The finest gift of beauty I could give another woman would have to be the golden arches—not fast food but the perfect eyebrow. A nicely sculpted brow can open up the entire face. Even a woman who doesn’t wear makeup would find that a well-groomed eyebrow can enhance her beauty with very little effort. Read more
EASY & QUICK | Silver and pewter are traditional materials for decorating and never go out of fashion. These metal place markers were created by cutting bannerlike shapes with scissors from a disposable aluminum baking sheet. Read more
CHEAP & PERFECT | Having the right cooking equipment makes food prep and clean up easier. Here are must-have kitchen products that infinitely out perform their insignificant price. Any one of them would make a perfect “little” gift. Read more
JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING | We love all the products we feature on Frugalbits, but these stand out as perfect “just a little something” gifts that will appeal to beauty and fitness types.
WASTE NOT | Do you have odd bits and ends of old gift wrap and ribbon lying around that you can’t bring yourself to throw out? I was on the verge of chucking out my growing pile of scraps when Brendan Power, my good friend and Frugalbits D.I.Y columnist, suggested I combine them with commonplace kraft paper to give it a lift. What a great idea. Read more
TO GET: A down ultra light coat. Patagonia makes one that costs the moon, but Uniqlo has the one and it’s just $99. There’s a wrinkle though. The nearest Uniqlo is in Manhattan and they don’t ship to Canada—or even across the U.S. any more, for that matter. We’ve asked a friend in NYC to pick up A coat, and send it to our U.S. Christmas destination. The process is a bit inconvenient but the coat is sooo worth it; it’s stylish, inexpensive and well made— you can’t get any better than that. Visit www.uniqlo.com Read more
HOLIDAY 2011 | It’s all but impossible to imagine storage bags would be at the top of anyone’s Christmas wish list—or tacked onto the bottom of it for that matter. But the clever containers featured here perform their intended tasks so well that anyone lucky enough to receive one or all of them as “a little something extra” for Christmas will silently thank the giver a thousand times over whenever they put them to work. Read more
FREE & FABULOUS | Too bad other big brands and major retailers don’t adopt Swedish fashion megabrand H&M’s approach to gift-wrapping, because if enough of them were to do it, gift givers would be able to wean themselves off wasteful wrapping paper in no time flat. Read more
BEAUTIFUL & EASY | We’ve used a combination of origami light cubes and bare LED bulbs (in a ratio of 1 boxed light to three bare bulbs) on every Christmas tree we’ve decorated in the last dozen years. The origami boxes produce beautiful, diffuse squares of light, something you don’t normally see on a Christmas tree. Some years we’ve chosen to box only white string lights, but mostly we box multi-coloured ones. To make our boxes, we worked with vellum squares (available at art supply stores or online) that deepen and intensify whatever colour light they cover. Read more
GIVE & GET | The fourth annual winter One Of A Kind show and sale got underway yesterday at Vancouver’s Convention Centre West (it continues through December 11). Frugalbits was on hand bright and early to scour the isles for cool stuff coming out of the studios of the more than 300 mostly local artisans and designers who are participating this time around. While plenty of items caught our eye at this holiday shopping extravaganza, products from the following three companies actually enticed us to buy. Read more