My Handmade Holiday

Previously I spoke about wanting to make a lot of my Christmas gifts for friends and family. Of course, I left it very late (mid-December!) to get started by luckily I wasn't working so was able to dedicate whole days (and plenty of them) to making gifts. 

This picture shows most of the gifts I made (click on the picture to enlarge it)


In addition to these sewn gifts I also made homemade lemon butter and tomato sauce, the very yummy Christmas cherry ripe biscuits (recipe here), strawberry seedlings (from my own plants), and put together packs of mixed fruit and vegie seeds. 


I'm going to list each of the gifts I made with the link to the pattern/instructions/recipe so you too can have a go at making them if you like. (If I can find the sites again! My laptop died and took all of my webpages saved as favourites with it!)


Starting from bottom centre going around clockwise

• Tiered mini dress - pattern from Burdastyle website here for around $5 and fabric a bargain at $2/metre from Spotlight! (I will do another post on this dress and another I sewed shortly)
  
  
• Reversible baby playmat with ties - no pattern just used scraps of materials I already had (in almost gender-neutral colours of green!), cot-size wadding, and 2 bias-tape ties that I sewed in to enable the mat to be rolled and tied up) In the picture below you can see the ties coming out from the top

• a silhouette print of a child and butterfly - no weblink as I came up with the idea when I found adhesive fabric in the scraps bin at Spotlight and had seen the silhouette idea everywhere on the web. I will do a tutorial on how to put it together though, so stay tuned!
  
  
• a simple gathered apron for my partner's mum (and an almost-matching one next to it for her twin sister) - based on this tutorial 
  
  
• The Madeleine Mini Bloomers (for my 21 year old sister - these are WAY too short for anyone older than that, unless thats your sort of thing..) - free pattern from here
  
  
• Driver's cap for my boy - this one was tricky to track down and I was almost at the stage of drafting my own pattern! Thank goodness Chantal from the blog Stayathomensewin was able to send me the pattern she used. Link here. My boy loved it and couldn't believe I'd sewn it myself (until I showed him some dodgy stitches on the inside, hehe)
  

• Betsy handbag - I had previously made this and blogged about it here. I cut out the strap where it attached to the bag and re-attached it to the outside with wooden buttons, it looked much better, good enough to give as a gift!
  
  
• More silhouettes - ducks were for a friend who is a few months pregnant (gender-neutral again because they aren't finding out sex) and the dog and cat for my sister who has pets that look just like these.
  
  

And, those gifts that aren't shown in the top picture - 

• Lemon butter - I LOVE lemon butter and made sure there was enough leftover for me. I used this recipe 
  
  
• Tomato sauce - I'll be doing a tutorial on this so check back shortly. Trust me it's worth it! So yummy
  

I was surprised I was able to get it all finished in time, actually a few days early which was nice to allow me to relax. I will definitely be hand-making my gifts this year also, but plan on starting earlier, November at least!

:) Kim