How to Put Together a Simple Girly Birthday Gift {For a Girl of Any Age!}

It's almost summer.  Which means, in our family, it's birthday season.  And birthday season means lots of cake.  OH OH and also lots of gifts to give!

One of my sisters is somewhat hard to get gifts for, so you know what I did?  Well, I went straight to Thinking Outside the Giftbox by Lauren Lanker, and when I was done, I had several ideas to pick from!  I decided to use two, and put them together to make a cute gift in a jar.  Or a glass.  Or whatever you call this cool looking thing that came from a building in our woods.  What do you call it?  (Ooh, and it even has this cool glass top with four points that look like the points of a compass!  Coooool.)

The two gifts I ideas I chose were a "10 Things I Love About You" booklet, and a plain ol' letter, because everyone loves letters!  The "10 Things I Love About You" booklet was not originally Lauren's idea; she borrowed it from Ashley at The Creative Place.  It's such a simple idea, and yet so special!

Instead of using the printable, I decided to just make my own from scratch.  So I painted on watercolor paper, and used that as my "canvas."

I didn't do 10 things actually.  I did 9, only because, with the size of the paper I was using, it worked perfectly to cut it into 9 sections.  There are certainly more than 9 things I love about my sister!

 I hole punched and fancily numbered each one.

Now this is the fun part - writing out what you love about your person!  (JK, all of it is the "fun part.")  Lauren said in her book that the ones she and her husband made for their moms were so specific that they couldn't be said of the other.  That's what I tried to shoot for.  The more specific, the more specialific!

This is the tag I made to attach on the front.  It's just white cardstock and black sharpie.

I have this little jar of ribbon that is just! so! fun!  Actually I have three matching jars of ribbon!  One of them contains lots of thin, pretty, colorful ribbons, and it is where I fetched the beautiful teal ribbon used for the booklet.

You could tie it like this, with a long tail....

 ...Or you could tie it with a pretty bow like this, which is how I ended up doing it.

I wanted the letter to be fun and colorful too, so I wrote it on this cool, wrinkled, old looking paper I had, with all different colors of sharpie.

Since I write long letters, and since I couldn't write on both sides of the paper because the sharpie bled through, the letter ended up being two pieces of paper long.  Which I like.

Now the construction of each of the gifts is completed, and all we have to do is package them up!  That's one of my favorite parts.

I wrapped a ribbon around the letter so it's all nice and compact, and it fits in the jar.

Now, just because the making of the gifts is done, that doesn't mean the making is done!  Time to make confetti!  (That's part of packaging up, right?)  I have these cool fringe scissors that are perfect for this.  I used hot pink, light pink, and light blue tissue paper, and just cut it into about inch-long strips.

Now, just because the confetti making is done, doesn't mean the making is done!  Oh no!  We still have a tag to make for the jar!  Actually though, this tag was pre-made when I put this gift together.  Yes, it was pre-made by me, but still, pre-made.  So all I had to do was punch a hole and write on it.

Out of the same jar of ribbon as I fetched the teal ribbon from, I pulled this pretty green ribbon.  It happens to be the same ribbon I used for The Little Green Bow, if anyone remembers that!

Alright, now the making is finally done, and we can put the gift together!

First I put in the confetti.  Then the booklet and letter went in together, and on top of that, the top!

Don't you just love how old and antique-y this jar looks?

And the top is so cool.

As I said in the title of this post, you could do this for a girl of any age, and she'll love it!  I'm sure you could easily tweak this also to be a good guy's gift.  But...probably only if he's your sweetie or your brother.  Or your dad.

Who, in your life, could you make something like this for?

{P.S. Linking up here!}