Holiday Present Ideas #4 – Coupon Books

Hello! I know it isn’t even the holidays anymore, but there are some holidays coming up that you can use this idea for, such as Valentine’s Day, for example. I think I am going to try to update this series preferably once a month, but I will try and update you guys as soon as I come up with more ideas.

This installment of the series will be about coupon books! I recently made a bunch of coupon books for my friends and family members for Christmas last year, and I think they were received really well.

The last time I made a coupon book was in elementary school, so I did not have very high hopes for them now, but I think they turned out really well. Plus, when I made one in elementary school, the coupons were already basically made for us, we just had to cut them out, fill in a blank, and color them. I think making my own ended up much better than if I had done the same thing now.

I designed them to look like a coupon, with dotted lines around the edges to look like perforation, and some of them had little drawings to go along with them. I color coded most of these to people’s favorite colors or just rainbow for the people who did not have a favorite color.

Boxes seemed a little bit overkill to wrap these inside of, and I definitely did not want to have to wrap the cards all willy-nilly with nothing to keep them together. Besides, wrapping something so thin would be very difficult and I didn’t really want to go through that at the time, since I had already wrapped a lot of presents.

Also, since I had already procrastinated on most of the presents I was supposed to be making, I did not want to spend all of the time in the world wrapping difficult to wrap things. I also did not want to use rubber bands to secure them, since that would eventually end up warping the cards, they wouldn’t look that good, and they would become brittle over time.

So, naturally, I chose the most time consuming way to “wrap” these coupon books. I chose to sew every coupon book an individual, personalized bag out of fabric that I already had, with my sewing machine that I had used less than a small handful of times.

The first step to making these bags was to cut all of the fabric. All of the fabric I used came from a local thrift store, and I was really proud of this. I cut pieces out of a bunch of shirts, and it took a long time. I then had to sew all of the little bags which was the hardest part because some of them were the exact size of the index cards I was going to use for the coupons, so I had to be very careful with my sewing.

I sewed a little square of velcro onto both sides of the flap on the top to close it. I wish that I could have done buttons, but I did not think I had the expertise or time to do all of that. I hope that the next time I do this I can include buttons and actually remember that before I sew the whole bag togther.

Then the next step was to make all of the cards. Some of them had to be cut to fit into the bags because I made them too small, but most of them did not have to be cut. I brainstormed a bunch of ideas for each person beforehand so I did not have to think of them while making the cards. To do all of the words and pictures, I used some nice pens that my mother got me as an early Christmas present.

After I finished all of these things, I decorated the outside of some of the bags. For my father’s bag, the only reason I decorated it was because I messed up and sewed the bag inside out, which meant that some squares I drew in marker were visible on the outside.

All in all, I really wish that I could have spent more time on these, because I know I could have made them much better. I wish I could have made better bags, that were more decorated and two toned. I wish that I could have spent more time on the coupon cards to make them look much better and have better ideas on them. I wish I could have used buttons instead of velcro. I wish I just planned this out a little better and gave myself more time to do it. I definitely could have started earlier on this and then came out with a much better product.

In the next year, I want to get better at both sewing and making things look nice, so these coupon books will definitely come out much better in the future, and if I decide to do them next year for the holidays.

Even though there are a bunch of things that I could have done to make these better, I really love how they turned out and I am really looking forward to doing more of these in the future and making them better!

If any of you guys also decide to do this kind of thing as a gift, plase send me an email with a picture of it! I would love to see the kinds of things that you guys come up with!

Here are some pictures to show you guys what I’m talking about: