Handmade gifts for girlfriend

Cut 10 coupons out of coloured paper and staple them into a little booklet. Make each one about her actual life: "one canteen chai, no questions", "I stand in the mess queue", "your notes photocopied before exams", "one call where I only listen". Leave the last coupon blank so she can write her own.

Scroll all the way up and copy out the first WhatsApp message she ever sent you, word for word, timestamp and all. Roll it into a small corked bottle from a craft or gift shop, and add one line underneath about what you thought when you read it. It's tiny enough to sit in her palm or on a hostel shelf.

Fill a shoebox with snacks that each come with a memory: the chips from your first bus trip, the toffee from the paan shop near college, the noodles from the night you both missed dinner. Tape a folded chit to each one saying why it's in there. Ten things is plenty. Honestly, she'll read the chits before she opens a single packet.

Get a cloth potli from the local market and fill it with a lip balm, two sheet masks, scrunchies, a few hair clips and the chocolate she reaches for on day one. Add a note saying it's for the week she feels worst, and leave it at that. It feels caring without getting awkward or clinical. If she's in a hostel and home is a train ride away, it'll mean a lot.

A ball of cotton yarn and a crochet hook come to about ₹200, and free video tutorials can teach a total beginner a simple flower in an afternoon or two. Make a practice one first, then the real one in her favourite colour. Turn it into a keychain, or tie three together into a tiny bouquet. Either way, she'll know you learnt a whole new skill just for her.

The cotton-cover journal is handmade already, but the real gift is what you write inside. Fill the first ten pages with places you want to go together, her best one-liners and a hand-drawn map of your spots on campus. Leave the other seventy blank for her.

Order the 24 bordered prints, then peg them onto jute twine with little wooden clips from any stationery shop. Tape both ends to the wall and you're done, no nails in a hostel wall. Mix in photos of her with her friends and family too, not just the two of you.

Page one is a four-panel comic of how you met. Stick figures are totally fine, it's the details that count. Fill the rest with ticket stubs, bills from your dates, printed photos and washi tape. A plain scrapbook, a roll of tape, a glue stick and a few colour prints come to about ₹450.

Ten envelopes, each with a label and a letter inside: open when you fail a test, when you miss home, when your internship gets hard, when we've fought. Write one each evening so they don't all sound the same. For a long-distance girlfriend, nothing handmade beats these, because they keep working for months.

Pick a flower or a leaf from each place that's yours: the college garden, the ghat, the café with the bougainvillea. Press them flat inside a heavy textbook for 10 to 14 days, then glue them onto a handmade card with the place written under each one. Start now. Pressed flowers can't be rushed, however nicely you ask.

One folded chit for every year of her age, so 22 chits for her 22nd. Each one holds a specific reason, a memory or a little thing she does that nobody else notices. Writing 22 that don't repeat is harder than it sounds, so do a few every night.

Ask her school best friend, her roommate, a favourite cousin and her sister to write her one page each. Friends in other cities can write by hand, click a photo and WhatsApp it to you to print. Put the letters in a shoebox with a few old photos. Give yourself two weeks, because you'll be politely chasing people.

Ask her sister, or her mother if her family knows about you, for eight to ten recipes of the dishes she misses most in the mess. Write them out by hand, one dish per page, with a line about when she'd eat it at home. That's ghar ka khana she can make whenever she wants. Lovely if she's moving into a PG or flat with a kitchen.