December Craftiness

One of our family traditions on my mom's side of the family is to exchange ornaments with all the cousins and now our kids. My grandma has 40 grandkids I believe, ranging in age from 38 to 5. Adding the great-grandkids in creates even more variety.

I was being called the family scrooge for a couple of years when I started saying that we should do away with this one for a variety of reasons that I will not go into here, but when I thought of a fun way to do the ornaments we would be exchanging that the kids could be involved with as well, I decided I could still handle it.

These are our ornaments from last year - a doughnut, a black penguin, a pink penguin, a cupcake, a gingerbread man, and a licorice ice cream cone (my favorite flavor, by the way, thank you Farr's Ice Cream).

The fried egg is an ornament on a lot of Christmas trees in our family, a symbol of my grandparent's farm, the chickens they had, and the Barker eggs they sold back in the good ol' days. The others were all just for fun.

Felt ornaments are really easy to make! When I was first looking for ideas I did a search in Google images and on flikr for felt ornaments to get some ideas of things we could do. Then I would either sketch out a design on paper, or being the non-artist I am, if it was something more involved I copy/pasted the picture into Word, size the picture to about how big I wanted the ornament to be, and have a template. I didn't feel bad borrowing their ideas - ours are not nearly as high tech as many of the others out there, and I'm not planning to sell them. Ideas for ornaments can come from anywhere, though - coloring books, clip art, the person's interests, etc. These amazing ones even say the ideas came from a Little Golden Book.

After you have a template, use it to cut out the felt pieces. In some cases you might want multiple copies of the template to cut up for the different pieces.

Then you can either sew the pieces together by machine or by hand. We did all our stitching by hand.

When stitching the back to the front, leave an opening for a bit of stuffing if you'd like, sew up the hole, and voila! You're done! Be creative and enjoy. They really are a lot of fun to make.

To show off my amazing sewing skills (cough cough), here's a picture of the quilt I finished the end of November 2008 that was supposed to be given to my brother's family Christmas 2007. I'm a slacker, what can I say. But it was worth the wait, no?


Right now I'm trying to finish up the quilt I gave to my sister and her husband for Christmas 2008 (it's amazingly cute, I'll have to post pictures after I give it to them), so I can get working on the quilt I'm supposed to make for my sister for Christmas 2009. If you want to come visit, feel free! Just know the house will be a disaster.

Playing Around

While I was adding the list of blogs I like to read earlier (there are many more, but these are some I thought others might be interested in), I realized yet again how boring looking my blog is. I'm feeling kind of odd (sort of migrainish or something) though I'm okay just sitting here mostly still, so I decided to do a little jazzing. Nothing too amazing yet, but I had fun making the heading. Can you tell the thingies hanging off the "Still Swinging" are swings? I am so clever. It definitely needs more 'fun stuff,' but we all know that will take more playing.

This month has been supremely busy so far. I feel like every December I spend so much time getting everyone else's Christmas ready that I can't hardly get ours ready. For "fun" I just counted - I've mailed out 30 orders that involved 61 bracelets. Adding the last week of November, it makes it 37 orders and 78 bracelets. I've got 3 orders (12 bracelets) that need to get made and out the door, and 7 other orders (12 bracelets) still waiting for payment or sizing info. This should all be slowing up soon, since people start getting worried about things being mailed in time, as they should.

Beg, Borrow, and Steal

I like to impress myself sometimes when I do something crafty (to me, the bracelets don't count), but it's not something I come by naturally. I just came upon two super awesome ideas that I have to share because they are so easy but could be SO FUN!

Simple Blank Books - My sewing machine is going to be straight stitching away making these! Thanks to kerflop for pointing to this one.

DIY Advent Calendar - What an easy fun idea! I got a fun advent calendar back in my teens from a friend. It had little cut out things to do each day, but the overall design while not difficult, would be a little painy to recreate. I like this far far better.

Acorn People - I don't know if I'm feeling quite crafty enough myself for these yet, but what a totally fun project to do with the kids.

Time to stop looking, I need to get to bed.

Next day update: I have GOT to make Melanie one of these boxes for Christmas! Perfect place to keep those little books or other fun treasures.