A great way of coming up with personal gift ideas for your friends or loved ones is by clipping pictures of magazines and keeping them in a file or creating a collage. Collage-making is an excellent way of keying in on someone's personal style or your own style. It's especially helpful if you've just moved to a new city and want to decorate a new place, or update your wardrobe to better suit the new climate or style of the city.
Here's what you need:
Create a separate collage for each person you want to shop for or if it's for yourself, each area of your life you want to imagine or manifest i.e., clothing, home dˇcor, career. Make one collage at a time. For your own collages, go through the magazines and clip pictures that give you an immediate sensory reaction. Don't overthink or judge them. When you've collected all your pictures, arrange them on the posterboard, before gluing them down, according to categories. Like, for clothing, arrange by casual wear, formal wear, accessories, etc. For home dˇcor, arrange by different rooms. Then glue on the pictures. Now you have a visible layout of your personal style. For your friends and family collages, clip items that you feel epitomizes them and glue them to the posterboard. Use it as a shopping guide. You'll be amazed at how efficiently you shop and by how you start to manifest the items on your collage. It's like magic! But really, designers already do this when decorating a room or designing a fashion line. It's an established technique. And it's fun and creative!
After making collages and getting a firm handle on your friends' and family members' personal styles, it makes it a lot easier to shop for them. And you don't have to wait till the last minute to get something for special occasions because things will pop out at you when you're out minding your own business. Example: the other night my boyfriend and I walked down the street to a sushi restaurant which was next door to a little dress boutique. While looking at the menu I was mesmerized by this shiny gold handbag on a mannequin in the window and I immediately thought of my mom. She's a sucker for shiny gold things. I couldn't stop looking at it. So after we ordered I popped over there and checked it out and asked the price. Four Hundred and Sixty Five Dollars. I said, "Well, I won't be taking this." But, it gave me a great idea of a gift for her that I can seek out at a more reasonable price next time I'm out at a more reasonable place.
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