The Perfect Gift For Anyone!

My friend's birthday was a couple of days ago, and my soccer coach just got married.  I needed a present, and since I waited until the last minute I didn't have much time to come up with a gift.  I hate buying gifts because I feel like making gifts for someone is more personal.  It just so happens that my other friend (the one who helps me with all of my projects) was at Michael's with me.  We were walking around looking for supplies for upcoming crafts we wanted to do and found some terra cotta pots.  We bought the pot, and the dish for it as well.  Then we found some glass bowls that looked similar to a fish bowl and bought those too.  We went to the wood aisle and found a package that had two little knob like things in it and decided that they would work for the lid.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of what they looked like before we assemble them, but I do have a picture of the finished product!

 This is the type of pot I was talking about, make sure to make a quick assembly in the store to make sure that you are buying the right size glass bowl for the size of pot that you picked out.

The first thing we did was clean both the pot, dish, and glass bowl.  Then we waited until they dried then painted the pot and base with red paint, we used acrylic paint and a sponge brush (mainly because we couldn't find any other kinds of brushes).   We also painted the wooden knob too.   I would suggest using spray paint though, I think it would be easier and the coverage of the paint might be better.  We had trouble with the pot soaking up a lot of the paint and it took a couple of coats to finally look red and not a burnt orange.  Then we let those dry for a while, once they were dried we used a permanent marker to write the name of the person who the gift was for.  After that we sprayed them with matte finishing spray and let that dry as well.  Then we turned the pot upside down and tried to use hot glue to glue the glass bowl to the pot, but it didn't stay.  We tried a lot of different things but the thing that finally ended up working was tacky glue.  Make sure the glass bowl is right side up to allow easy access to the candy inside! We also turned the dish upside down and glued the wooden knob in the middle of it.  Once the glue was all dried we tied a ribbon around the space between the glass bowl and the pot because we could still see some of the glue.  We then filled the glass bowl up with peanut butter M&M's because we didn't want to use gum balls and we knew that they liked the peanut butter M&M's, but really any candy will do.  Then we wrapped up the gift and gave it to the birthday girl and newlyweds! They loved them!

This is the finished product!

Here is a list of the supplies we used
      - 2 terra cotta pots $1.19 each
      - 2 clay saucers ( I called them dishes) $0.89 each
      - 2 glass bowls $1.00 each
      - X-Large bag of Peanut Butter  M&M's $8.00
      - package of wooden knobs $1.49
      - sponge brush (already had)
      - red acrylic paint (already had)
      - matte finishing spray (already had)
      - ribbon (already had)


Total: $15.65, and if you divide that in half (in the case that you are only making one and not two) the total cost is only $7.80.  One way to keep the cost down would be to buy a cheaper candy, as you can see that was the most expensive thing.  Without that the price for one would only be $3.80!  This is a great cheap gift and super easy to make, as well as the perfect gift that anyone will love.