Handmade Holidays for Kids--great upcycled gifts and more

I saw on the news last night that there are already people camping out for Black Friday sales.  Seriously?  If I had almost a week of free time, I can think of lots of things to do with it, but camping out for the privilege of buying something wouldn't make the list, even if I did have money to spend.

As it is, I don't know that I'll have any money to spend on Christmas presents!  The adults on my list are pretty easy to take care of gifts for, since I was already leaning toward homemade gifts for them anyway (which I'm not going to say right now, since some of them do read this blog, but I might mention it on my Facebook page), but kids can be a bit trickier.  They tend to know what they like and, thanks to a culture of rampant commercialism (you know, the kind of culture that puts it in people's heads that they should camp out for a week to buy something!), kids tend to want store bought crap.  I have a few ideas that I'm tossing about for the kids on my list though, ranging from toddler to teen.  I don't know if I'm going to make all, or even any of these (and expect a blog post on the ones I do!), since if money were to present itself, I'd rather buy something (I know, I'm bad) that I know the kids would like than rely on my shabby crafting skills to produce something that, if well made, I'm sure they would like, but I can't promise I would make most of these well, since the majority of them depend on some stitching or basic woodworking skills that, frankly, I lack.  Basically, I'm brainstorming very publicly.

I stole the pictures from sites that contain directions, figuring they'd want me to, since you are more likely to go to their site if you see how cute their ideas are.  There are a number of thses that I wouldn't make exactly the same way as the directions I link to, but I linked to something just to give you an idea of what I have in mind.  If I do decide to make those gifts, I definitely will post my own version. 

Toddlers to Early Elementary Ages

felt food (a ginormous list of tutorials for tons of foods can be found here)

a bean bag toss game; maybe like this one, maybe something a bit different

sock monkey

bath crayons

salt dough jewelry
sewing cards
rag doll

puppet theatre

puppets made from old stuffed animals

Elementary Age to Teens
wobble board
journal

jean purse