I'm a big fan of homemade food gifts, which in my mind include alcoholic items, condiments, spices, etc. In fact, my mom recently told me that one of her favorite gifts in years past was a jar of Bronzed Chicken Spices that I mixed together in a big batch and doled out to family members along with the recipe. Mom said it took the hard part out of making a yummy dinner, and it was a thoughtful and helpful gift. Bonus!

That conversation greatly influenced my selections when I sat down to choose the items in this year's Foodie Gift Guide. It can take just pennies to make a gift that's likely to end up as someone's favorites list this year, so why pick products that cost a fortune, no matter how cool they are? Sure, we'd all like to have a fancy mixer or espresso machine, but in today's economy, a nice whisk or a pound of good coffee are just as welcome.

So here's a baker's dozen of food and kitchen items that you can either make as gifts this holiday season, or pick up without emptying your larder, er, pocketbook. (Puns definitely intended!) I'd love to hear about other gifts you plan on making or buying for the foodie in your life. Please tell us about them in the Comments! Merry merry, happy happy!

Homemade Coffee Liqueur
A few years ago we made two different versions of coffee liqueur, dutifully marking them brew #1 and brew #2. Some recipes call for instant coffee and some call for a pot of brewed java. The bad news was that we forgot which recipe went with which number. The good news was that both batches were tasty, and our friends and family really appreciated the gift, especially when certain name brands can be quite pricey. This also needs to sit for a month, so factor in the time this needs to sit on the shelf aging to perfection.

Berkeley-based Vaska, makers of botanical-based laundry soap, is holding a Get Cozy With Vaska Contest, which sounds like it's right up our alley.

Twelve winners will get $300 in cash and a page in the 2010 Vaska Cozy Calendar, sure to be a collector's item (or so they claim). The contest ends at midnight Jan. 4, 2010, with winners announced on Jan. 10. So now's the time to get making cozies! The cash would be a nice help in paying off some of my holiday debt, is what I'm thinking.

And I appreciate the fact that their PR efforts are focusing on crafters and our mad crafting skills:

"The Get Cozy Contest is a way of introducing the crafts community to laundry care products that conserve the integrity of their designs and, at the same time, we can reward them for their creativity. We know crafters will appreciate Vaska's softer, brighter, greener results," says Julia Fry, Vaska creator. Fry is a former fashion designer, whose love of textiles led her to create the herb-based detergent.

All the details, contest rules, and info on where to buy Vaska detergent can be found on their website.

The farm collective I am a member of is rapidly canning their late tomatoes, before the rain splits them all on the vine. If you find yourself in the same situation or are considering canning as holiday gifts, consider these wonderful labels. They are inexpensive, functional, and lovely. Add your own unique text to the template and choose a color. Lelo in Nopo Handmade takes care of the rest.

This week's Weekend Project on MAKE is this funky-cool electric cigar box guitar. Most of the construction is very crafty, and there's only a little soldering involved! You could always make it just acoustic, too. Check out the video and PDF instructions.

My mom has had a long love affair with frogs (made birthdays really easy when I was growing up), and I recently caught the bug myself (so to speak) at the California Academy of Science.

So of course I fell in love with this adorable froggie hot sock (or hot frog wheat bag, as it's referred to in the original post), and now there's a wheat bag pattern and tutorial! I'm totally smitten with that fabulous fly lolling on the greenest of tongues. Gotta make myself one of these to stick in my pocket or the little one's stroller on a cold San Francisco summer (ha!) morning... (Via Whip Up.)

p.s. Check out the Wikipedia page on frogs for some jaw-dropping frog tidbits.

There's something so summery about seeing hopscotch squares and colorful chalk drawings on the sidewalk as you walk through your neighborhood, and the kids that live near me have been pretty creative. So I was delighted to see this great sidewalk chalk how-to recently. It never occurred to me that I could make my own, but custom-mixed colors sound pretty fantastic! (Via Whip Up.)

Sarah James at Instructables is at it again with another DIY beauty product: vegan lip balm. Learn all the basics for this bee-free kisser balm.

More:

• How-To: Make Your Own Deodorant
  
• Homemade Shampoo
  

To follow up her tutorial on DIY shampoo, Sarah James comes back at us with this easy recipe for making your own deodorant.

More:

Homemade Shampoo

Etsy video maven Tara Young went inside the studio of Birdhouseaccents, a couple based out of Canton, CT who build and sell birdhouses:

It took Fred Jakubiec from Birdhouseaccents 25 years before he made building birdhouses his full-time job. It was well worth the wait. After 13 years as Area Supervisor at various fast food establishments, a stint at a steel mill and years of driving for Fed Ex, Fred decided working for other people just wasn't fun anymore.

He and his partner Lynn Patrick regularly took trips to Amish country to go thrifting and flea market shopping. During one visit, Fred discovered primitive style woodworking, and it was then that knew he found his calling. Building birdhouses and decorating them with special recycled accents was the perfect niche for this one time woodworking tinkerer turned birdhouse entrepreneur.

Most years, for Father's Day we let my dad, and now my husband, sleep in, make him a nice breakfast, and then head out for a picnic at the beach or by a creek in the mountains. This tradition is a great way to let the family spend some quality time together, give us an excuse to blow off household chores and head out for a nature excursion, and it's easy on the pocketbook as well.

But we always offer a small gift as well. And the ones that have held up the longest, evoke the strongest memories, and are often displayed as favorites around the house are the ones that are handmade.

Around our house, we have framed finger paintings and sketches of flower vases and pots of gold. We have fish made out of driftwood hanging in the living room, torn-paper hearts on the bedroom walls, and a sea shell and sea glass collage sitting on the mantle. My husband's got a wooden box, painstakingly painted by a then-5-year-old, that holds assorted screws on his tool bench. A decorated tin can holds the pens and pencils on his desk, and my own pen is a flower blooming out of a pot of pinto beans, recently created by our 6-year-old son. One wall in the kitchen is festooned with hand-print castings, along with a beaded crystal hanging, and an Ojo de Dios. All made by our two sons over the years, and all cherished.

Sure, the T-shirts, ties, and necklaces are always appreciated. Neither of us will turn down breakfast in bed or homemade muffins, but getting to see presents made by our children around every corner of our house is truly the gift that keeps on giving!

Feel free to share your homemade gifts, memories, and whatever else is on your mind in the Comments!

Sarah James at Instructables made a guide to making your own shampoo, with an emphasis on what ails you.

Nothing is more romantic or classic than a perfect red rose. Its beauty is undeniable and it is a timeless symbol of love and devotion. While many bridal floral designs are complicated, textural, and packed with flowers, sticking to one type of flower and one deep color is a simple way to ensure a good design, and to also ensure a successful do it yourself project. I purposefully omitted ribbons, bows, and sparkles to allow the perfection of each flower to shine, and to make the construction of each piece less daunting for the novice.

This project showcases a hand-tied rose bouquet for the bride overflowing with more than two dozen flowers, an elegant single blossom corsage, and a handsome boutonniere. If you choose, you can scale down the bride's project to make bouquets for each bridesmaid, or embellish each project with your own signature wedding style.

Check out this video highlighting Gwen Neucall of BeyondThePicketFence who makes natural soaps. She goes through the process of soapmaking, from selecting and combining ingredients to testing out experimental natural colors.

Sarah James at Instructables shows us how easy it is to make your own mineral makeup. She writes:

Mineral makeup is more than just a new beauty trend - it offers health benefits for skin as well. And now you can make it at home! It's made of all natural, finely ground minerals from the earth, without many of the chemicals, dyes, and preservatives found in traditional makeup. I have VERY sensitive skin, and have had trouble in the past with commercial makeup (even store-bought mineral makeup!) being too heavily fragrances, or containing irritants like bismuth oxychloride. This formula eliminates classic irritants so that it's kinder to the skin. Since it contains titanium dioxide which has anti-inflammatory properties, it also has a calming effect on the skin, particularly important if you suffer from inflammatory problems such as rosacea or acne. AND I've added micronized zinc oxide to give it an SPF rating, helping to further protect skin from damage and wrinkles. By making your own at home, you can control not only the purity of the ingredients you use, you can also create a custom color, matched exactly to your own skin tone!

ModHomeEcTeacher at Curbly rounds up some sweet smelling eucalyptus cleaning recipes.

Check out this tote bag you can make without sewing! Sarah James at Instructables shows you how to use duct tape to make something that's actually atractive for once, not that I don't love duct tape crafts.

Thinkgeek's April fool's joke this year was to pretend to sell this Tauntaun sleeping bag. Well, it's not really commercially available, but someone had to have made the one for the photo! I just love that intestinal lining. Via Neatorama.

Here's an interesting woodworking project on Instructables: make a boomerang from firewood!

Conditioned hemp rope is expensive, but Instructables user mcvarij shows you how. I never knew it was so involved, and yet simple!

Check out this Instructable by user skymring for these attractive (and comfy-looking) moccasins. The pattern is made right from your own foot, so they're bound to fit! The creator says they're "Viking shoes," but they don't look like any Viking shoes I've ever seen; they look more celtic to me. Can anybody place the time and place when these shoes originated?

It could also be adapted for compost; a friend of mine has a small hole cut into her countertop that feeds directly into a bin below for veggie scraps.

This one goes out to fellow CRAFT writer Rachel Hobson, who uses the word "frak" more often in regular conversation than I thought possible. Frak Off eye quilt, via MAKE.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to my new favorite cookbook, The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market Cookbook. I happen to be lucky enough to live a 15-minute bike ride away from the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market, but the recipes will easily adapt to a farmer's market anywhere (or, for that matter, a supermarket, although you'll lose the magic of learning to cook by what's in season). The genius of the book (besides the deliciousness and simplicity of most of the recipes) is organizing it by vegetable. I know most cookbooks do this to some degree, but it's wonderful to see the seasons unfold along with the produce, and to get ideas for cooking with things you can buy at your local farmer's market that you might not otherwise try.



Case in point: I am not usually a fan of broccoli, but some got left in our fridge after my mom came to visit, so I opened up the book to the broccoli section and found a great, easy recipe that uses anchovies for bonus points (good for pregnant ladies!). I tossed in some wild rice leftover from dinner last night, and shazzam! A tasty and nutritious lunch. It's not that pretty to look at, but it's really exciting to think I can use this cookbook to approach many of the scarier-looking veggies at the market. Anything that makes the farmer's market and seasonal produce (maybe even from your own garden!) more approachable is a great thing. (Check out the Chronicle Books site to sample a few of the recipes from the book.)

The very first moving picture machine was barely more than a hand-cranked circular flipbook, called a mutoscope. Jesse Breytenbach made her own and documented the elaborate creation of the wooden apparatus that holds the "movie" cylinder.

I found this great Instructable by Belsey on making chocolate lip balm - I've been buying chocolate lip balm, this looks cheaper and just as good!

Doctor Popular had this clever solution for simplifying mass transit with his bicycle:

When taking your bike on to the CalTrain, you always wanna make sure you aren't blocking someone else's bike that might be getting off before yours. Most bikes show their destinations by using these ugly little yellow tags that would show what stations they would board or depart on. After talking about it for a while, I finally decided to make my own bike cozy that proudly displayed my frequent start/stop destinations, San Francisco and San Mateo.

Craftsters emruth and abby marie is unique shared pictures of how they went from a small stuffed dinosaur to this giant plastic inflatable dinosaur for their sculpture class.

I love making food gifts for friends around the holidays; it's the perfect answer for people who are hard to shop for, it's fun, it's inexpensive, and you get to lick the bowl! Here are a few recipes that caught my eye as I was trying to decide what to make this year, but check out the CRAFT blog archives in the past few weeks for more foodie thoughts (like those tasty-looking candied orange peels). You can also look at the Edible Giftable guide I wrote up last year.

If candy canes are good, wouldn't homemade candy canes be even better?? Try it and see! (You'll need a friend for the pulling of the candy, but surely that's part of the fun.)

In case you don't like your teeth (or you love your dentist), toffee is totally the way to go. I like Elsie Marley's toffee recipe since she and I must be kindred spirits. I am addicted to toffee!

My family makes cookies for our neighbors every year, and I must admit that they look like they were still done by little kids. These gorgeous Christmas cookies on Design*Sponge from Caroline Swift really take things to the next level (there's also a recipe for winter cherry brownies and champagne sorbet, so don't miss this one)!

I'm putting lemon curd on this list because it's the edible gift I want to receive! I absolutely love lemon curd but never make it myself. Maybe it's time to start...

If you're just not a baker, maybe this is the edible giftable for you! This candy garland from Whip Up is a great way to use up some pretty yarn scraps and add some flair to your holiday decorations or presents.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Anna Borstad tells the story on Whip Up of how she ended up creating this recycled textile worm for a company that raises and sells red wriggler worms for home vermicomposting.