Gift Ideas

Hi hi dudes and dudettes,

How has everyone’s day been? Positively smashing I hope!

Today’s post will be about different gift ideas which I’ve come up with for friends over the past few years. In turn I’m hoping it can help you with gift ideas if you ever get stuck.

Over the past 2 years, I haven’t been in Sydney during the first half of the year. This has meant that I’ve missed out on a lot of my friends’ birthdays. Which in turn resulted in me missing out on buying them birthday presents. I love buying my friends’ presents. I love the idea of trying to find that gift that that would appreciate and make them happy. Because you know what, it’s fun to make people happy! J

So round comes 2016, and I’m finally staying put in Sydney and being cheeky old me – I made a friend celebrate her birthday. Haha! In hindsight, I’m pretty sure she enjoyed herself and we had a good night out!

With a birthday to celebrate, I was like Yay! I get to buy her a present. Usually with presents, I like to think about themes that would match the person. To me, this makes the gift a bit more personal. Anyway, here’s a list of gift ideas I’ve had in the past.

Cupcake theme present

This was a present which was given ages ago, however I do know I used ideas from Pinterest. The birthday girl for this present, hereafter referred to as cupcake girl, really loves baking. As she loved baking, I figured a good theme for her presents would be baking cupcakes. Here’s a breakdown of her present;

• Recipe cards placed on stringed frame web-site thing. It’s hard to explain, soooo… just refer to the picture below. The idea came from watching ISAtv’s The Makeshift ep. 9 (link to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yofIjnvfmak).
• Dry ingredients in a jar – I saw this on Pinterest and I thought it was a brilliant ideas as cute present. You just put all the ingredients to make a cupcake in a jar and put a nice ribbon around it and it's a nice simple gift.
• Cupcake bouquet cake – again I saw this on Pinterest and thought, how cool! And it totally matched the theme. Also, I need to disclose that I did not bake the cupcakes. The cupcakes were made by my best friend, who is just simply a talented baker.
• Groupon voucher for cupcake decorating lessons.

Left to right: Web-site full of cupcake recipes. Groupon cupcake decorating voucher and the finished product. Cupcake bouquet cake.
Photo courtesy of the birthday girl.

25 things they love for that quarter century milestone

This gift idea I’ve used twice for people and I think it’s a sweet idea. The whole point of this is to find 25 items of things which the person likes and gift it to them. It really shows them how much you know about them and it’s fun to watch them unwrap 25 presents. Ideas can vary from baking tips, succulent plants, diaries, gift cards for their favourite store, necklaces, albums from their favourite artist, books etc etc.  

The ticket gift

I don’t think gifts always need to be tangible items. Sometimes those intangible ones are just as amazing. One of my fall back gift ideas is always a concert tickets. Buying someone tickets to see their favourite artist live is always a great present idea. (Caution: please note this idea only works if the artist is currently touring the country. If not, you could give them concert tickets to you performing their favourite artist’s songs. Just saying. ;) ). Other experiences include tickets to see a musical (just an FYI – Aladdin will be playing at Capitol Theatre in August, I’m plugging this since Aladdin is my favourite Disney movie. Haha!). Tickets to sporting events etc. The ticket gift will give them something which they look back at fondly.

Relaxation theme present

For this particular friend, I thought a nice theme for her would be a relaxation theme. What comes to your mind when you think of relaxing? I think of candles, tea and Lush products. While out and about shopping for these items, I walked into a bookshop noticed a colouring book and remembered that colouring is also a new thing to do to chillax. So I figured why not add that to the mix. As my friend is a massive Harry Potter fan, a Harry Potter colouring book will go down a treat for her! I also added chocolates from Hey.there.sugar, as chocolates are always a good thing to give as presents. Who doesn’t love chocolate! And the present was topped off with an Alpaca card. Purely because alpacas are freaken awesome!!  

Photo courtesy of the birthday girl.

Relaxation Theme present;

Candles from Dusk

Bath products from Lush

Harry Potter Colouring Book with textas

Tea from T2

Alpaca card from Typo

Chocolate from Hey.there.sugar (https://www.instagram.com/hey.there.sugar/)

Think Geek theme

For another friend, who is a geek like me, but she’s definitely more knowledgeable than me on everything geek. Anyway, for her birthday I was advised to ask her if there was anything which she wanted. All she replied was “something homey”. So that got me thinking, what is something homey that she would like that wasn’t too generic. I went to Zing Pop Culture in Wetherill Park and found these amazing homey items. 

I recommend heading to Zing Pop Culture, if you want to find a lot of geek themed products, they have a massive variety.

So yeah, that’s just some gift ideas which I thought I’d share and can possibly be useful for you. If you've had other gift ideas i'd love to hear them in the comments below.

Until next time peeps!