More Crafting...

For Christmas 2009, I decided to take a "homemade" approach. We made most of our gifts and I had a lot of fun doing it. In Matthew's family, we draw names and I drew my sister-in-law, Jenny. As soon as I picked her name I knew what I wanted to make for her. I bookmarked this tutorial in my Google Reader from the fabulous Sew, Mama, Sew! website and was waiting for the perfect person to use it on. While making the Car CD Holder for Jenny, I also made two for me (one for each visor in my car). The tutorial was very easy and I was excited about the finished product, Jenny was too! I paired the gift with a g.c. to iTunes! :D

The next gift was for my nephew, Drew. I found also found these two patterns on Sew, Mama, Sew! The Toddler Backpack is already a favorite of mine! I decided to use flannel for the main fabric and canvas for the straps. The tutorial was easy to use, the only difficult part was adding Velcro to the front of the backpack and turning the straps after stitching them (always the most time consuming)! Drew looks pretty adorable with his backpack and I hear it makes for a great church bag!

My sister-in-law, Jill's birthday is Christmas day, so I decided to make her a Linen Apron. I thought it would be a cute idea to scale it down and make a matching one for my niece, Grace, so I did, with the help of my mother-in-law. This pattern was really difficult to follow as the measurements were in centimeters, so the conversion was difficult, but they turned out so adorable!! Both have hand-stitched embroidery and we used a linen-looking fabric instead of real linen because linen wrinkles so easily. Grace's is a little different from Jill's, but they match which I think is just so darling!

The last two projects were some of my favorite and most time consuming. I made two different magnet boards with matching magnets. I bought the boards from Robert's Crafts and then sanded and painted them. For the magnets, I used the following tutorial. I had made magnets before, but this time I sealed them with decoupage to help seal the paper to the rock, so the heaviness of the magnet doesn't rip the paper off the rock. The first set of pictures is the magnet board I made for my mother-in-law. They will be building a home this summer, my plan is to get pictures printed for the board for Mother's day. The second set of pictures was for my family in AZ, I loved getting the picture printed and organizing them on the board.

Overall, I think the projects turned out well! I'll definitely be making them for my family and home someday!