Gifts for Girls

I have the pleasure of being friends with some very nice ladies around town.  Some of them have children, some of them are children, but they are all very nice just the same.  This means that Marco and I are invited to a lot of birthday parties- which we are not complaining about.

But that means that sometimes we have to get really creative with gifts.  Add that to the fact that we're on a strict budget and things can often get a little fuzzy.  Let me set the scene shall I?

Marco and I had a birthday party for a very special 4 year old in less than 24 hours.  I had been bidding, and being out bid on a few dolls on eBay.  We had searched the local thrift shops for cool, unusual gifts.  We had voted down the bird feeder, the chocolate fountain, the cool sandals and the one dinosaur book we had been able to find...  And then I saw it, for a low price of $1.99.

I love this game.  I loved it as a child, I love it today, heck, there is a set in my living room looking at me right now.  I knew I could make it work, but I wanted it to be special.

By 10:00 the next morning, I ready to dig in to my special gift for my special girl.  Step one was to find 24 people that the birthday girl and her sisters knew by sight.  For this I stalked Facebook for a good hour, copying and pasting pictures into a word document, cropping them down and sizing them.  I made two small copies and one large copy of each picture.  Then I cut out all the copies- this part took forever.  Like, two hours to find all of the pictures, size them, print them, resize them, print them again twice and then cut them all out.

Then I took out all of the cards from the game.  I removed the cards from both boards and the cards that the players draw from.  I did panic a little as I counted cards, but I thought that if one had been missing I could have just scanned a card and made a new one.  Thankfully, all the cards and all of the pieces were there.  Whew.

I put the cards in stacks, big cards, red board cards, and blue board cards.  I put the cut out pictures into stacks, big, small, small.  Then I got to taping.

Using regular old packing tape, I just attached the big pictures over the faces on the cards.  Then I used the same method to attach the smaller pictures to the cards that go in the little windows.  Then I load all of the new pictures back into the windows and loaded the windows back into the boards.

Oh, and before I started cutting pictures, I took the boards outside for a quick spray paint to make them classier- I hate the bright red and blue plasticy looking boards.

And with exactly 75 minutes before we were due at the party, I had a custom, one of a kind gift for my favorite 4 year old.

What about you?  Customize anything lately?