Page 76 - Phonebox Magazine March 2016

Get Crafty for Mother’s Day
Homemade Gifts
Stuck for gift ideas for Mother’s Day this month? We’ve chosen some homemade gifts you can make that are inexpensive, thoughtful and just perfect for showing your mum how much you appreciate her.
owers in a frame or a cheaper alternative is to laminate them.
Film Night Box
Take a shoebox and cover it in pretty wrapping paper. Fill the bottom of it with tissue paper, and then buy a few things your mum might like for a fun lm night... Chocolates, a DVD, a facemask, and maybe even a bottle of wine. Corn kernels are only a couple of pounds too, and it’s great fun to heat them up in oil and make your own popcorn!
Orange Body Scrub
This is a quick and easy gift idea. Take two cups of granulated sugar, half a cup of olive oil, and the zest of three oranges. Gently mix all three ingredients in a bowl until fully combined, and then scoop the scrub into a glass bottle or jar. To personalise it, grab some colourful marker pens and write a little label or message on the front.
Mini Herb Garden
There are two options for this crafty gift. If you don’t mind buying a few herb plants, you can plant these straight away in a metal trough or bucket. Alternatively, buying herb seeds is a lot cheaper, and your mum can enjoy watching the herb plants grow before using them in cooking.
Quirky Coupons
Sometimes our mums do a lot more for us than we do for them! It’s time to handcraft some quirky coupons and gift them to your mum for her to use when she wants to! These coupons could include breakfast in bed, a free car wash, help with the washing up, or afternoon tea at yours!
Glass Jars
There are so many things you can do with jars. After you’ve nished your jam or chutney, wash out the jar and voila! A jar to start experimenting with! You can ll it with owers and tie a pretty ribbon around it, get drawing with a marker pen, or even plant a cute cactus or succulent in it. This is something your mum can keep, use and love.
Photo Frame Collage
Collages are so fun to make, and not expensive at all. Find about fifteen photographs of your family, buy some PVA glue, and cut and stick them onto a wooden frame (you can often nd frames in local charity shops). Make sure you brush PVA over the tops of the photographs too, to seal the collage. This is a really lovely way of up- cycling an old photo frame. If you can get your hands on a photo of yourself with your mum, you can put this in the photo frame to nish it off too!
Cookies
Treat your mum to some personalised cookies! BBC Good Food’s gooey cookie recipe is a great one to use. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees, then cream together 125g butter, 100g light brown soft sugar, 125g caster sugar, one egg and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Finally combine this with 225g self-raising our and 200g chocolate chips. Roll the dough into golf-ball sized portions, and place them on baking paper. Bake for 8-9 minutes until golden. To personalise them, mix together some icing sugar and water to form a rm icing and pipe your mum’s name or ‘happy mother’s day’ onto the cookies.
76 Phonebox Magazine | March 2016
Pressed Flowers
This is something you’ll need to be a bit organised with and do a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day. Find your mum’s favourite owers (either in your garden or in a friend’s garden if you have permission) and place them in an old book, one by one on a different page. Try to make sure it is quite a heavy book which will press the owers at. Leave the owers to press for about ten days for maximum effect, then arrange them on a piece of paper. You can either frame the