Since I became a predominately stay-at-home mom, I’ve done better than expected adjusting to just having Daddy B’s income, but I really struggle with gifts because it isn’t a gift to me if I didn’t somehow get the gift myself… financially. As a result I’ve stressed myself out the past two years making gifts. I love making gifts, but the first year I didn’t have much time because I had a young baby. This year we’re moving and my sewing machine has been put away for a couple months. So it’s December and here I am just starting Christmas gifts. AND we’re moving next week sooooo I probably shouldn’t still have all this fabric out. I bought all the material for these gifts during the summer so I sorta planned ahead at least financially by getting all the fabric during a special sale at Joanns.
The bright side to sewing gifts? Everyone is getting a more expensive gift than I could afford to buy, we can make our mortgage payment, it’s a way for me to “give” something that is valuable to me- my time- to my friends and family, and my readers get some fun blog posts.
Downside to sewing gifts? Gray hairs, stress, and probably paying through the roof in shipping costs. I actually designed my gifts this year to be lightweight because last year I made heat packs and those are super expensive to ship! Oops! And this year, I managed to cut off part of my finger while cutting fabric with the rotary cutter… that hospital copay sucked two days before closing, as does signing all that paperwork with a bum hand (I’m a lefty and of course, that’s the hand I took out). AWESOME. I’ll live though and apparently fingers grow back… haha.
Onto the GIFTS!
My theme for Christmas gifts this year was “in the kitchen.” Mostly. I also made calendars starring Baby G on Snapfish. Like last year, I am putting together a DVD of photos and videos of Baby G, making an envelope and a sticker for it. My iMac is pretty convenient for this sort of thing and I like to make a copy for myself in case my harddrive fries or something equally horrid. Plus it’s cool to be able to put on the slide show with my chosen background music. This DVD was a huge hit with my mother and mother-in-law last year. What can I say- Baby G has some pretty serious fans. I sent all my gifts out to my dad, stepmom, and brother though… and I just realized in reading this post that I forgot to mail the calendar and DVD too. I am failing here.
Regardless, I finished enough of my gifts that I will be able to set these posts to all go up over the next few days while I’m busy moving all of my things into the new house. Yay! Enjoy!
{Personalized Dish Towels: No Sew}
For today’s blog post, I will cover the personalized dish towel. I saw this idea on Pinterest (flip to the picture of the hand print on the dish towel), but there wasn’t a tutorial. I bought the blank dish towels at Walmart for $1.97 per 2 pack. I made a pair for each person.
I used fabric pens ($12.97) to write Baby G’s name and the year on each plain white towel. I debated whether I wanted to do direct hand prints on the towels, but I couldn’t think of a way around it… my concern was that the paint said it was safe and non toxic, but then it said to call Poison Control if it was ingested. I decided to do it very carefully. I had bought fabric spray paint ($14.97 for a pack of three different colors) so I sprayed it on a scrap piece of cardboard, smooshed Baby G’s hand on it, then smooshed his hand onto the towel. Repeat. Then I ran with him to the sink to wash his hands. The whole time I held his hand and didn’t let it go… we all know it’d go straight to the mouth if I did, haha.
I did try to add quotes to some of them, but it wasn’t easy to write lots with the fabric pens so I stopped, given the high likelihood of error.