Homemade Gifts

It has been a very long time since I have played Fun Monday but Jill made it next to impossible to resist. She asked us to share our experiences homemade gifts. . .

This is the third year I've made our Christmas cards, people seem to like them.  I love to paper craft!  This year I just made this one design and it was pretty quick.  Now I need to actually mail them, lol.

My mom often makes quilts and as you can see with my grandson, they are huge hits!

One of my blogger friends, Snowcatcher, shares a new crocheted snowflake pattern, of her own design, every single Monday.  I have not crocheted since I was a wee girl, with my grandma.  These snowflakes have kicked my butt!  It took me hours of trying to just get simply one to not look like a chaotic knot of thread, lol.  I was determined to make a few for people I thought would appreciate them.  After about 3 hours of attempts I finally got one lopsided flake.  I kept going and I have now made 9, none are perfect like Snowcatcher's, but I am hoping the people I share them with will simply appreciate that I tried, and tried, and I was thinking of them the entire time or I would have given up.  {If you feel like you read this part before it's because you did, I posted about the snowflake a few days ago in my cancer daily posts but it fit so well here I posted it again.}

You can see more Fun Mondays by going to Life is Not Bubble Wrapped.

in the holiday spirit

Homemade Cards

Can you tell that I’ve been busy? I have all of our Christmas cards made. This is the first time I’ve made our Christmas cards. Heck, this year I made my first cards ever and since I’m kinda busy trying to get ready for an impromptu visit to Missouri I thought I’d just show you these today.

I made three different cards, for a total of close to 60.

The trees are all iris-folded and have little rhinestone toppers, the snowflakes are embossed (my first attempt at embossing) and the last tree has little bead garland.

Halloween outside and. . .

In.

Here’s the card I made for Thanksgiving. It was actually fun. I used glaze on the leaves along with some glitter and tiny beads. After the glaze dried I popped the leaves in the freezer for about 10 minutes then cracked them to make veining.

A fall iris-folded leaf card.

A simple thank you card. It’s hard to see in the photo but there’s light green glitter tulle on the front.

The card I made for Marissa when Cole was born. The baby says ‘ta-da’.

For my parents’ anniversary.

Because I’m a chemo angel and send a card weekly to my ‘buddy’ I have many cards that are just kind of thinking of you cards. The one above is one of those, as are the ones below.

And then the birthday cards:

Don't forget the giveaways. :)\

You can find some instructions for Iris Folded cards here - (and some free patterns, I used this leaf pattern) it's the place I used when I first saw one and wanted to learn.  They are really pretty simple.