Tuesday, August 21

Want handmade gifts with a difference?

A few days back, you got a glimpse of some really innovative gift wrapping by Lalitha Menon.
That was not all! Here is more from her. The gift occasion has been Christmas, but such ideas can be used for practically any time of the year.

Does the following picture remind you of Easter egg hunting? Or simply looks like a bird nest that lost its way to an office desk?

Lalitha Menon, the ever-so experimenting gifter, has done a lot of work here. She emptied the contents of egg-shells by making a tiny hole at one end carefully. She then washed and dried the egg-shells.

What followed, needed more dexterity. She filled small pieces of muslin with cloves, cardamom and cinnamon, tied each with a ribbon, and gently pushed it into different shells. She sealed the shells with white tape.

The nest, she made with Inja - a tree bark that is easily available in the ayurvedic shops of Kerala, India. And used a ribbon for the gift effect. So spices in the muslin are the gift. They can be pulled out and placed between clothes. And Inja is a superb body scrub! I bet it makes for a gift from nature, and far less expensive than the expensive body scrubs from big buck stores

Here is another one from her desk:


It's simply a gift placed inside an empty coconut shell - rather two shells of a coconut. The coconut was sealed by wrapping with tissue paper, and using a ribbon to hold the two halves. The post-it note reads -- `A great ostrich laid an egg just for u @ my farm!!'

And now for some patience:


Never thought you would pull out some cotton from the First Aid box or your medicine shelf for gift wrapping did you?

``The idea here was to rag the receiver, so it takes some time to unwrap the gift,'' says Lalitha Menon. Sure enough, the gift was wrapped with cotton at both edges and the center filled with colourful rubber bands.

The words on her post-it note read: `Santa ran out of `wrapping paper in the North pole...''

Wow, what a Christmas gift!

Pics by Lalitha Menon

1 comment: