A few last gifts

Ok, I finally gave our last Christmas gifts tonight (yeah, a bit late). So now I can feel free to show them.

More "discards" inspired by Denyse Schmidts's Quilts:



This set of them included a lot of vintage fabrics, and I found that I really liked the contrast of the modern style with those sweet vintage patterns.

One last 10-minute headband:



And, best of all, the pencil pouch that worked! (Bless you, Noodlehead.)





This last was a gift for a four-year-old. I used his own handwriting as the pattern for the embroidery, and included a pencil and a pen and a sketch book (of course, his mom is the one who really loves it, with that precious handwriting).

edited to add: I can't take credit for the pencil-pouch idea; that was from my brilliant friend Julie, who gave embroidered pencil pouches to her friends' children, using her daughter's handwriting and drawing. Shamelessly stolen!

Resolved: make gifts sooner next time!

Happy New Year!

We spent our day cleaning up from the holiday decadence, sweeping up pine needles, and weeding out old things to make way for the new.

I'm hoping we've weeded out a few old habits, as well, and made a little room in our hearts for new ones. (I'm reading Simplicity Parenting, and I love what he has to say about how a less-cluttered space allows children to play more deeply and fully; I think the same is true for us.)

One of the things I'd like to do better this year is to avoid the last-second stressful crafting of Christmas presents, and instead, space them out throughout the year. A friend and I are going to keep each other motivated to get right to work on those great ideas we come across, rather than bookmarking them for later.

Are you doing the same? Here are a few more of the gifts I loved making this year; maybe they'll inspire your plan-ahead crafting (these are the ones I'd hinted about earlier).

I was so impressed when I saw this lovely initial wall-hanging idea on Cluck. Cluck. Sew. And if there's one thing I have plenty of, it's vintage white buttons! I planned to make 5 of them: 2 for my nieces, 2 for my best friend's children, and one for Lucy. But the store had limited supplies of stretcher bars, so Lucy's will have to wait. Here are my versions:






This summer, I'd loved the headbands I made myself using Blue Bird Studio's 10-minute headband tutorial. I thought they'd make perfect stocking stuffers, so I made a bunch (I forgot to photograph a few of them, I think.)

Here are some extra-wide adult versions:



And some narrower ones for girls:



And lastly, inspired by my neighbor, I decided to try my hand at making scarves from old t-shirts. I learned a few things from this:

I love the feel of old t-shirts and would wear one of these scarves every day if I'd made one for myself.

Appliqueing t-shirt designs onto t-shirt fabric is fun and satisfying.

Sewing t-shirt fabric on my sewing machine is a horrible, miserable experience I don't ever want to do again! So out went the lame attempt at a two-sided scarf. Only the one-sided scarves were given as gifts, and I'm not nearly as happy with them as I'd have liked. This is one of those gifts that needed more time and thought.

This is the first one I made, and I like it quite a bit. The fabric was oh-so-soft organic cotton.



This one is not as nice, and I wish I'd had more time to give to it:



I like the applique on this one, and the super-soft blue fabric:



This is a project I'm definitely going to try again, but by hand and with lots more time to do it well.

And the last gift I'd hinted at was these coasters, using the pattern from Denyse Schmidt's Quilts:



These were harder to do than I'd expected. I'd printed the pattern from online (Sew, Mama, Sew!), but used the directions from the book, and I don't know if there was a disparity or if it was me, but the fronts ended up 1/2 inch smaller than the backs in one direction, so I had to trim them down and they ended up a bit wonky. I'd want to figure that out before doing it again, but I did like the mix-it-up nature of the piecing, and felt like I was learning quite a bit about quilting as I sewed.

What are you making for next year's gifts--any ideas yet?