In these more frugal times, more and more people are realising that if you make your own gift hampers you can give a personalised gift at a fraction of the cost - and make it look like it cost a lot more.

The beauty of making your own gift hampers is that it doesn't require any real skill or experience. Even if you're the world's biggest disaster at crafting, even you can create a beautiful hamper, simply by spending your time on getting it right.

It's really very simple, you just bring together items you think the person will enjoy and like and bring them together in an attractive package.

What You'll Need to Make Your Own Gift Hampers:

• A wicker basket, or other attractive box
• Packing materials
• The items to put in your hamper
• The finishing touches
  

If you can put these simple gift hampers together, you can make money working from home making gift hampers for profit.

You can:

• Hampers to Order: simply provide people with a range of hampers to choose from, packing materials to choose from, included items - then make them to order.
• Make to Sell: make up 2-3 different hampers and sell copies of those: if you are more comfortable sticking with what you know you can do, just having to build up the same hampers as required, then this can be an easy route to profit from hampers.
• Throw A Hamper Party: either organise your own hamper parties, or (better) find people who wil host a hamper party. Simply take hamper supplies, packing materials and goodies to go in them and hold party plan style parties and sell the items to people to either take away with them, to order from you and be delivered back to the host a week later, or even turn it into an activity party. A great way to get moms together for a fun-filled day that includes the kids, so no child-care issues.
  
• Activity Days: come up with a format for running hamper workshops, people pay you to come and put together a hamper on the day. Half day craft workshops where they either pay one fixed price and are limited in what they get, or they buy the items from you on the day at cost and you get paid for running the workshop to show them how to do it.

I'm sure you can think of a few other ways to profit from hampers!

Traditionally most gift hampers are placed into wicker baskets.

These are available in a variety of shapes and sizes and quite often you can even buy a small bulk lot (say 3-12 baskets) at quite affordable prices - it's always worthwhile keeping a couple in the back of a cupboard as you can instantly make up gifts on demand when you need to!

Most gift hampers are open-topped, perhaps finished off with what is called cello paper (that's the see through plastic you get round bunches of flowers), however, a lot of expensive or food hampers are often of the lidded wicker basket variety.  Which style of hamper you choose is up to you, but the lidded variety will be a lot more money than the open-style.

Once you've got your hamper, you will need to stuff it full of filler material. The filler material is there for three reasons really:

• It protects the individual items in the hamper from each other and in transit
• It helps to make the whole package look more attractive, many people will buy a hamper JUST because it's caught their eye
• It enhances the perceived value of the overall gift, even sawdust makes a food hamper more expensive as a small jar peeks temptingly out of the pile
  

There are many styles of hamper packing materials available, from wood shavings and fine straw to coloured shredded tissue paper.  What is popular with some people at the moment is shredded banknotes (not real ones obviously!). 

Think About Weight

One thing to consider with packing materials is the weight.  Shredded paper is obviously going to weigh less and go further and cost less than wood/straw.  You have to think about the weight to:

• have it posted to you - the heavier  it is, the more it costs
• for you to pick it up/move it about - it can be a pain if you have to move spare stocks into your loft or a shed outside
• the weight of the finished hamper - you have to get it to your customer or friend and they have to get it home
• the weight of posting it to people if you're selling your hampers online or by mail order
  

What you put into a gift hamper will vary, depending on who it is for.  If you are doing it with somebody special in mind, then you've probably already got an idea.  But if it's ideal for them, then maybe you have discovered a niche and could create your first one, then photograph it to make them for other people.

When you make a gift hamper, you'll be thinking about the person, their likes or their needs.  Maybe for a young man you might make a hamper containing aftershave, a keyring, a football mug and a gadget; perhaps your hamper is for a new baby and you want to make up a hamper of nappies, cotton buds, a dummy/comforter and a small teddy. 

There's an endless mix of what you could put into a gift hamper - perhaps a hamper of miniature alcohol bottles, or a chocolate hamper, full of somebody's favourite bars of chocolate.  With old fashioned sweets being popular, you could even create a hamper containing small bags of sweets that were popular 30-40 years ago.

Generic hampers are often beauty products.  An elegant collection of hand balm, face cream, bubble bath, hair conditioner.  Or, for teenage girls, a makeup hamper - giving them a huge collection of great new makeup to try out .. and why not slip in some makeup wipes and a mirror too.

Half the fun is finding and picking the things to go into your hamper.

Wrapping hampers is something anybody can do well, by just taking a little bit of time. If you're a confident gift wrapper than you won't even have to think about it. If you're not confident, then simply go at it slowly, once you've got a way that works for you you'll become so speedy others will be in awe just watching you and thinking "wish I could do that!"

The easiest way to wrap up a hamper is to simply take a large sheet of cello paper, place the hamper in the middle, then bring the sides up to meet above the basket and goodies and secure it. After that it's just some decoration that's needed.

Cello paper is the hard plastic paper that you get wrapped around bunches of flowers at the florists. It's ideal because it's lightweight, easy to manipulate, cheap, lets people see what's in the hamper - and once finished with some ribbons etc it can look stunning.

How to Wrap Small Hampers

If your hampers are very small, 1-2 item hampers, you might decide that just using plain cling film is sufficient - just seal the cling film under the basket and secure with a piece of sticking tape.

Using cello paper again, you can just wrap the gift hamper tightly, again sealing the cello paper under the basket and securing with a piece of tape.

The finishing touches can be what truly makes your gift hamper stand out from the crowd.

If you're using cello paper to wrap the gifts, you can get some simple twist ties to secure them. After that you can affix ribbons, bows or other decorations.

Ribbon comes in just about every width, colour, pattern, shade and style imaginable. You can cut the ribbon ends using shaped scissors, or with pinking shears, or even fold them over and glue the ends before affixing small decorations on the ends, perhaps a tiny stork if it's a baby hamper, or the numbers 18 or 21 if it's a birthday hamper. These items are sold by craft shops online and offline and are called embellishments.

Other things you can do is to spray the cello with glitter spray, which comes in many colours, or learn to create curled ribbon (simply run the ribbon across the blade of a sharp pair of scissors).  Look around you, see what other people are doing.  Every time you create a gift basket, you can add  in new ideas and find for yourself what's easy, what looks fab and what works well.  What makes people go ooooh!

Well, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Hampers make lovely gifts and it's something you can do to give handmade well thought out personalised gifts, or to buy more easily for people you don't know that well ... or to turn into your own cottage industry, selling gift hampers online or offline at local craft shows, boot sales, or even sell to local shops!

I hope you've found it informative and you're all fired up now to create your very first professional-looking gift hamper!

Good luck - and leave your feedback in the comments box below, I'd love to know how you're getting on or if you have any great hamper tips.

Photos by:

Giften Custom Gifts