christmas gifts- belt and headband

Okay, this one is going to need more pictures, but this is all I have for now. I had Kelsy's name and wanted to make something special, but this was a hard one. I had no idea. Anyway, I set out with the goal of a stretchy-elastic belt with big flowers and decorations... but ended up with a ruffley thing that clips together in front with these leather and metal clips. You can't really see it, but she's also wearing a headband- it's wrapped in leather with a little leather bow on the side. She's so cute, she makes anything she's wearing look designer, so that helps me out!

christmas gifts- aprons

Jayme and Jill got aprons. This was a simple pattern, but my favorite part is the high waist wrap around tie. It looks so cute on my so cute sisters.

three old shirts = one cute dress

This was a hang-out-at-home-one-Saturday-night kind of project. I took the front of a white shirt, the back and other parts of a grey shirt, then the sleeves and bottom of a polka dot shirt and put them together in this little thing that fits Teah. It turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

christmas pajamas

Our family has a thing for the grinch. We quote it all the time, and start watching it (the Jim Carrey version) starting in July. Anyway, for the annual Christmas Eve pajamas, I made the girls and their cousin matching "I heart Grinch" pajamas. Shirt Batter (Blake) did the embroidery for me, then I bought a pattern and made pants. The big girl's pants turned out pretty good, but I didn't do so well on the babies... too small.

ps- I'm so glad to have this blog to document all these projects without being so braggy on my family blog!!

christmas gifts- favorite things

For Havi's friends, we gave them each a "favorite things" memory game.

Here's how I went about these beauties:

-First of all, I made these sheets on the computer- the front has simple pictures of 20 of Havi's favorite things and the back just a repeated pattern.

-Print them out on cardstock (2 copies per friend), ModPodge the front to the back, let dry.

-Mod podge the entire front of the sheet and the entire back of the sheet, let dry (for thickness).

-Cut into squares, don't loose track of your piles!

-Then we found some brown paper strips (to make them brown paper packages) and tied them with string.

-I made a label that said, "Favorite Things Memory Game- for you, my friend, who is one of my most favorite things in the world! Merry Christmas, Love Havi"

-We threw these in a cute little bag with a few of her simple favorite things- candy cane and lipstick, and tada! fun friend gifts for four year olds!

This could be a fun birthday party theme/favor.

christmas gifts- headbands

We (I did the flowers, my sister Kelsy did the ribbon and attaching to the headbands) made about 6 of these flower headbands that Teah gave to her friends for Christmas. They turned out really cute, this one had three smaller flowers in the linen, others we did were: one large white flower, three medium printed flowers (pink, green, white), a couple with large linen flowers... that's about it! Simple to make- for the flower, just take a long thin piece of fabric and needle and thread, then sew and twist. Then hot glue some ribbon onto a headband (I bought some thin metal headbands on etsy), cut some felt in the general shape of the flower and use that for the back of the flower on the headband... does that make sense? Maybe someday I'll start doing tutorials :)

dinosaur purse

My goal this year (it started with Christmas) is to try and MAKE instead of BUY as much as I can, and that includes gifts. It's actually pretty fun to make the stuff, but it's so fun to GIVE handmade! Havi was invited to her friend Amelia's dinosaur birthday party, and this year's birthday gifts will be purses to go with the theme, so we came up with this fun little purse. We filled it with some candy, wrapped it up and voila!

(last week we did a ladybug purse, but that got rushed off to the party before pictures could be taken).