Thursday, February 14, 2013

Valentine's Gift for a Gamer

Every year for Valentine's Day, my boyfriend and I exchange gifts. Our second year together we actually decided to make gifts for each other, both of us were short on money so this seemed like a nice way to celebrate and not stress out about the cash. It's a tradition that we've kept up since that time.

Since I have a friend coming on the 15th we celebrated Valentine's Day early. This year he got me a little Valentine mailbox and put a little something in it each day. He was struggling to come up with something but I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this. He "made" a little collection of gifts from some of my favorite things.

Day 1: A Paint Your Own Sun-Catcher in the shape of an elephant. Elephants are one of my favorite animals.
Day 2: A Luigi K'Nex Mariokart Bike.
Day 3: Cake Pop Sticks (I got a cake pop maker for Christmas, so this was an awesome gift!)
Day 4: A drawing of Sulley and I (when I'm dressed in my 1/2 marathon costume) as if it were done by Boo
Day 5:A Luigi's Mansion Valentine's Card and a Michael's gift card!
Day 6: Chocolates and multiple Valentine Cards, including a few more Luigi cards with some drawings by Terence in them. :-)

For him, I made him something practical but fun. He LOVES practical gifts, which makes my job of giving gifts pretty easy. He's a gamer. He LOVES video games. He's got tons of games and lots of controllers. We used to just put the controllers on the shelf on the bottom half of our coffee table, but they'd fall off pretty often. He'd been saying for awhile he should get a basket or something to keep all the controllers in. Luckily, he hadn't picked one up yet. So that's when I knew what the perfect gift would be.

I went shopping to grab the supplies as I didn't really know how I wanted to go about doing this gift. My first stop was Walmart. After digging around the store for almost an hour, I finally settled on picking up some foam sticker sheets ($5) and a small organizational bin ($5) which I wasn't crazy about. I wasn't exactly sure what I'd do with it. I knew I wanted to make some small controllers but wasn't really sure how I'd do it or how they'd be attached to the basket.

I then scooted on over to Michael's. After searching around I found a basket that I really liked. It was originally $14.95, but they were having a 40% off all baskets sale so it came out to $8.97. Woo! I also picked up some larger foam sheets that fit in the bottom perfectly ($0.89) and some star brads to hold the sheet in place ($2.99). And some foam sticker letters ($2.99).

I came home and started working away. I cut out the different controller shapes and used the foam stickers, pens and markers to build them. These foam sticker sheets were awesome. They made the project really easy. The only thing that I suggest is that you have SHARP scissors. Mine were a little dull so I didn't get as precise cuts as I wanted. If you're trying to do bigger shapes you shouldn't have a problem though. It was more the fact that I had a lot of TINY shapes to focus on.

Here's the front of the basket:

His name and a Game Cube controller.

One side of the basket:

 A Wii controller.

Another side:
A Wii Classic Controller.

And the back:

A NES Classic Controller and a Game Cube Wavebird.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out...and how few supplies that were actually needed. But mostly how excited he got when he opened it.





3 comments:

  1. This is amazing! I have a little basket for my controllers and extra DS's... but it's no where near as cute as yours!

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  2. That is so perfect :) You did great!

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  3. This looks great- y'all are awesome! Have fun this weekend!

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