Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Better late than never: Christmas Crafts

Due to technical difficulties, this post is a little late, but maybe it will inspire something for next year. Christmas '06 is less than a year away now ya know!!!!

I love a homemade Christmas. I love making ornaments and gifts and cookies and everything else than can possibly made. This year, we're living in Sicily which makes things a little harder. There's no Michael's to run to for supplies. So I had to use mainly what I had on hand. Luckily I have a lot already. The gifts we sent out this year were more of souvenier type gifts rather than handmade gifts so I decided to make my friends and family here stuff. I made a few ornaments and spruced up a store bought tree skirt.


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I carved an image to blockprint my own cards this year. Then I glues them over existing cards to save a little bit of time. The results were this:
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Since we bought a small tinsel tree this year, we found a lot of our larger ornaments didn't look right. I like some of them a whole lot, although most were handmade or thrifted. So I stuck them in a glass bowl with some other silver sparkly things that I normally stick on the tree.
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Felt birds I made and embellished with embroidery and sequins.
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Plain tree skirt than I embellished with embroidered snowflakes.
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The whole tree.

*I also made a garland of glitter stars but I never used them. They were just made from red cardstock cut into stars and then covered in fine glitter. Pretty but messy. We're still finding sparkly freckles on each other.

Gifts:
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Pajama bottoms made of flannel. These were for my husband. They're camo with dinosaurs. I made my son Elmo ones and I made myself fruity ones. For each pair I just used our existing pajamas as patterns.
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A photocuff. I made my husband 2 of these. The other one is black and red. They're made of felt and glitter vinyl leftover from reupholstering my chairs. They're made to fit pictures from those polaroid cameras. I think I need to made me some with oilcloth.
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Embroidered boxers for my husband. Pattern from http://www.sublimestitching.com Jenny Hart is awesome!

*My friends here each got a bottle of Dolcino wine, two wine glasses personally etched by me and wine charms also made by me. One set had full names and stars, the other had initials and hibiscus flowers that I drew and cut out from contact paper. I wish I had gotten pictures of them.

I also made my husband a picture frame that I decoupaged with chinese fortunes. It ended up seeming like a self help poster so I took it all the way and printed out a picture of a cat that said "Hang in there" and put pictures of myself and my son where the cat's face should have been. I think its hilarious. I don't think he found it as funny as I did.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment is late, late, late, I know, but I wanted to say that I loved the card you sent me. I was so impressed by the fact that you recycled old cards, too. Nothin' says lovin' like...uh...something made into something else. Yeah. The point here is that I love recycled crafts. You're the winner! Expect craft goodies once we get settled into Our New Place!

6:40 PM  

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