Personal Graduation Gifts for Grads

Graduation gifts can be tough! Whether your graduate is graduating from High School, College or Graduate School, you want to get them something special. Today I am going to share some fabulous personal Graduation Gifts for Grads!

It seems like forever ago, but remember when I graduated, I must have received twenty pens, a ton of savings bonds and at least three briefcases as graduation gifts! Don’t know about you, but I am not the “practical” gift type, I like to go with a more personal and creative touch.

My son is graduating high school this spring and I am mixed with emotions. Of course, I am so proud of all that he has accomplished and the incredible man he has become.

I am excited for him to start this next chapter of his life, going off to school and finding his independence. However, I am nervous for him to leave and wonder will he be able to get along okay without us. (Or course, I know he is going to be just fine, but a part of me hopes he doesn’t find it “too easy”… is that bad?)

With all of these emotions, I want to make sure no matter where he ends up, he always has a piece of home to take with him.

This is why I simply adore all of the items that I made on Shutterfly. Almost every one of these items that I am sharing with you are practical things that he will use on a daily basis, but will always remind him of his friends and family at home!

Let’s get going and let me show you some of the fabulous gifts we created!

Great personal gifts for graduates:

Mason Jars are my very favorite thing! I am so excited about them. We are going to use them as table decorations for my son’s graduation party and then he is going to take them with him to school. I know that he’ll have these mugs forever.

These mason jars are so well made and I love that you can personalize them with whatever you choose. With my son attending Michigan State University, you can’t go anywhere without hearing “Go Green” and “Go White” – it is the official greeting of a Spartan. That’s why we thought it would be perfect for my son’s first set of glassware!

For the party, we are filling them with green & white chocolate candies and we will have the perfect candy dishes to help decorate the tables!

Mobile Portable Chargers are a must these days, and especially around campus. You could be out at classes all day and you don’t want to be caught with no battery.

These mobile chargers are the perfect gift for my son’s friends. They are reasonably priced, practical and personal (the THREE “P’s”!)

We made one with his high school logo and upcoming college logo for his friends. We also made one for my husband who was having charging envy and is getting very sad about our boy moving out!

We tested the chargers out this weekend while we were away on a family vacation and they worked great! You can even plug two devices in at a time. With the personalization you will always know whose is whose.

We are actually going back to Shutterfly and ordering two more for my other two boys, so they will each have their own – no more fighting over charging blocks!

One of my son’s favorite gifts was the Metal Collage Print. Guys are not so into decorating their rooms, but he got very excited about this picture.

We had him take his favorite pictures from high school and we made them into this fabulous collage and printed it a metal. The colors, when printed on metal, are so incredible. They have this amazingly beautiful glow to them that makes the colors just pop out. This will be a keepsake that he will have forever.

Speaking of decorating his dorm room, we fell in love with the Personalized In Your Words Pillow. Again, this is a great gift that will really have a personal feel. Take you and your best friends inside jokes, sayings or favorite movie lines – make them into a pillow.

My son has always gone to summer camp. It is his home away from home. So we took his camp villages that he has lived at for the past several summers and put them on a pillow for his room. He went crazy for this! Of course, we had to make an uber MSU pillow to show his school spirit!

Another one of our favorite gifts are these Stainless Steel Travel Mugs. These will be great for carrying around campus as they keep your beverages ice cold or nice and warm!

We made a few of these as gifts for some of his friends. We took some of their favorite pictures and collaged them on the mugs.

Finally, while the gifts are usually for the graduate themselves, we wanted to get something special for some special people in his life – the grandparents. To say they are proud is an understatement. So we decided to make these wonderful Personalized Woodgrain Frames for them to put his graduation picture in and they can proudly display in their home.

I have been on tons of websites that will utilize your photos to make gifts. Shutterfly, however, really makes it quick and easy. Their website was incredibly easy to use and intuitive. We simply uploaded our photos and edited them right there on their site and “poof” – we had our personalized gifts.

We loved how they show you an actual preview of what you were getting and how they warned you if the photo quality wasn’t good enough for that particular project. If you are looking for personalized gifts for graduation or for that matter, any other special occasion, Shutterfly was a no brainer.