A Joyful Holiday Season

This holiday season, I had decided my goal was to make nothing but handmade crafts for Christmas. I am happy to say, I was able to achieve that goal. I would like to share with you some of the items I made and where I got the ideas from.

Can Walkers

Below you can see a picture of my daughter with the can walkers I made her. This was a very cheap and simple gift to make. I had bought two big cans of diced tomatoes at Costco awhile back ago and saved the cans. I took the labels off of the cans and I had my husband drill two holes into the side of each can. I painted each can with array of different color peace signs and then tied some rope onto them. My daughter tells me this was her favorite gift out of everything she got. The idea for these, came from Family Fun.

Monster Hoodie

This was a very fun project to make. I purchased the black hoodie from a local thrift store and used some of the fleece, that I had on hand, to add the eyes and the teeth to the hoodie. The idea for this came from a project posted on CO+K. I really liked the way this hoodie turned out and I'm really tempted to make one just for myself.

Polar Bear Hooded Scarf

My daughter has had a love for polar bears for the last couple of years. Last year we adopted a polar bear in her name. This year I wanted to do something a little different. I have been seeing hooded scarfs everywhere lately and I have been loving them.  I decided to make my daughter a polar bear hooded scarf out of fleece. Luckily for me Urban Treads sent me out an e-mail with a link on their tutorial on how to make a hooded scarf with a down loadable template. Once I had the hood scarf together, I took my sewing machine and did a zigzag stitch on the the edge of all the material, this was to give it an overlock stitch look or to make it look like I used a serger. Once, this part was done, I sewed on the paw prints onto the pockets and sewed on the eyes, nose and ears. In the ears I added a little bit of stuffing to help them stand up.

Wood Burning

I recently tried a new crafting technique, wood burning. It took me many tries to get the hang of it, but I have been enjoying it. I'm hoping I can get good enough at it, so that I can start doing some of the more detail work I have seen out there. I  ended up making some little ornaments for the tree. I ended up making a reindeer, a sun, a tree, and a pine tree as ornaments.

I hope everyone had a great holiday and I'm looking forward to a great new year!