A Handmade Christmas

Well it was a busy December working on several Christmas projects.  I made an asserted effort to have a stress-free holiday season.  I was so excited about the handmade things I had planned to give to family and friends and I didn't want to lose the cheerfulness of it (see 2 Corinthians 9:7).  I was also trying to trust that God would give me the time I needed to finish my projects since I had honored my husband by not starting on them until he was done with his school semester about 2 1/2 weeks into December as he had requested.  I will say though, after several late nights working to get things done, I understood why people start planning for Christmas in November.  I think I will do that next year.

This tinsel wreath was just something fun.  A lady from my Bible study group gave me some Christmas decorations including this tinsel so I thought I'd put it to some good use.  

I saw this wreath on Bleubird Vintage's blog and had planned to make something like it.  I never had the time to put a word on my wreath.  Before I pack the Christmas decorations away, I want to shape the word "peace" out of some black wire I have and wrap strips of scrap fabric around it.  I've heard the Christmas story so many times, but this year the part that says, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will toward men," (Luke 2:14) came to mind and really stuck with me.  For my wreath, I wrapped the tinsel around a wire hanger I grabbed from our closet.

Click on Image for Full-Size

A friend of ours offered to take some pictures of our family but wasn't able to shoot them until mid December because Gregg had finals and had to also meet a couple Ph. D program application deadlines.  I had in my mind that if we didn't get the pictures done in time to use them for Christmas cards, I could order New Years cards instead.  So these handmade cards were my Plan B.  I used a bunch of "Thank You" cards I had left over that I had ordered for my wedding more than 4 years ago, and got the angel and blue velvet ribbon images from The Graphics Fairy and the "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" sheet music off of Google Images.  I added a little shine with gold and blue gel pens.

I got this tutorial for Cinnamon Ornaments emailed to me.  My Bible study co-leader also gave me a little different variation of this recipe which you can find here (recipe at the bottom of the page).  When Kristen blogged that the dough shouldn't be sticky, I have no idea what she was talking about.  I let the dough stand for an hour and followed the recipe and it was super sticky!  I ended up seriously kneading my dough quarters in lots of cinnamon, as pictured above in the black plate.  I also found the thicker my dough, the easier it was to tap it out of my cookie cutters.  Metal cookie cutters were suggested as working the best.  But other than that, these were fun to make and bake and they sure do smell good!  I'm planning on making more to use as decor around the house and as future gifts.  As pictured above, I decided to make monogram ornaments for different families.  The letters with the heart represent the couples and the letters below represent their children.  I thought a tradition could be started where the kids get to take their letter ornament with them when they move out and when they get married, I could make them a heart ornament with the letter that represents their spouse's name and then make more letter ornaments as gifts when they have children.

So this year we literally had no Christmas budget.  But that didn't discourage us from having presents for Leala to open.  We got creative and came up with gifts we could make her for free.  Gregg thought it would be nice for Leala to have her own chair since she likes climbing into her old one that she's too heavy for now and that we need to use for her younger sister, Adella.  I have to admit, that when Gregg told me his idea for making Leala a chair out of cardboard, I couldn't imagine how that would work well.  But when he started showing me pictures of his progress from a co-worker's phone, I was impressed!  He accomplished it with just cardboard filled with paper and some duct tape.  We remembered that we had some black furry fabric in our closet that we were going to use to make a dash board mat for my car years ago.  It worked very well for a chair cover!

It was so fun staying up a few late nights with Gregg, busily piecing together and sewing up Leala's presents. We had experienced so much joy making her gifts that it didn't bother me this year that Gregg and I couldn't buy each other presents (though we did end up getting blessed with Christmas cash from some friends and family).  It truly did feel more blessed to give than to receive this year!

With all the other Christmas projects I had to get done, I only had time to make Leala these bracelets.  I guess I'll save the necklaces for next year.  I used this tutorial to make the felt flowers on the pink and yellow bracelets.  I used the embellishments to cover up my stitches.  These really are super easy to make!  Because I didn't have wide enough elastic (the 1/8" stuff I had was a nightmare to work with and I did have a little melt down about the project not working), Gregg did let me go to JoAnn's to buy the elastic I needed which only ended up costing $1.50 for a yard (I ended up getting 3/4" for Leala instead of the 1" used in the tutorial).  And the felt was from a 14-sheet package I had bought at the Dollar Tree to make a princess crown for a 4-year-old girl's birthday present for the Build-a-Bear birthday party me and the girls were invited to earlier this month.  So technically the Christmas present I made Leala wasn't completely free, but pretty darn affordable!

I know when money's tight, people can get discouraged thinking they can't celebrate Christmas (at least the consumer American way).  But with a little resourcefulness and creativity it is possible to have something to give.