Day 16 of Blogmas features the making of some Christmas gifts that I’m very excited to give to my three best friends this year! I love giving my friends and family Christmas gifts that make them feel loved, and this year I’m going for a useful-but-also-fun kind of gift. Enjoy!
Step One: Digital Designs
Part of my friend gifts this year is creating personalized stickers! I’ve been inspired by all the character-style planner stickers out there, plus a bit of Bitmoji influence. Since three out of the five people I’m making gifts for use some form of planner, this will be the perfect gift for them!
The first step in this process is designing the characters. I used my Surface Pro (which I absolutely adore 🤩) and a free graphic design called FireAlpaca. I created each layer of the designs to give me the ability to edit different areas without affecting others. I used the pen tool for outlines and watercolor tool for color.
Look how pretty the first sticker design turned out!! This one is for my sister, who loves everything scaly and squishy, and has an actual trench coat that she loves to wear.
The next step is to print the designs. I saved my design as a PNG, then inserted it into a Word Document. Make sure to set it to “In front of text!” Then I simply duplicated the image and spread the copies across the page.
The next step will be filling in the rest of the page. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll make an entire page for each person or just half, but eventually I’ll print the designs out on white sticker paper and cut around them to make die cut stickers.
Part Two: Personalized Straw Cups!
The other part of my friend gifts this year is making personalized straw cups using stickers from Redbubble. I picked out a bunch of different stickers that remind me of each of my friends. Everything from faith phrases to fandom references to clever puns can be found on Redbubble. I can’t wait to put these cups together and give them to my friends! Stay tuned; I’ll update both this post and my Instagram as soon as I’ve finished them.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post. Making friend gifts can be stressful, especially when you have a tight budget, but the reward of seeing someone receive a gift that makes them feel known and loved is immeasurable. If this idea helped you, please do me a solid and share with all your peeps using the graphic below. And let me know if you have more brilliant friend gift ideas!
Happy crafting!
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