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?

Old traditions, new ornaments

Hope you're not getting tired of Christmas yet, because I've still got more to share!



It's been our tradition that I give a new ornament to Andi each Christmas, representing our year. This year, of course, it had to be Lucy.

And we started a new tradition: making an ornament each year for Lucy. When I thought back on her year, for one thing that would symbolize it, I thought of the blanket Andi knitted while she was pregnant. She made the "Big Bad Baby Blanket" from Stitch 'N Bitch, using a gorgeous, soft red wool. There was just a bit left. I asked her to make a mini version for Lucy's first ornament, and I love how it came out.



Lucy got a few other ornaments, too. From her Granny, she got this "baby's first Christmas" ornament:



She said she settled for a pea pod because she couldn't find a string bean. It also reminded her of Lucy in her hammock.

Lucy's Nanny gave her this ornament, fair trade from Guatemala. It reminded her of Lucy in the sling, of course:



I started a journal for Lucy, to keep track of her ornaments. I imagine her someday unwrapping each ornament as she decorates her tree with her children and shares each one's story.

A discount for you from Stonz Wear

If you read this blog regularly, you know it's not commercially motivated. On occasion, I've mentioned a product I love, because I feel like I've discovered something great and I want to share it with you. Such was the case with the Stonz boots I wrote about a while back. I've been teaching preschoolers for 16 years now, and I've come across a lot of winter gear in that time--some good, and some not so good. (As I've often quoted to the families in my program, "there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.") I know first-hand that it can be a real struggle getting outside in the winter happily with babies. I knew Lucy would be out every day come snow or wind or slush, so I was thrilled to find something that worked so well.

When I wrote about the booties, I also wrote to the company to say thank you. And guess what? They offered you a deal if I wrote about them again. I gave it some thought, because it's annoying to me when my favorite bloggers get all commercial and are constantly endorsing products. I don't want to do that! But I've been recommending these boots to everyone I know anyway, so I figured it made sense to take them up on their offer. Stonz Wear is offering a 10% discount to you for the next week. Just let them know you read about it here when you order.

Besides the fact that they make toasty warm boots that will stay on without letting the snow in, here are some things I loved about Stonz Wear:

They are made in Canada. (About as local as I could find, and I figure it means they know snow!)

They don't use plastic packaging. (I try to avoid buying plastic whenever I can. Nylon boots seem like a necessary evil. But stuffing them into a plastic bag is not necessary. Glad to find a company that understands that.)

They offer free shipping for orders over $50. (Gulp. Yes, they're expensive. But so worth it. I buy clothes exclusively at thrift stores and tag sales, but when it comes to shoes, I've decided it's worth shelling out the money for something that is good for your feet. Especially for a baby just learning to walk!)

Oh, and here's one other thing I love that I didn't mention before. As I've written before, it's cold in our house, and we wear slippers for warmth. Lucy wears her Robeez as slippers. The Stonz boots--even with the sherpa fleece lining--fit right over them. Thank goodness! It's hard enough dressing a baby in winter gear. This eliminates one step and makes it that much easier. (Plus, it's one more layer of warmth.) On a warmer rainy day, though, I could put the boots on bare feet and not feel like she's overdressed. So it's like I got snow boots and rain boots in one.



Enough. Go get a deal if you were so inclined anyway. If not, don't worry--I won't do this too often!

A few more little gifts

Here are a few more Christmas gifts.

Lucy got in on the crafting a bit, too:



She did her first watercolor painting this month, so I thought of a way to share that with some of our family and friends, a little stocking stuffer for the readers in our life (these are a few of them; we made many).



Next is a little present I made for her. She loves to play with drawstrings, cords, knots, and buttons, so I made her a toy full of them. She loves the button I added as a last-minute whim; it's huge and made of shell and cold, and must feel good on her gums (don't worry; it's on there very well!)



And here is a gift for a friend who holds his tension in his shoulders. I had read a lot about goldenrod this fall, and had read somewhere that goldenrod oil is good for aches and cramps and particularly for shoulder tension. So I decided to try my hand at making a salve. This was our first attempt, and it came out great! I had about 2/3 of a pint jar of goldenrod oil, and one block of beeswax (slightly more than an ounce), and decided to just use them all and hope for the best. Andi melted the beeswax, mixed in the oil, and put it in the fridge to hasten the set (we made it the day we planned to give it; Christmas Eve!), and it worked. It smelled lovely, looked beautiful in its thrifted container, and felt nice when he tried it on his hands. We've yet to see if it works on his shoulders.



More to come!

Presents, revealed

It's been a sad Christmas around here. Lucy was sick, and my family, all gathered together nearby, didn't want to be exposed to the germs. So we had a quiet Christmas at home with a miserable baby. Happily, the fever is now gone and she's on the mend.

But I do have a few more finished-at-the-very-last-second gifts I can show.



The only good thing about Lucy feeling sick is that she'll actually snuggle a bit (a rarity for our on-the-go baby). So while I was working on a gift for my sister, she settled in on my lap and said "oooh!" as she touched the stitches with one little pointer finger and helped pull the floss through.

This turned out to be one of my favorite things I made this year. I love it so much, I wanted to keep it! It's the bookmark from Handmade Home (sized a bit smaller: I cut the fabric to 7 1/2 rather than 8 inches high). I used pieces of that same linen dress as the scarf I shared earlier, and some trim I'd gotten on that same Goodwill trip (yards of this heart trim and tiny white rick rack, sewn to the ugliest red felt I've ever seen--now liberated). I'd asked my nieces to do self portraits and signatures the last time they visited me, and I transferred them to the fabric, embroidered, and then sewed them back to back.





Also from Handmade Home are some potholders I made for friends. I'm not as thrilled with how these came out. Apparently, I am terrible at applying bias tape. I hand sewed the back side of the first set (badly), as directed, but gave up and machine sewed the next one. I don't like either result. But I do like the pattern--the potholder fits your hand nicely, and the diagonal quilting lines make it fold just as you'd like it to in your palm.





I'm going to have to work on applying bias tape better. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard! My other comment on this pattern is that the first (failed) attempt I made used batting, and I hated the look and the feel. It is much better with a piece of towel inside; it gives it a vintage-y feel and more heft.

Enough for now. But I have more to share over the next few days. (And time to do it; I'm on vacation!)

O, Tannenbaum

I've enjoyed getting glimpses of other people's Christmas trees on various blogs, so here's ours (filling up with all the packages we've received so far in the mail):



Here we are at the tree farm where we go every year, cutting the "perfect" tree. It takes us ages to agree on just the right one. It has to be very skinny to fit into our small rooms. And not too tall--I can touch our ceilings without standing on tiptoe. But we don't want it to be too sparse. This year, we think we got a great one.



Between both of us working full time, and raising a baby, and trying to keep the house neat enough to present to parents each morning after 6 kids trash it every day, and trying to make all our gifts, there's no time for decorating. We set up the tree and it sat for a few days with only lights, while the kids kept asking why we hadn't decorated it yet. Finally, I decided to have them do it (if you're new to my blog, these are not my kids I'm talking about; they're the 1-5 year-olds in my early childhood program). We left the very lowest branches bare to protect the ornaments from cats and babies. (I might have done a teensy tiny bit of stealthy re-arranging of ornaments...)

It was only mostly decorated at that point, because I saved our "special" ornaments to put on later with Andi. These are the ornaments that represent our years together; I've given one to her every year since our third Christmas together (1992), reflecting something important from that year in our life. Here are a few of them...

The chicken I made last year, when we added 3 chickens to our household. This one resembles Gertie, our Black Australorp:



The board, sandpaper, and saw ornament I made the year we spent doing nothing but major DIY home renovations (boy, is it hard to photograph these well!):



A rowboat we bought on the vacation we took to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary. The cottage we rented had rowboats available, and we spent one lovely morning rowing on the cove there.



Otherwise, our tree has a very Scandinavian look, mostly red and white and straw. That was my parents' aesthetic, so now to me, it's the way a tree "should" look. Also essential to me are these crocheted snowflakes, made by my grandmother and her sisters. Her tree had them, as did ours and my aunt's, and to my childhood mind, every tree. I inherited a lot of them and love them so much.



I also have a lot of Dutch-themed ornaments, reflecting the heritage of my mother's side of the family (the only side I really knew). These wooden shoes are one of three pairs. I have 2 sisters, and growing up, my mother always bought ornaments in sets of three, so she could eventually divide them among us. Again, that feels like the way it "should" be, so when I buy ornaments or make them, I do it in threes.



I love our tree. I love that it looks like our trees growing up, but also reflects our own little immediate family specifically. It looks nothing like the trees of anyone else I know, and as much as I like and admire other people's beautifully-decorated trees, ours feels exactly right for us.

Presents in the mail

Ok, here are two presents that are safe to show, finished at the last second and now in the mail. (Please excuse the horrible nighttime photography, but they were finished late and had to be at the post office first thing this morning!)



First up...a scarf for a 16-year-old girl who likes vintage accessories. I asked a friend for suggestions of something wonderful that I could make quickly, and she thought of the perfect thing, inspired by Soulemama (of course.) Her scarf for Adelaide was gorgeous and seemed just right (made with all linen, rather than wool, for a southerner.) I was able to find a few good table-runners at Goodwill and combined them with a linen dress I'd bought there earlier (for another project yet to come) and bits of crocheted lace I'd saved years ago from a torn pillowcase. I'm quite thrilled with the result. I hope she will be, too.



Next, a hat for a guitar player. Again, I took inspiration from Soulemama, basing the design on the recycled sweater hats in her book Handmade Home. However, my crummy printer won't enlarge patterns, so I had to just draw it approximately. It came out ok, but next time, I'm going to have that pattern printed for me. It's modeled here by a friend, and admired by Lucy (who's having a bit of "air time" before bed, a rarity in the winter!)