A Cowboy Kit

Yesterday we were invited to help celebrate the birthday of the kid's friend Zachary. Of course with that invitation came the question on our part of what we should give to him. We are really trying to use what we have and give lots of homemade gifts this year so our ideas all went along that line. What we ended up deciding to give him was a cowboy kit. What it included was this:

• A horse head to attach to his bike. (We thought about a stick horse which would be made basically the same just with a longer stick but we thought he would like a bike horse better.) I made the horse head with some brown material I had on hand, some white felt and yarn, buttons for eyes, a stick and some ties to attached to tie it on the bike. ( I think Velcro would have actually worked better here but if I have any, I couldn't find it.) We (Jonathan helped me) stuffed the head with grocery bags.
• A saddle. This was pretty simple, just some fake leather cut in somewhat of a saddle shape and then I attached elastic to it that could go under the bike seat to hold it on.
• Saddle bags. These I also made from the fake leather that I had on hand. I made them the right size to go over the bike bar and then the tied on with some ribbon.
• Cowboy Cookies. These are basically chocolate chip cookies with oatmeal in them but they were called Cowboy cookies in the cookbook so I thought they would be appropriate. We put them in a container that fit in his saddle bags and Mara decorated the front with a horse picture.
• A rope for a lariat which we put in the saddle bag.
• A handkerchief.
• Mara also made a very cute card with a picture of a cowboy on a horse on front. (Mara has a book that teaches how to draw horses and she has been having a lot of fun with it lately and has gotten pretty good.)
• A cowboy hat.

Here is Jonathan trying it out at home before we left. ( We wanted to make sure it all worked all right.) Zachery seemed please with the gift and it caused all the little boys to start playing cowboys and they seemed to have fun with that. For the gift we were able to use stuff that we already had, so it didn't cost us anything but time. As far as the time goes, one blessing of being a stay at home mom is being able to have time to work on projects like that, also the kids helped me as much as possible. However I will admit that I procrastinated as usual and we were scrambling at the last minute to get it all together. It seems I never learn!

That was one of our frugal projects for the week, what frugal things have you been doing?

For lots more posts about frugality, visit Biblical Womanhood.