Ghost of Christmas Crafts

I almost forgot to show you all all the Christmas crafts I made! We were on a pretty tight budget this year but I think it ended up being a good thing. I had to really think hard to come up with a project that would fit the person instead of just buying something. If the pictures look very square, it's because Craig was so kind as to take them before he did all the wrapping.

For my mother I made pot holders*. They came out cute but I didn't think it was enough so I used the leftover fabric to embellish dish towels using this Sew Mama Sew tutorial. I will probably make some of these for myself too because no matter how many towels I know I have, I never seem to have enough.
I hadn't decided on my older brother gift but as soon as I saw this fabric, I thought of just the thing. I knew that, as a bachelor, he probably didn't have too much in the way of table linens and he loves to entertain. He also loves Japanese food. I had made this pattern* for place mats before for us, but this time I included a little chopstick pocket (on the right, look closely). They make me wish I liked sushi.
The Beav got the honor of receiving my first piece of crocheted clothing. The pattern was from a book from the library, but after the red line it got weird and really wide. I ended up taking out everything below the red and just winging it to make it a more head-like shape and size. I was worried I would just have to throw it out and start over with a new pattern but after making Craig try it on after every row to see how it looked, I eventually got it. I really like how it turned out but I will never be able to repeat it so it is a truly is a one-of-a-kind piece of work.

The other homemade gift I made was candied nuts for Craig's dad. Craig came up with the idea and I thought they would be difficult to make but they ended up being really simple and so delicious. The night I made the test batch we ended up having some friends over and they were gone in about 10 minutes. I filled two mason jars with the nuts and had planned on fancing up the jars with Christmas cloth but Craig had to mail them before I recovered from the flu so that didn't happen although I don't think his dad probably even noticed. That is the nice thing about giving things to guys, they don't care about the packaging as much.

*These two items came from Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing. I have liked everything I made from that book. Like the title suggests, the projects are simple but that is good for me since I had done a lot of piecing and quilting with my machine, but not much with patterns. If you have done more than 4 or 5 sewing projects, you would probably find it below your level but for beginners, it's pretty good.