Handmade Gift Challenge 2010: The Results

As you've seen in the past few weeks, I was quite busy making Christmas gifts last year. I started in July with a few things, but didn't get serious until November. My plans for making Dan and Elise larger gifts fell through. Overextended myself. I don't think they mind though.

I hadn't planned on sewing so many gifts, as sewing is not really my forte, but it just turned out that way. In addition to what is shown below, I also gifted a number of my pots.

Forgive me as you've seen most of these not that long ago, but I wanted to collect them up in one post.

Matching "Memory" Game

Toddler crayons

Ukulele applique pillow

Back-painted glass frames

Drawstring bag / On-the-go playmat

Back-painted glass cow diagram

Box-style floor pillows

Photo tile magnets

Robot taggie and onesie

Painted monogram plaque

And some little extras

Mod Podged frame

Postage stamp coasters

Greeting cards

Photobooks

Little extras: more handmade gifts

Mod Podged photo frame for my niece. Wallet-sized flat frame from the dollar store + a scrap of pretty paper. Easy and quick.

How cute are these postage stamp coasters? I can gush about them because I didn't come up with the idea.

I got the tutorial and templates from Design Sponge. I felt compelled to make them because I had all the materials on hand except for the 24-cent sheets of felt. I made two sets of them and I might make another for myself. (You know, when I run out of projects to work on.)

For my mother-in-law, I made a stash of 22 greeting cards: birthday, baby, sympathy, wedding, thank you and blank cards. I really should do this for myself as well. No more freaking out because I forgot to buy/don't have time to make someone a birthday card...

I continued the tradition I started last year of giving photobooks of Elise to our dads. I made them at Snapfish, but I also like Shutterfly. These pages are representative of the entire book.

My goal for the books is to look more arty and less photobooky. I also want them to chronicle her growth, not record life's events. So I made up a few rules to keep them on track.

Rule #1: I only use photos of Elise alone.
Rule #2: Each page is composed from a single photo session.
Rule #3: No captions!

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These are part of my Handmade Gift Challenge.

Painted monogram plaque

This painted plaque was a gift for my eight-year-old niece.

Before

I found it on a clearance shelf at Kohl's for about a dollar; I forget the price exactly. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be an outdoor "garden" decoration and is made of some sort of heavy plaster or something. The finish was really messed up, but it wasn't chipped or anything.

I sprayed it with white spray paint and when that was dry, I did some detail painting on the raised designs with craft paint. Then I sprayed the whole thing a coat of clear glossy sealer.

I think it turned out pretty cute. Definitely better than it was before. So much fun rescuing ugly things and making them pretty.

Robot taggie and onesie

When I ordered this robot fabric, I had plans for a project using small pieces. But when it came in the mail, it was so cute, I knew I had to come up with a project that would use a larger piece of it. So I decided to make a "taggie" as a gift for my new nephew.

Essentially, making a taggie is like making a pillow without any stuffing. I found a small piece of red fuzzy fabric in my stash and cut my robot fabric to the same dimensions.

I started out pinning loops of grosgrain ribbon to the fabric, the folds pointing inward, but the fabric was puckering and I didn't think the ribbons would stay straight when I was sewing up the side.

So I broke out the painters tape and it worked awesome. I was careful to use ribbons that weren't too narrow, and I made my tags short so they wouldn't get wrapped around little fingers. I also avoided using painted ribbons; babies shouldn't eat paint!

Because my robot fabric was white, the red fabric was showing through a bit, so I sandwiched a piece of off-white cotton between the red and the robots. In the end, it made the white whiter and the brights brighter. It also gave it some extra heft.

I stitched up three of the edges, turned it right-side-out, stitched the last side and then top stitched all around the edges.

The finished taggie is approximately 8 by 14 inches (I think... I forgot to measure it before gifting).

After I was finished, I couldn't resist cutting out one more of the robots from the leftover fabric to make a matching appliqued onesie.

p.s. The fabric I used was Beep Bots in Multi by Hoffman Fabrics.

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This is part of my Handmade Gift Challenge.

Photo tile magnets

I made a bunch of these photo tile magnets for Christmas gifts. They are small at about two inches square, but have a nice weight to them.

I started with these tile magnets I picked up for about 25 cents a two-pack at after-Christmas clearance last year. They were fine as-is, but to me they were more valuable as supplies. You can't even buy raw materials for that price.

I resized some photos of Elise to the same dimensions as the magnets and printed them out on photo paper. Before cutting the photos out, I sprayed the sheet of paper with a water-resistant clear sealer (so the ink wouldn't run.)

After the clear coat was dry, I cut out the photos and adhered them to the tiles with Mod Podge. Once they were dry, I sealed them with a top coat of Mod Podge.

I think this one of my brother and Elise is my favorite. The square shape suits the composition of the photo really well.

I had to re-do a couple of the magnets because I used too much Mod Podge when gluing down the photos. It soaked through the paper from the backside and made the ink run. I was able to rip off the photo pretty easily and salvage the tiles though.

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This is part of my Handmade Gift Challenge.

More box-style floor pillows

When my sister-in-law saw the box-style floor pillow I made for Elise's playroom, she mentioned that she would love one for her kids. I decided to make her one for Christmas, but with two kids, why make just one pillow?

I had a yard of the leafy fabric on hand. I bought it without a project in mind, but I just loved it so much (and it was only $3/yd.!) It shrank a little when I washed it, so the finished dimensions of the pillow are slightly smaller than Elise's pillow, at about 21-22 inches square and 4 inches high.

I made a second pillow from some chocolatey brown wide-wail corduroy to the same dimensions as the first.

I also skipped putting handles on these two pillows; I was just thinking two kids, two pillows, brother/sister fight, broken flat screen (or something like that)... I didn't want to be responsible!

I want to apologize for the couch photo. I kind of hate couch-as-backdrop photos, but since these were gifts, I didn't want to put them on the floor. It does give you a sense of scale though.

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This is part of my Handmade Gift Challenge.