A Crafty Christmas

Let’s just ignore the fact that I haven’t blogged for over eight months.  It makes me look bad.  I’ll cover that some other time.

Let’s focus on happy things.  Like Christmas.  And on the fact that, even though I do not consider myself to be crafty or artistic or anything else, I somehow decided that it would be a great idea for me to make most of my Christmas presents this year.  By hand.  Oh, and I decided this the first week of December.  Good thing I’m pretty satisfied with how things turned out!  Also, most of these weren't too challenging, just time-consuming.

My co-workers and I exchange gifts every Christmas.  I made caramel popcorn for the part-timers (not shown), and I made t-shirt scarves (as in, they’re made out of t-shirts) for the full-timers.

That went well enough.  In fact, my boss wore hers to work last Friday.  Score!

Carried away with my success, I made one for a friend of mine.  We've been friends since fifth or sixth grade, so even though we don't see each other much, we still exchange gifts.  Behold the third t-shirt scarf, and the flower pin I made to go with it.

The craftiness was getting to my head at this point.  So when I found out that I had drawn my sister’s name for the yearly family gag gift, I decided to make her some leg warmers from the arms of a sweater.  She’s always cold, and it’s a kind of kooky gift.  Perfect for a gag.  I’m told she now wears these puppies around the house, under her pants, which is more than I was expecting her to do.  I made them cute just in case she liked them.

The above presents are things that I had kind of been in the back of my mind as possible gifts.  This last crafty thing just popped in my mind out of the blue, and was inspired by my mom's search for a point of interest in a room she'd just finished re-painting.

A lady at work has offered to teach a select group of us how to oil paint.  Over the past three years I've painted three paintings.  The painting on the left was one of my favorites, and just might be perfect for my mom for Christmas.  But it's a small painting, and it needed something else.  So I called my friend and asked her if I could borrow her paint supplies.  When you consider that I painted the picture on the right in one week by swinging by my friend’s house for an hour or two after work, I'm pretty happy with it.  As you can tell, I had done the painting on the left the year before.

And that was my unexpectedly crafty Christmas!  I don't know if this is the beginning of a trend, but it was kind of fun.