DIY Life

It's getting close to your big day. You've done everything you can to keep your wedding plans simple and frugal. You've made your own invitations, created centerpieces yourself, made your bouquet and even your guest book.

Now, how will you thank your bridesmaids? In keeping with your frugal DIY wedding, a thoughtful and unique hand-made gift sounds perfect.

Spa products
Wouldn't it be fun to have a spa day with your bridesmaids? Since this is an expensive luxury, you could thank them with some homemade spa products instead. Try some of these:

• Facial products: Make a cleanser, scrub, mask, and moisturizer to pamper your bridesmaids.
• Foot products: Create a soak, scrub, and butter -- those feet will be worn out from dancing at the wedding!
• Body products: Make bath salts, body scrub, hand scrub, and body oil, so she can be soft all over.

I have a fascination with pretty paper, but I balk at buying it. I just don't send out enough correspondence to cover the cost, since I prefer to use my cell phone or email to keep in contact with my loved ones. Besides, my love of pretty paper has resulted in a drawer full of lonely, unused stationery.

For those that prefer to use snail mail, but also balk at buying notebooks, lined or graph paper, I have the perfect solution for you. Printable Paper has hundreds of papers styles that you can download and print for free, including graph paper, lined paper, financial paper, music paper, and letter paper. The site also has stationery, cash receipts, fax cover sheets and even business cards for you to download and print out. For a small fee, you can print out matching envelopes for your gorgeous stationery.

Now, you no longer have to worry about running out of any kind of paper. Just pop over to the site and print out what you need. I was truly amazed at the pretty stationery. Not bad for free. If you don't want to pay for the matching envelope, download it for free by checking out this post by M.E. Williams. If you have your own image in mind and want to create your own stationery template, check out this post by Debra McDuffee.

via: Lifehacker

I have a love / hate relationship with word processing programs. On the one hand, it completely excites me that they are so technologically advanced that I can use them for almost anything I need -- from creating business cards and labels to inserting photos to make flyers and even scrapbook pages.

The hate part comes in when I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do what I want to do. No little dog or paper clip on the sidelines offers me the help that I need.

eHow has a simple tutorial on how to create a stationery template in Microsoft Word. Did you know that MSWord comes with templates you can just fill in? Or, you can choose to create your own from scratch. eHow has easy, to-the-point instructions on how to do both.

What will I do with my new-found word processing skill? For starters, I think I'll make a personal stationery header for quick notes, thank-yous, and the like. Now that I know how to do it, the possibilities are endless.