Trip Gifts

We picked up a few things during the trip that we wanted to gift to our family and friends for Christmas, so for gifts this year we stuffed baskets with a mix of trip memories and homemade goods.We labeled each of the gifts so the recipient would know the significance of each piece.

-Amanda

1 - We bought a geode in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. We broke apart the rock so we could share a piece of the same geode with everyone. The insides of geodes differ, so it was a mystery how ours would look - but we were happy with the crystallized formations inside. We simply glued the geode pieces to bottle corks (idea originally found here).

2 - Chopsticks from San Francisco's Chinatown. This was one of our favorite stops on the trip.

3 - We decided to collect soil from each state to keep for ourselves - we're still undecided of what we'll do with it all (maybe plant a tree when we get a house?).  We did know we wanted to share some of it with our peeps, so mixed the soil from all 50 states with beach sand (for a better color) and threw in a few of the seashells we collected along the way.

4 and 5 - The afternoon we spent in the lavender region of Washington State was a favorite, by far. We picked up some soaps to gift and then we decorated the gift baskets with a couple stems of dried lavender (from a bouquet we picked ourselves during our visit).

The homemade gifts we included were a quick bread, seasoning rub, garlic salt, bergamot hand scrub (2.5 cups sugar, 1 cup extra virgin olive oil, essential oil), and bergamot soy candles (we combined a few different tutorials to make our own). If you're ever in need of homemade gift ideas, check out our pinboard.

To make it all pretty we used the label on the bottom left from here and this noel tag. We also gave each person a photo from our travels, one that we knew would mean something to them:

We hope everyone had a great holiday season!