One reason for my lack of posts lately is that Jason and I decided to move our wedding date up, an entire year. We made the final announcement about this decision to our family back in April, about two months before the wedding. It was initially going to be a very basic justice of the peace ceremony. But then it grew into a pretty full-blown wedding. Talk about scope creep!

Regardless of where the nuptials took place, I knew I wanted to have my three bridesmaids standing up there with me, and so I began to mentally plan bridesmaid’s gifts for them. My mom has helped out a lot, so I wanted to make her one too. In general, I wanted the gifts to be:

• Reusable
• Consumable
• Natural, if possible
• Home-made

Since I like flowers so much, I decided to do a flower pot theme, where the “plants” were the gifts. First, I headed to Michael’s and found some cute and extremely colorful flower pots. I got some ribbon to accent the rim and tied a bow.

Next, I found some Jelly Belly Jelly Beans (in cappuccino flavor) that could be my “dirt.” I lined each pot with a plastic zipper sandwich bag and poured the jelly beans in.

To show who each pot belonged to, I thought it would be cute to make a label like the ones that come in potted plants. I freehand drew a general shape for the tag (I didn’t have any on hand or I probably would have traced one) onto some card stock and cut four out all at once. I also picked out some of my own photography to use as the flowers, looking for photos to match the flower pot colors.

With a little rubber cement, a gel pen, and some research, I completed the labels. I decided to put the origin of each girl’s name on the label. The name meaning would have worked well here too.

After that, it was time to assemble the goods. I wanted to get natural products that were likely to be consumed. I went with Burt’s Bees hand sanitizer and lip balm, as well as alba body wash. For some little accents, I found cute gerbera daisy writing pens at Pier 1. I also got a fake gerbera daisy for each pot as a little filler.

To fill up the pots, I actually ended up taking out a lot of the jelly beans to give a more “buried” look. I started with the tallest item as my base.

I continued with the next largest and added a the filler daisy as sort of a background.

I added the smallest item and filled in the pot with the “dirt.” I stuck in the name tag and the daisy pen.

And voila! Home-made gifts that I’m actually quite tickled about.

To create a flower pot gift of your own, you will need the following:

• Flower Pot
• Plastic zipper bag or flower pot liner
• Ribbon
• Rubber Cement or Glue
• Card Stock
• Gift products
• Fake Flower
• Flower Pen
• Jelly beans in a brown color
• Photo Paper
• Stock plant photos