LittleMissMatched sent us products for review, but opinions are all our own.

Tween girls can be so tough to buy gifts for. They’re at an age when they still like things that are childlike but they want to be seen and treated as older. Take my ten year old. One minute she’s using a variety of silly voices while playing Barbies with her sister and the next minute she’s shrieking that she doesn’t want to go to the movies because Moana is for babies (she loved it, by the way. She just would never admit it to you).

It is nearly impossible to purchase solid gifts for such fickle creatures.

But, once in a while, you stumble upon something that balances delicately in the sweet spot between little kid and big girl. The cool personalized stationery from my last post is a great example. Another sure hit? LittleMissMatched‘s Colorize Collection. The collection, which includes different sock designs and a headphone set, allows girls to customize them by coloring in the designs themselves. My girls are big fans of LittleMissMatched to begin with, but having the ability to customize their socks took their love to a whole new level.

Can I tell you a secret? I love making bath and body products.

Most of the time they’re insanely easy to make. We’re talking easy enough to make with your four year old and not pull out clumps of your hair easy.

Better yet, the pay off can last for weeks! The ladies in this house are suckers for things that smell amazing and make you feel all pampered. We like to make big jars full of scrubs that the girls happily glop all over themselves in the bath tub. And I’m not going to lie to you, I happily glop them all over myself too.

Since they’re so simple and relatively inexpensive to make, homemade bath and body products are perfect for making in large batches and gifting to friends and family for the holidays. I put together a list of 15 DIY skincare products that would make awesome gifts.

OK, so life got in the way of this series a little bit, but I wanted to give you guys at least one more quick and easy DIY gift idea that you can learn and put together in an afternoon.

I love bows. They’re so cute and girly and perfect for little munchkins who don’t have quite enough hair to let their femininity shine. My impossibly adorable niece Camila is kind of a hair clip queen. She has had a head full of hair since she was born and I get a kick out of seeing her in all of her assorted hair clips.

Having two girls of my own and knowing how quickly and often we lose our hair clips, I decided to make her a bunch in a variety of colors for Christmas. The problem? The best bow I could do is the kind that works for my Converse.

So I decided to head to YouTube to learn to how to make a fancier bow.

When budgets are tight, handmade gifts can be just the thing to save you during the holiday season. They’re thoughtful, highly personal and cheap. Yes, you need to put in a little time investment. But as long as you don’t overreach (one of my go-to moves), you can make it work.

Since I’m such a big fan of anything DIY, I decided to start a little mini-series on simple ways to learn new crafts and make gifts for the holidays. Today I’m going to start with my favorite DIY go-to: Pinterest.

I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of times when I’m looking to learn a new crafting skill I specifically look for tutorials made for kids—especially if I’m trying to learn something quickly. It sounds a little silly, but I figure they’ll be the least complicated and will teach me the basics quickly before I’m ready to get crazy.

For my first project, I decided I wanted to learn how to weave. I’ve been seeing gorgeous woven wall hangings all over Instagram and it gave me the itch. I thought it could be a cute gift idea, so I took to Pinterest and found a few tutorials that seemed perfect (that’s another trick when learning a new skill: I always look at more than one tutorial in case one site states one part more simply or another has clearer photos of the process).

I’ve been so bogged down with stuff lately that I haven’t really had any time for making. Since I really love to sit down and make things, I decided that my sister’s birthday was the perfect excuse to force the issue. I stalked her Pinterest boards (which, for the record, is the best idea ever) and noticed a running theme of black cats. More specifically, there were a whole lot of screen printed black cats.

My daughters have been taking art classes at a local art lab and Samantha literally just had a class where they did screen printing. Deal = sealed.