kattitudes

Here is a great way to welcome a new addition to the family Christmas and the family Christmas tree this year. With a simple name and birthday written on a gender appropriate Christmas ball ornament, you have a wonderful memorial to the moment someone came into the family.

Of course, the store where I saw these wanted forty two dollars for the privilege of having someone else draw a stork on a Christmas ball ornament. Um. No. I can do that myself for a quarter worth of paint and a little bit of effort (and I dare say that my stork might look a wee bit better in all honesty). And if I did not feel confident in my stork ability, I would find the most adorable baby representative clip art that I could and decoupage the dickens out of the ornament instead.

Either way, making a welcome to the family and welcome to your first Christmas ornament is a great idea. Anyone can buy one of those Baby’s First Christmas ornaments, but making your own as a special gift for a new baby in the family or a new member of your circle of friends just makes it all the more special. And it makes a memory for the baby in question to have forever once he or she gets old enough to appreciate the work you put into the ornament.

Starting today, you will find a very handy page over there on the right hand side of the blog (it is listed under the pages). I have created a page that lists pretty quick and dirty some of my favorite shopping places online.

It is a first draft, so not all my bookmarks are up there by any means. However, some of the multitudinous places I wander online are up there so that you too can wander in and find some of the remarkable bargains I’m finding.

If you have places that you love, please – by all that is holy – let me know. I am always looking for a new place to shop. Send me a note, leave a comment, and I would love to check it out. I live to comparison shop (must. comparison. shop. It is in my blood).

Keep in mind, these are not places to purchase finished products. These are stores for you to purchase supplies for you to make your own gifts and wonders. This is for you to get your own crafty on.

If I remember correctly, I think this came from Pottery Barn, but it has been so long, my memory has failed me. I do remember looking at that picture and thinking that I could absolutely make this.

We have a jigsaw, and I know that the curves are simple enough that even I could duplicate this pattern. If I go slow enough, I could cut out each of the shapes.

All this would take is a little planning and a lot of patience. If you have a wood worker in the family or access to a jigsaw, there is no reason why you need to pay the money that was being asked for a table like this. I remember the price was just insane. And I kept thinking Oh my goodness, the shapes are so basic, I could do that!

The colors, basic. Painting job, simple to duplicate. Construction, simple with the right nails and/or screws. The whole duplication effort would hinge on getting your hands on a way to cut the shapes. And as long as you could do that, you could make the cutest little tables for someone for Christmas (or really, for any reason under the sun. Why wait for Christmas?).

I am really tempted to try making one of these for my back deck. I could use it as a plant table. I doubt I would paint it pink (in fact, I can guarantee that my Mister would outlaw that particular color on the back deck right now), but I have a fantastic geranium planter that hasn’t died yet (a minor miracle, given my track record with geraniums) that would work perfectly on this.

This is another wonderful gift idea for baby, but you are going to have to get help from baby’s Mom.

If you can ask Mom to scan a print of baby’s hand and/or footprint at major moments in her (or his) life, you have all you need to accomplish this fantastic idea.

Once you have the digital scan, you can add the date label, print on whatever paper works for you (and if you have been to a scrapbook store lately, the paperwork that is out there is just beyond imagination), and frame in whatever captures your fancy.

Obviously, you will need to plan ahead to get the hand and foot prints, but if Mom is a scrapbooker, and keeps ink pads in the house, you are good to go. If you start asking ahead of time, this is something you could have planned out for a first birthday or Christmas.

Either way, it is an awfully cute gift to give Mom and Dad. Or conversely, a great gift that Mom and Dad could give the ever adoring Grandma and Grandpa. And it would be something fun for Baby to have once they hit the teenage years and just can’t believe they were ever that small.

Gifts for a new arrival can be such a challenge some times. I just recently finished what I thought was a phenomenal work of art for a baby gift, but there is such a long story attached to the conclusion that all in all, the situation has not been the joy I had hoped it would be.

What surprised me was a comment I overhead at a Christmas gathering last year, but having had time to process it, it does make sense. The woman said that when her child was born, she received so many handmade quilts, that she literally was overwhelmed.

Now, where I am from, you never have too many quilts. They can be table covers, wraps, towels, clothing replacements, house decorations, good lord, I could list from now until tonight. But she doesn’t decorate with quilts at all, and she said that she received some almost twenty different handmade quilts on the birth of her child. She literally had too many of them (particularly as we live in the hot and humid state of Georgia, where the baby does not often require additional coverage).

Well, after thinking about that, I started thinking on a more simplistic gift to give a mother. Then bingo.

I love this idea for the simple structure of a onesie. Each child goes through what? Approximately seventy point six billion onesies in his or her lifetime?

And while the cheapest and easiest style to find might be while, sometimes that does not always flow with what we want to flow.

That is when our creative urges hit – to deal with situations just like that. This is just a simple ribbon, sewn straight across and straight down a onesie. Nothing complex, nothing extravagant. Just a ribbon. The ribbon can change with the seasons, or with your whim. But it is just a ribbon.

You can add a simple ribbon to a receiving blanket or to socks to match. With a simple ribbon, you have embellished an entire outfit that you already *know* your dear friend is going to use over and over. And with the ribbon, the onesie is simply replaceable, so in a disastrous situation, you could re-sew another ribbon in just a few minutes time.

How is that for a wonderful yet elegant baby gift idea? It is something you know the baby needs and it gives the mother-to-be the ability to accessorize as much as she does with her own outfits.

I am so pleased with this idea. So simple to accomplish, yet so many variations available. Run with it!

I just love this visual. And with a little focus, this would not be difficult to duplicate at all. These blankets are just hand embroidered with a little embellishment stitched into the middle.

The shapes are simply cut out of contrasting fabric and stitched right into place. As for all the rest, they are just hand stitched on. The words, the embellishments and decorations and everything.

Once again, this is the type of situation where those fabric transfer pens come in extremely handy. Hit up the aisle in your local craft or (better yet) your local fabric store and you will find a huge selection of transfer methods for getting text and shapes from your printer to your fabric. Then you just have to sit down with needle in hand and basically, you are coloring in the lines with thread. That is all embroidery really amounts to in the long run. Using thread instead of crayons. Isn’t that wonderful?

The edges were done with a basic blanket stitch and for a little visual interest, the thread was changed as it went, so the color is different all around. I thought that was a fantastic way to add a lot of visual differences to the blanket and give the baby something fun on which to focus.

If you have baby gifts in the future that you know you need to be making plans for now, start your embroidery engines now. The wonderful thing about new babies is that you have a pretty generally safe bet; it will either be a boy or a girl. Aside from those two, your other choices are pretty much limited to – well – a boy or a girl (noticing a pattern?). So it makes embroidery options simple to plan ahead and get started.

So, let’s get started. Take a good look and get started this weekend.

OK, now how simple is this? If you do not own a sewing machine, this is something that with patience, a needle and thread, you could easily accomplish.

This is a (large) square of fabric with a ribbon sewn right down the middle. A bow was knotted in the center and sewn down.

That. is. it.

That is the whole kit and caboodle. Isn’t is sweet? And what an innocent gift, reflecting the innocence of the child you are celebrating.

In fact, you don’t have to limit this to a gift for a baby. Who doesn’t appreciate a nice wrap to snuggle with during a good movie? There are only eleventy billion different ribbons from which to choose just the perfect look that you want for your particular blanket.

If you have a sewing machine, this should take you – oh…what? five minute? from start to finish. That is not a long time investment for a darling looking gift. You could line these up industrial machine style and make a whole slew of them for gifts this year.

In fact, if you watched the price of fleece at your local fabric store, you could wait until there is a 99 cent per yard sale, then use the 50% off coupon (if you can) and really stock up at a crazy low price. You can purchase ribbon from the 10 spools for a $1.00 bins and make bazillions of these. You could hand these out left and right. Make a huge pile of them and start taking them down to your local shelter. At those kind of prices, we could make enough to keep the entire world warm!

We are so making these this year for our annual Halloween Crazy Dinner! We have to tell you about our Crazy Dinner, but we will do that in another post, as it is just too fun.

Anyway, we just love these. And oh my gosh, how incredibly simple. Come on, it is just a bunch of crepe paper and construction paper! And dig out all those stickers that you have left over from past projects from your crafts closet or your crafts armoire and you are in business.

We always try to make sure that all the Halloween candy is out of the house asap if you know what we mean (and come on, you do). For us, it is a joke at this point because (yes, yes, it is a sad story, but a true one.) We are part of the unlucky people that have migraine attacks, and we know that chocolate is a migraine trigger. So we literally cannot eat chocolate without suffering from a massive brain pain. So out of the house it goes asap. We just hate to have it around.

So, come this Halloween, back to early childhood we go, and we are going to pull out our construction paper, our crepe paper, our blunt scissors and all the silly Halloween stickers we will have in our stock and we are going to make these wonderful Halloween hats and fill them with Halloween treats and use them as placeholders at our annual Halloween dinner. We cannot wait!

The beauty of this design is that it lends itself to absolutely everything. You have a birthday coming up? Fill it with treats and change the colors to match the birthday cake. It would make a great little craft for the kids in the house to keep busy doing while you are trying to get the house ready. Easter, it would be a wonderful basket replacement if you don’t want to fill an entire basket. Christmas – fill with a silly paper hat, a joke and a small gift to make your own Americanized Christmas pseudo cracker and put around the Christmas dinner table. Fourth of July – fill with water balloons and take everyone out to the pool later. You name it – this is a great little project and something that you don’t have to worry if it gets absolutely destroyed, because you can make about a kazillion more and they will all still look great!

We made ornaments like this using labels decoupaged on blank porcelain gift tags found at the local fabric/craft store. Then I put the name of the recipient directly on the with a metallic Sharpie marker.

There is a lot of focus on “going green” and understandably so, considering how much waste is generated each year by the phenomenal amount of paper that is used when we wrap all those Christmas presents and put a tag on each one. Hey, look right here for the first in line to say how much we love wrapping up and making all the presents look so wonderful. We adore that part of Christmas – love it so much! But what an incredible waste. We actually have a running joke around our house … at the end of the present opening frenzy, we call what is left over the Mountain of Greed. The wrappings, the boxes and bags and ribbons and whatnot that is piled up waiting for the garbage bag…that is the Mountain of Greed.

These permanent gift tags are one way that we are trying to reduce the amount of waste that we generate each year. One idea we used for tags was taking the baby pictures of the recipient in place of the name. One side of the porcelain gift tag was decoupaged with their baby picture, the other side was my baby picture. It made it a LOT of fun to figure out who got what present and who it was really from. And because the gift tags are porcelain, we can use the tags through the year for a number of other purposes also.

Consider doing something like this in place of all the wasteful paper wrap and tags we throw away throughout the course of the year.

Materials Needed:

* 1-1/2 yards red gimpe braid
* 1-1/2 yards of red satin ribbon for bow (if you do not tie bows well, purchase a pre-tied bow)
* 10 packages of red ribbon roses
* Heart frame (this project uses a 7 x 7 inch frame)
* 1/4 yard of red satin fabric
* 1/2 yard of batting
* Glue gun with plenty of glue sticks
* 1 inch cabone ring

Cut batting to same shape as frame and glue to frame. Cut satin fabric 2 inches larger than frame, but do not cut the center from the fabric. Lay fabric on work surface, right side down.

Lay frame over fabric, batting side down. Begin gluing fabric to outer edge of frame. Glue small sections at the top, bottom and sides of heart first, then go back and continue to glue rest of fabric. (Fabric will gather and wrinkle, but will be covered later with backing.)

Cut center out of heart fabric, leaving one inch extra around entire opening. Clip fabric every 1/2 inch around opening, staying 1/8 inch from the frame (these cuts will be your gluing tabs). Glue each tab to back of frame. Repeat directions to cover back board of heart, omitting steps for center opening.

Glue red gimpe braid to edge of each heart starting at top of heart and continuing around entire edge (tape the ends of braid to prevent raveling). Glue front and back sections of frame. Remember to leave the top edge of the heart open to allow for picture insertion.

Glue roses to entire front of frame starting with the outside edge to the inside edge and then fill in the middle. Start and end gluing at the point where you will eventually glue your bow. The bow will hide the area that is not covered by roses (see the photo). Tie a bow with satin ribbon and glue to frame. Glue tassels to bow and glue cabone ring to back for hanger.