Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Creating for Christmas

It is about this time of year I start panicking about what handmade creations I can make for Christmas this year.  I was looking back at things I've done in the past.

Last year the ladies got wristlets made with either this  pattern. Though sadly I didn't manage to get photos of many of them in the rush to get everything wrapped. This pattern was fab and easy to follow. I did manage to get a couple of pictures:

 



The previous year I made slippers for all the ladies and girls and actually my little boy.  The ones for the ladies and girls had flowers or hearts on them and the one for my boy looked like paws.  Again if I'm making something for a present Christmas or otherwise I tend to leave it till the last minute and not have any pictures.  I love this pattern.  I did modify it a little because I thought they would fall off to easily if I didn't.    So at R6 I did two extra rows  all around.  For the children's slippers I started with a chain of 8 and at R7 I only did 16hdc instead of 19hdc.  I hope that makes sense, because I've not written anything more on my notes!

I did take a couple of pictures on my mobile, so excuse the worse than normal quality of the photos!


Though they look pretty and they are comfy and warm they can be lethal on a wood/laminate surface as you basically end up sliding everywhere.  On the pair I made for myself I added a few dots of hot glue to see if that helped, without making them less comfy.  I'm pleased to say it did.


I dug out the kids slippers, and took a picture of them - these have been well used since I've made them.  The reason I've only taken a picture of one slipper for each child has nothing to do with the fact that I can't find the matching pair of either, nope, nothing at all!


Adding the claws was suprisingly easy, I simply used some yarn to sew the shape that I wanted and filled it in with the yarn.  It was probably quicker than making the flowers I had done for the rest of the slippers.


Later I made some for me too and managed to get a better picture of them.


Through the original panic, and search around Pinterest I've come up with an idea for presents this year and made a start on making them.  This year I've even taken some pictures of the presents before I wrap them!

Monday, 1 December 2014

Advent Books

A couple of years ago I saw something on Pinterest that I thought would be a lovely idea for advent - wrapping up a book for each day of advent.  I wanted it to be themed so I looked through our books and found all the Christmas books, all the books with any snow included and then all the books with a vague mention of winter and managed to scrape together 24 books to use for advent.


Since then I've collected enough Christmas books, so now they are all about Christmas, most from charity shops and ex-library books, but some new ones in there too.  I think that this is possibly one of my favourite parts of Christmas now - plus the kids get to unwrap a load of presents before the day and they think that is great.  They do have favourites, obviously not the same favourites - that would make life way too easy.  I also have some favourites that they really dislike, but that is tough because I will  continue to read them Threadbear until they are much, much older (left home maybe?!).


Here is our list of books (although we do have a few more these are the ones that I tend to use):













A Christmas Carol  - we don't have this one, but something similar, I don't read the original to them












I wrap them up and number them.  I'm careful with the numbering, to make sure that we will have time to read them on that evening.  Even so, it is inevitable that at some point we end up opening 2 books on one day.  I was worried that the kids would be upset that there was only 1 book to open each night and two of them, but right from the beginning they seem to have understood and taken turns. 

A friend of mine borrowed a load of Christmas books from the library and wrapped those, which I think is genius because then you don't need to store them all year!