DIY gift for friend - $2

I have a friend I had to make a birthday gift for. Short on time, (always) short on money I was starting to scramble.  I love my friend dearly, but shes more than a little hard to gift for. So I ran through my head the things she likes. She likes dogs, but not a lot that I felt I could do with that. She likes Wizard of Oz but already owns everything ever made by the marketing company. She likes Star Trek (and I'm friends with her anyways, haha ) but again, I couldn't think of anything to do with that. She likes drinking tea.......yes....I could work with that. 

A box of tea bags is cheap and that made me happy. So I picked up a box of 20 tea bags, but made sure they were the kind with the strings attached to the bag. I opened the box of tea from the bottom (I left the perforated top in tact for her) and took each tea bag out of its mini cello bag. 

$2 box of tea bags

Then I picked a colour scheme. I decided on pink because I had enough pretty pink scrap book paper bits to do this project. I took the scrap book paper and cut out 20 squares. Then I used a glue stick and glued them to the existing tabs on the end of the tea bag strings. 

pink paper selection

Next I cut out 20 more squares out of plain white paper this time. 

Total of 40 paper squares

After that I went online and searched out some quotes. I found quotes about drinking tea, quotes from Star Trek, motivational and inspirational quotes about life. I wrote each quote on one of the white squares. I added a couple little memories and inside jokes from our past decade of friendship.

I glued the white squares to the back of the pink ones. Ta-daa! I thought they were really precious and would bring a smile to her face for the next 20 tea times.  I put the tea bags back into the original box and re-sealed the bottom.

Pink paper view of the tea bags

Some of the tags flipped over so you can see how
I wrote the quotes. 

I didn't want to give her a box that, from the outside, looked like a regular box of Wal-Mart brand tea. A little Mod Podge and more pink paper fixed that up just fine. 

Close up of the finished, covered box. 

Considering how frantic I was just a few days ago about this,  I am very pleased with my low cost, high pleasure gift!