Our crafty Christmas presents!

Wow, Christmas is over! That was a marathon, trying to get everything finished and wrapped in time. I've learned lots about planning, organisation and my own ability to cope (or not) under pressure, but I was really pleased with the presents we ended up giving. We had lots of false starts and some ideas we thought were going to be great ended up not quite making it under the tree, but all's well that ends well-ish. So I wanted to post some pics here to remind me of what we (finally!) achieved.

This is a technique we learned at the Art Cafe in Exeter. Decoupage - sticking teeny bits of pretty paper onto boring things to make them into pretty things! We bought plain hardback sketchbooks in a discount shop and decorated them and added 'Journal' or 'Sketchbook' labels cut from magazine letters. They actually looked really nice and were very simple, Chloe did this one herself - although it took many sittings to get it finished as she has a very short attention span at the moment, lol!

This was a necklace experiment! I wanted to see if I could make one of these necklaces with the crystal in a wire cage, so I played with some thick wire, and was delighted that this only took 15 minutes!! I made another one and they were some of the best received presents of all, and definitely the quickest to make!
An ideal grandparent present - we painted two charity shop frames with white acrylic paint, embroidered a sickly quote (well, grandparents love them, lol) and added a photo of some beautiful children...

An embroidered bag, which we filled with a pre-loved unicorn toy and a fairtrade game - this was the only thing we spent money on at Christmas apart from some photo frames (excluding presents to our children)!

Chutney, for the dads - mine, dh's and dh's stepdad. They were all delighted with their baskets, containing a jar of chutney, a jar of caramelised onion chutney and a bag of truffles. I forgot to take photos of the finished baskets, which was silly because they looked really nice and I was so proud of them!

We played with lovely smelling ingredients and created these gorgeous potions, all made from recipes in the 'Grow Your Own Drugs' book. We made bath oil, bath salts, lipbalm and bath bombs - and we didn't include the soap we attempted because it went a hideous green colour and is still not set, two weeks later -not sure what happened there!
All wrapped up and ready to give. We were really pleased that none of the people who received these realised they were homemade until we told them!
And probably our best received present of all this year... we made this collage for my brother, embroidering little squares for two of the spaces. He's at uni and spends his holidays in America with his girlfriend so only sees us a few times a year but rings all the time and adores his niece and nephew. We were thrilled that all our presents went down well, but I think this was the only one that actually produced tears...!
All in all, I really enjoyed the challenge of making Christmas presents for everyone, and will definitely do it again. BUT I nearly killed myself trying to get everything done at the last minute and the Christmas Eve dash to buy photo frames which had suddenly become vital will definitely not be repeated! I developed a stress-induced coldsore on Christmas Day and Boxing Day was a horrendous panic trying to make truffles and fudge for the relatives we were visiting next. Next year, we won't be giving anything with such a short shelf life (long-life recipes would be very much appreciated...) and I'll be starting in about February, rather than December! The children ended up without any homemade gifts so I need to finish the trousers and MP3 player case before I start planning for next year though ;-)