crafting ideas, that are also fun to make!

Salt dough decorations

These can be a lovely craft to decorate for the Christmas tree to make very affordable but also meaningful decorations, and they also would make a lovely gift for friends and family.

All you need is:

•1 cup of plain flour

•1 cup of table salt

•Half a cup of water

(Please note this is not an edible recipe)

You can mould this into any shape you want and then decorate these with paint or stick bits on them such as glitter. Or you can put finger or hand prints into them and they can become a lovely keepsake. You could frame a hand print in salt dough, or pop some ribbon on it to use as a tree decoration.

Home made fudge

Home made fudge is a lovely, tasty but not too expensive gift idea, simply make the fudge and then pop into bags, tie with a ribbon and you have a lovely gift.

You can make fudge in all sorts of flavours and there are many recipes readily available online. The main ingredient is condensed milk and the recipe can be as simple and inexpensive as mixing condensed milk and chocolate!

This is a great one to get the kids involved in too, getting them to mix the ingredients and fill the bags with fudge.

Pom Pom crafts

You can get hold of wool for as little as £1, from Poundland. You can also grab Pom Pom makers from Poundland too for just as cheap but these aren’t essential, a piece of card will do the same job too. Then there’s a variety of fab crafts to make. One of my favourites that can be very simple but effective is making a Pom Pom wreath. And another very cute one is Pom Pom gnomes, you can find tutorials for these crafts readily available on google or Pinterest.

Decorating Christmas biscuits

A classic, easy, cheap but fun activity for the kids to do at Christmas time. All you need is some rich tea biscuits (or any plain biscuit), some icing sugar and some decorations, that could be chocolate chips or sprinkles, let the kids get creative and have fun designing some biscuits. Last year I picked up some really cheap Christmas sprinkles for 28p and Christmas sugar decorations for only 8p in the January supermarket reductions. They’re dated until next year so they were great to bring out this Christmas for some biscuit decorating fun, look out for discounts like this after Christmas this year.

DIY Christmas crackers

If you don’t like to spend on Christmas crackers and don’t like the wasted items that can be associated with them. I’ve got a cheap and easy craft for you, handmade Christmas crackers.

All you need is:

•Toilet roll tubes (or kitchen roll tubes cut in half)

•Tissue paper

•Something to tie with, this could be string, wool or a bobble or even an elastic band if you’ve got some spare

Simple pop anything you’d like inside the tube, I went with tubes of smarties and chocolate coins in the ones I made but you could put anything you wanted in such as sweets, toys, mini alcohol bottles for the adults or mini toiletries. Then roll the tube in tissue paper, and simple tie the tissue paper at either end of the tube and that’s it, as easy as that there you have diy Christmas crackers. Of course, you could buy the cracker snaps online to add in, and you could also buy the party hands too, but these aren’t a necessity if you want to leave them out. I got my Christmas tissue paper from Home Bargains for only 99p and I also got a pack of tiny bells for 99p that I attached to the ties for an added bit of decoration.

I hope you have fun trying these ideas. You can find me trying some of these crafts and more over on my Instagram _moneysavingamy.

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas, have a great one!