Speaking Part 2 你親手做的禮物 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a handmade gift you gave to someone.

You should say:

• what the gift was
• who you gave it to
• how you made it
• and explain why you chose to make it rather than buy something.

¹ A handmade gift I gave someone fairly recently was a small recipe book I put together for my younger sister, in the summer of 2022, about three weeks before she moved away from Taipei to start university in Tainan. ² It was a slim, A5-sized notebook, hand-bound with a navy linen cover, and inside I'd handwritten exactly thirty of my mother's everyday home-cooked recipes — the dishes my sister had grown up eating but had never once cooked herself.

³ Putting it together actually took me almost two months. ⁴ I sat with my mother in the kitchen on weekends with a notebook and a measuring cup, watching her cook each dish and translating her instinctive "a bit of soy sauce, until it smells right" into something a nineteen-year-old in a shared dorm kitchen could realistically follow.

⁵ I drew small illustrations next to each recipe, mostly of the finished dish, and wrote little notes at the bottom of each page — things like "don't skip the rice wine, it really matters" or "this is the one Dad always asks for". ⁶ I bound the whole thing myself with a kit I'd bought online, and the stitching is honestly a bit uneven.

⁷ I chose to make it rather than buy her something practical because I wanted her to take a specific, edible piece of home with her. ⁸ A rice cooker would have been more useful in the short term, but it wouldn't have been from us in the same way.

⁹ When I gave it to her, she actually started crying, which neither of us expected. ¹⁰ Two years on, she texts me photos of finished dishes from her flat in Tainan most weekends, and the book itself is, by her own admission, completely covered in soy sauce.

A handmade gift I made last winter was a wool scarf for my grandmother, who's in her late seventies and lives in Yilan. I'd never knitted anything in my life before, and the whole project was prompted entirely by a YouTube tutorial I happened to watch one weekend.

A handmade gift I gave my best friend for her thirtieth birthday last year was a printed photo album covering the fifteen years we've known each other. I spent about three weekends going through old hard drives, my phone backups, and her own social media archive.

A handmade gift I'm probably most proud of was a small wooden jewellery box I made for my mother last Mother's Day. I'd been taking a beginner's woodworking class on Saturday mornings, and the box was actually my final project for the course.