• Homemade party favors add a personal touch to your child's party.happy birthday image by yannik LABBE from Fotolia.com
  
  When you throw a birthday party for a child, costs can quickly escalate. If you want to give your party guests favors but want to keep your budget low, consider making them yourself. There are plenty of cool favors you can make that kids will love. Homemade party favors also have more of a personal feel than their mass-produced counterparts.
  
  

Edibles

• Most kids love sweets, so give each party guest a bag of goodies. While bags of candy are common party favors, these will be much less expensive because you are making them yourself. Homemade baked goods are always better than store-bought ones. Make your favorite batch of cookies, whether they are chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin or sugar cookies. Alternatively, make a few different types of homemade candy, such as fudge, and put an assortment in each bag.
  
  

Finger Puppets

• Send the kids home with a few cute finger puppets. These are easy to make. Go to your local thrift store or dollar store and buy a few pairs of inexpensive gloves in different bright colors. Cut the fingers off of each of the gloves. Use plastic jiggly eyes, yarn, buttons, craft foam, pompoms, scraps of fabric and any other items you want to transform the fingers into puppets. The kids can put them on their fingers and have a puppet show.
  
  

T-Shirts

• This is a great homemade party favor that you don't even have to make yourself. Buy each child a plain white T-shirt. Set up a table where the kids can decorate their shirts. Cut pieces of cardboard to place inside the shirts while they are being decorated so that the decorations don't bleed through. Give the kids tubes of puffy paint so they can write or draw designs on their shirts. Do this project at the beginning of the party so that the shirts dry before it is time for the kids to go home.
  
  

Modeling Clay

• Decorate plastic bags with the party guests' names and colorful stickers. Inside each bag, put a scoop of homemade modeling clay. Make the clay yourself using 1 cup of flour, 1 tbsp. of vegetable oil, 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of salt, 2 tsp. of cream of tartar and whatever shade of food coloring you like. Mix the clay together and portion it into each child's bag. Punch a hole in the side of the plastic bag and tie a ribbon through it. Attach a cookie cutter to the ribbon that the children can use to make shapes with the clay.