Dirty Thirty Gift Basket

I love making gift baskets for people; instead of one big gift you get to customize a whole bunch of nifty little gifts and brighten someone’s day. All of my friends are turning 30 lately it seems. One of my close friends is crafty like me. For my birthday last year she gave me a box of lollipops with the tag “30 Sucks” on it. I felt I needed to return the favour with a fun gift for her 30th. As she is newly pregnant I was a little bit limited – no booze, shot glasses, wine glasses, etc. I decided to go with a Dirty Thirty theme. As XXX is the Roman numeral for 30 it is very easy to do a naughty gift basket but I decided to go another route: getting clean! Since it’s “dirty” 30 I decided that a gift basket full of soap and other things you use to keep yourself clean would be hilarious and useful. Target has an awesome selection of travel-sized items which is perfect for what I had in mind.

Dirty Thirty Gift Basket

What You’ll Need

• basket or box
• floral foam
• kabob skewers
• travel-sized items
• hot glue gun
• tape
• tissue paper
• stickers spelling Dirty 30

Here’s the list of items I used

• bar of soap
• shampoo
• conditioner
• body wash
• shower puff
• mouthwash
• toothbrush
• toothpaste
• dental floss
• facial cleansing cloths
• face wash
• face cream
• q-tips
• makeup remover
• kleenex
• mini Tide to go pen
• Tide in travel packs designed to wash items in a sink
• Wet Ones wipes
• hand sanitizer

How To

I bought a fairly thick piece of floral foam, I believe it was 4” tall. I trimmed the foam to fit into the rounded basket I was using. The best way to trim floral foam that I have found is to use a serrated knife like a bread knife and make sure you cut it somewhere like a garage as little bits of it fly everywhere! I then hot glued the bottom of the foam to the basket.

Next I attached the shower puff and the hand sanitizer to a hole on either side of the basket. The shower puff took a bit of work as it was hanging too low at first. Since they are so squishy you can work with a tight fit.

I attached the skewers to the back of all the items using a line of hot glue run vertically down the center of the back of each item. Certain items won’t take the hot glue such as a toothpaste tube – I learned this once it fell off the stick after it dried. I simply used some scotch tape to attach the stick. The tape won’t hold some of the heavier items so do not rely on this method – hot glue is your best choice.

Once those have dried it’s all about arranging. This takes some time and effort. All of your items will be the same height once inserted. I suggest arranging them all into the foam as you like it and then trimming the skewers once you are content with the layout. I used snips from my toolbox to cut the skewers – they can be pretty tough and you don’t want them to split and fray. Scissors probably won’t do it without a lot of effort. Once you have adjusted the height you may find you need to move things around a bit more to make it look balanced. Another thing I noticed was that I had too many heavy items on one side and the basket would weigh heavily to that side when I picked it up so I was forced to readjust some items.

Once I was happy with the result I tucked tissue paper around the floral foam to cover it – it was rectangular and my basket was rounded so there was plenty of gaps around the sides. I also put tissue amongst the skewers to cover them up. I then attached the stickers to the front of the basket.

She absolutely loved her Dirty Thirty gift basket! She laughed her butt off. The reason I like to put so much effort into gifts is strictly for their smile on their face. I love seeing someone’s face light up when they see the hard work and thought I put in to customizing a gift just for them.