A Handmade Christmas

This Christmas was all about creating handmade gifts :)

I wanted to create special gifts for the kids so I made each of them felt crowns. A pink princess crown adorned with ribbon flowers and tinsel trim, a pirate one for my little monster, and a crusaders crown for my oldest because he's totally into the older Indiana Jones' movies and they used the crusader crest in one of them :) We couldn't forget about daddy though so I created him his very own tugboat crown complete with a little mini tug in the same colors as his boat along with its name embroidered on the bow *grin*. It was incredibly hard to keep it a secret though! I had to do all of my sewing after everyone had gone to bed because I couldn't let the kids see it for fear that they would guess they were getting one to. So I waited until hubby would fall asleep and then I would quickly whip it out and do more work on it LOL. Needless to say there were many very late nights involved!

The kids got involved in the fun to and they each created a special Kanzashi flower for Omi (my mom). It was so cute to see my 6 year old folding the fabric and creating her flower :) We decided to put brooch pins on the back of each of them so that she could stick them onto her purse, coat or pretty much anything.

My son surprised me with this lovely little hand quilled dragonfly!! He's such a sweety :)

We even experimented with making our own felt beads which turned out really well. We turned them into another little gift for Omi by making her a festive red and green bracelet with them :)

Of course I can never get enough felt so when I ran across a fabulous tutorial for recycled paper Christmas bows to decorate gifts with over at How About Orange I just knew I had to make one to but with a felty twist to keep up with my all felt theme *grin*. So literally minutes before we were supposed to be running out the door to my moms for Christmas dinner I was busy at my cutting board zipping off strips of felt, twisting and sewing it all together to make more brooches! LOL. Hubby was watching and teasing me because as usual I had found something that I just had to do which was going to make us notoriously late as usual :)

It was worth it! I finished up two of them, one for my daughter to wear on her Christmas dress and another for my sister which she just loved! Yay. I think this was one of the most rewarding Christmases for all of us as we were so proud of our creations :)

~ Rosina