Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas

My daughter is a Tae Kwon Do student and this is our first Christmas at the gym. I have been wracking my brains for what to give the teachers and Master Amanda at the gym. I have been making some super cute felt charms for my Girl Scouts and I was thinking, what else can I do with felt? What I ended up with was:

This is Master Amanda (who earned her 4th degree black belt right before Christmas) and Sammi who is currently a green belt. I used my gingerbread men cookie cutters to cut create the "bodies". Then I made the deboks basically the same way, tracing them and leaving myself some sewing room. I sewed them together around the bodies, I don't think they would have gone on after I sewed them up. I added the belts and tied them in traditional knots, then sewed the two figures together. I added the date and Master Amanda & Sammi's names to the back with fabric markers before giving it to Master Amanda. I ended up making homemade lemon sugar scrub for the teachers at my daughter's schools. Here is the link. It was super easy and I had enough left over to give 1 jar as my secret santa gift for Girl Scouts and keep 1 jar for myself (I multiplied the recipe and ended up with way more than I intended.)

Homemade Christmas? Ornaments & Garland

'tis the season to make some holiday cheer! I have been hard at work on a few Christmas projects. First off, we have a yearly fundraiser at the library and I was asked for some ideas of what I would put onto our tree this year. One of my jobs at the library is to help sort and sell donated books. Sometimes books are in such bad shape that I can't do anything with them but throw them into the recycling bin. (Some people cannot throw books away, no matter how bad of shape they are in.) Apparently there has been a 'fall cleaning' mindset going on in our town because we have had so many books donated that I have no room to put them onto the sales shelves. So I said to myself, we're a library, couldn't we make ornaments out of old books? I quick search on the internet later and I knew this was going to be fun. I didn't expect the whole tree to have my "recycled books" theme, but the director liked the idea and was willing to give me the chance to run with it. I found inspiration for the paper tree topper at Great Green Goods. The topper is actually 2 pieces tied around the top of the tree. The backbone is a page from a very badly torn board book. I then made 12 spiral rolls of pages from picture books and hot-glued them on to the backing. Then I made 12 spiral rolled pages of old romance novels (which were about 1/2 the size of the picture book pages,) and glued them in between the first set of spiral rolls. To make a center for the topper, I added one of the fanned ornaments made out of picture book pages and glued on a sparkly snowflake.

The fanned ornaments were an idea I found on the blog Pinecone. I didn't make them with two layers but we did use the button center idea and the assistant director helped me out by adding glitter to the edges of the ornaments.

We made the cutest round ornaments that I found on the blog Craftside out of children's books that had broken spines. I liked this type of paper best, it is heavier grade and holds up better.

The last touch for the tree was to make a garland. I cut strips of paper about 1/2 inch by 6 inches long from old romance novels, kids' books, graphic novels and atlases These were randomly woven into a gumwrapper weave. You can find instructions and videos on how to do this all over the internet.

The final touches that really brought the tree together were the great idea by a coworker to use glitter hairspray to add some sparkle to the fanned ornaments and the tree topper, old fashioned strands of silver icicles and a random box of vintage glass ornaments we found stashed in the storage room marked, "Janitorial Supplies." I think the tree topper looks like a prairie windmill and so I'm going to give my tree a title: Homemade 1940s Prairie Christmas.