DIY Gifts | 25 Crafts of Christmas

Give the gift that keeps on giving this Christmas with these DIY Gift Ideas from Tindalls. From making your own soap, to decorating a festive tealight holder, there’s a DIY Gift for everyone this Chrismas. 

1. Soap Making

Materials:

  • House of Crafts Soap Making Kit
  • Additional items such as essential oils, petals, herbs, oats etc are optional.

Making your own soap for Christmas gifts is a fantastic way to gift someone something handmade but also practical and useful. We sell complete kits that include all the items you will need to make soap.

The kits include soap compound, fragrance, dyes, pipettes and moulds- with some also including petals and other bits you can add into the soap. You can use essential oils in the soap and there are lots of recipes online you can follow if you wish to branch out a bit from the kit. We made soap with lemongrass essential oil, oats and honey.

Melt the soap compound over a double boiler until it is liquid and then add any dyes and fragrances. We found it was best to let the soap cool a little before adding in the oats so they didn’t settle right at the bottom of the soap bar.

Pour into your mould (the House of Crafts kits provide moulds or you can use silicone baking moulds or plastic chocolate moulds as well). We used glassine paper to wrap up the soap and tied it with a bit of a string.

2. Candle Making

Materials:

– House of Crafts Candle Making Kit

OR

  • Wax pellets
  • Candle Dye
  • Candle Wick
  • Wick Sustainers
  • Essential Oil
  • Jars
  • Candle Mould

Candles are wonderful for this time of year and are relatively easy to make. You can make use of old jars to put the wax into or use a candle mould to create different shaped candles. We sell wax and wick separately or you can buy complete kits.

You need to melt the wax down and then add colourings and flavourings. The kits will include dyes and fragrance but if you are buying wax and wick separately we found that you can use Crayola Crayons to add colouring to the candle wax.

Once your wax is melted, you need to secure your wick in the mould or at the bottom of your jar. Make sure it is completely straight before your pour any wax in so that the candle will burn down the centre. Let the wax cool before removing from the mould.

3. Mugs

Materials:

Mugs are great to customise as presents. You can buy plain mugs for very little money and then use a huge variety of mediums to decorate them in. Posca pens work really well and give you varying width nibs and colours but you can use ceramic paints by Pebeo to cover larger areas, although fine details are slightly harder to achieve because you will need to use brushes with the paint. The mugs can be baked to set the paint, the time and temperature will depend on the material and brand you are using.

4. Keyrings

Materials:

  • Key chains
  • Silk/Foam Clay
  • Funky Foam
  • Scissors
  • Glue
  • Screw Eyes

We sell keyring chains in packs and have made some sweet keyrings to give out as gifts. Using the silk and foam clay and a screw eye, we made a smiley face keyring. The silk and foam clay are air drying and take roughly 24 hours to fully dry out, once dry they are quite hard and durable. We also made another keyring from funky foam. We cut the shapes out and coloured them using Posca pens as we just worked from one sheet of A4 funky foam to save buying lots of colours. The foam was purple coloured and shows how well the Posca pens cover it.

5. Tealight Holders

Materials:

  • Tealight
  • Tinfoil
  • Toilet Rolls
  • Modroc
  • Acrylic Paint or Posca Pens
  • Brushes
  • PVA glue

Using tinfoil, toilet rolls and modroc we constructed some tealight holders.

The height and width is completely up to you but just remember to measure a wide enough hole in the top to fit a tealight in. Use tinfoil to mould around the tealight and then if you need to increase the height of your holder, add that on top of a toilet roll tube.

Cover in Modroc. You can add a little bit of PVA glue into the water to mix with the Modroc to ensure the end product is less flakey. Once the Modroc is dry, you can use acrylic paint to paint over the edges in any design you choose. We chose a festive design but thought plain coloured ombre edges would look really pretty as well.