A fun kitchen gift to make

Here is a fun gift idea for a friend or relative who likes to bake. I had purchased a lovely spatterware pie plate as a birthday gift for my daughter, but wanted to dress it up in some way.

I decided to add bags of homemade pumpkin pie spice and apple pie spice. I stirred up these spice mixtures, then packaged them in sandwich size zip-top plastic bags. Then I made a fabric bag for each one and designed a tag on the computer. I strung the tags on jute and tied them around the bag tops which were first secured with rubber bands.

The gift still needed something more, so I made up a little cookbook of favorite pie recipes.

I got the idea from a Gooseberry Patch book -- Holiday Open House. It was intended to be a little booklet of cookie recipes to share at a cookie swap. I thought it would adapt well to a cookbook for any category of recipes. I found some very cute recipe cards online to print out and use for it. I was able to type the recipes right onto the cards before printing them out.

This was a real lifesaver because I just didn't have time to design my own right then. You can find the cards I used at Graphics Garden.

I put everything into the pie plate and set it all into a pretty snowflake print plastic "cookie plate bag" from the dollar store. The gift even smelled nice because of the spice mixes! My daughter was thrilled with her birthday gift!

This idea could be adapted for almost any category of recipes -- a colander with Italian spices and a book of pasta recipes, for example, or a cookie sheet with cookie spices and cookie recipes. Have fun with this idea!