5 Valentine's Gift Ideas for The Crafty Person in Your Life

With the holiday coming up, my mother-in-law told me that she is going to get me gift cards for craft stores, and honestly that is a well appreciated gift since I eat through yarn and have a sewing machine I need to break in that I have yet to open and set out in my sewing room. However, sometimes I get a little tired of people just giving gift certificates. I know it is hard since we can make our own scarves and socks among other things. I can ever make my own jewelry and what I cannot make for myself, I usually barter the things I do make for things other crafty people do. I decided to make myself a list of things that I saw around the net and walking around town.

Old Clothing and Household Items
I know this idea sounds crazy, but hear me out on this okay? When I was younger, I walked into a friend of mine's room to find an organizer made out of back pockets of jeans. Yes, you read that correctly. She had markers, pens, crayons, notes, and other sundries of the teenage variety in it. I actually though it was adorable and she loved the fact that she could load it down without the pockets ripping like most of the other organizers out there. You can make memory quilts, get creative with fabric you have around the house hanging around, and use old college sports t-shirts that I know come out year after year to make a nice theme quilt if you cut the designs off the front of the shirt just right.  There are people who buy thrift store sweaters, unravel them, and reuse the yarn to make things because they like the yarn so much. Old silverware can be painted and turned into wind chimes. Old glasses lenses can be painted and wire wrapped for ornaments or also, wind chimes. The list goes on and one. Go through your closets and start handing things out.

Quirky and Twisted Humorous Things

A friend of mine pinned the bag from this particular shop on my Facebook wall. I had a great laugh about it. My husband told me that if I can make enough money off my craft things I am more than welcome to buy the shirt and the tote. It is cute, tongue in cheek, and absolutely something I would wear around town. I will probably get this to work out in even.

If you cannot find something, you could always design something, stick it in a picture file of some sort, buy the t-shirt iron on things at Wal-Mart or the local craft store, and make your own for the lovely person you know. I am sure some of you that read my blog have the same twisted sense of humor that I do and would love something like this!

A New Habtit...I mean Hobby
I can attest to the fact that you can get burnt out doing the same thing over and over again. I usually stop crocheting when I hit about the third straight week of doing something. It gets old after a while and it is not all that fun when you have the same thing to work on over and over again.

So, walk around your local craft store. Get creative with yourself and see what you can come up with on your own. If you have to, get one of the pre-made kits that are littering the store somewhere that you see and know the person hasn't done yet. Or, pay for the class of something that you heard them talk about wanting to take, and let them know when the class is. Just double check with them on when your person has time off to take the class.

Hardware Stores are Your Friend
Crafty people do not stick just to Joann's and Michael's to get their supplies. I have been known to walk around the local hardware store and go "Hey, if I do this, get some of these, and figure out exactly how to build it correctly, I could make a killer coffee table!" when the mood strikes my fancy.

For this idea, I would take your crafty person with you unless you know what you need to buy for them. Yea, I am pretty sure that if your crafty person does not have power tools, giving them a starter set would be AWESOME as a gift idea since I know several crafty people who would like to get into the more heavy duty crafts. However, it might be a safe bet to assume that you need to have them go with you just to be on the safe side.

Offer Your Help 
I recently redid one of the rooms in my house to become my "craft" room. We re-purposed the old entertainment center to hold my yarn and to use the place where we put the television to hold my sewing machine that will hopefully make it up there probably sometime today. I could not have done this without my mother-in-law coming over and helping us get thing settled.

Money is a little tight for most people at the moment, so if you happen upon your crafty person and notice that they are having issues or need some help to...organize their yarn or something, offer help. Yes, you will probably get yelled at a lot while doing this, and yes, you will more than likely want to pull your hair out when you are through because you don't know why they want things they way they do and the person is making no sense, but trust me. A little help to your crafty person is worth it's weight in gold to someone who has something like yarn tangled in a mess in a box in their closet. I am guilty of that one myself. If they are stuck trying to come up with an idea, let them use you as a sounding board. Even better, work on a craft with them! You could release your inner crafty person that is bottled up and do something fun with them. They will still love you if you happen to do something wrong I promise! They will even fix it if you ask nicely!

Now that I have given you just a few ideas, go out and see what you can get or do yourself into! I would love to see what you got them or did with your crafty person, within reason of course.