Since it's March, I've decided to finally finish up the Handmade Christmas posts. As I've said before, I get a big fail for picture taking, mostly because things were finished and wrapped up right before they were given as gifts. This is the reason Mr hates handmade Christmas every year, because December is chaos, despite every good intention I have to start making gifts in February.
Anyway, in addition to the Floppy Disk Pen Holders and Secret Hollow Books, I embroidered some cuteness onto linen and framed it for some family members. For the ladies in my family, I found a pattern for a dachshund reindeer embroidery which was perfect. They love all things dachshund. I printed the template provided, transferred it to the linen, and embroidered the festive dog. I can tell you the finished product looked much like the version I linked to, but I failed to take any pictures of my own creations. For Mr's mom, who loves owls, I looked at hundreds of pictures of owl embroideries on Flickr for ideas, then drew something out. Since my drawing skills are even more basic than my embroidery skills, I went for something simple. Here's what I came up with (sorry about the flash):
I also knitted my sister-in-law a vesty shruggy thing, which turned out well. It was my first knitted garment. Too bad the only picture I took was when I was about four rows in from the beginning. Oh well.
It wouldn't be Handmade Christmas without some handmade embellishments on the outside of the packages. Being a librarian, I am a bookmark enthusiast, and when I saw these snowflake bookmarks it was love. I know there are paper cutting stamp things that would have made this project much easier, but I love the simplicity and clean lines of these snowflakes. I cut out each snowflake with a craft knife, and each bookmark took at least 45 minutes to cut. I used paper we had leftover (still!) from our wedding stationary. After affixing the white paper to the brown, I put a little hole in the top and tied a thin brown ribbon through.
I used the snowflake leftovers to adorn the outside of the gifts, and tied the bookmarks to the packages. We used paper grocery bags again this year to wrap the gifts, and when we ran out of those, I scored the last roll of kraft paper at Target two days before Christmas. Here's one of the framed embroideries wrapped up:
Our gifts for Mr's family:
Our gifts for my family:
So that's the end of Handmade Christmas 2009. I'm lucky to have had much help and support from my loving husband.
Coolest blog on the block. JW
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