Handmade Gifts Wrap Up

I’m doing one more post about handmade gifts, because they consumed so much of our energy over the past few months, yet we couldn’t really talk about it. So. Here we go.

For my sister I made the market tote from Amy Butler’s Sew-It Kit. Lesson learned: if you take the time to actually follow directions and buy home decor fabric and the fabric says “dry clean only” even though it’s 100% cotton, if you wash it, most of the heavy starch will wash right out of the fabric. It still turned out fine, but geeze fabric makers. Who dry cleans cotton?

And because Casey is the easiest person to shop for/make things for, she also got a little travel card game set. (On second thought, I might be making all these things for my idea of Casey or the college version of her. She’s a minimalist now might be throwing all this stuff away or donating it to Goodwill as soon as she gets it. I need to snoop around next time I’m at her house.)

There was the collection of make-up bags using the Flossie Teacakes tutorial that went to some of my sister-in-laws and my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law. For once I did a really good job of buying just enough fabric, which is kind of disappointing because I was looking forward to having more scraps left over.

Rush drew his Aunt Kelley’s name in the Williams family handmade gift exchange, so he made this cute apple stamp lunch bag/produce bag/tote. He loves painting.

I made a crayon roll for Rush and adapted the pattern for colored pencils for our neighbor’s children. Rush is currently more interested in the metal lunchbox where he stores his crayons because he can stand on it and reach things on the bookshelf. He’s also into using markers from my marker box. Maybe for now I’ll just tuck away the crayon roll for travelling. There are sharks on the fabric, so maybe it will be a good rainy-day-at-the-beach toy.

Maybe my favorite gift was the pillow I made for my brother featuring a silhouette of his dog Mel. It was risky, because what single, 25-year-old male has “quilted pillow made by pregnant older sister” on his Christmas list? I think he liked it though, or at least he’s polite. I was inspired by a quilt that Kellaura’s mom made with her dogs on it.

For my dad, I designed a set of postcards with a map to their beach house on one side. If he and my mom invite friends for the weekend, they can give them the card with directions and any other notes they need to add. I did have a slight breakdown when I sat down with my box of black and white postcards still warm from Kinkos, excuse me, FedEx Office, and jars of paint and realized it was going to take forever to paint each individual card…who in the world thinks it’s a good idea to hand paint postcards? It’s not like color copies are restrictively expensive these days. I think because I generally enjoy making cards it never crossed my mind that it might be a time consuming gift. I finally just buckled down and painted them, but still consider it kind of an insane thing to do.

We didn’t get pictures of everything, specifically anything that had to be mailed or sent early, like the beaded cross for my sister-in-law, or anything that was wrapped as soon as it was finished, like the purse I made for my mom. Hopefully these gifts are being enjoyed somewhere.

I hope we didn’t run out of all our good handmade gift ideas. We should probably get an early start for next Christmas. We’ll have two children this year, so I guess I should get started around April or May. Trent should start now.