Handmade Holidays

This year, in an attempt to drive myself totally insane, I decided to try to make as many handmade gifts as possible. Please keep in mind when reading this, I have an infant who was born in September. So I'm hoping for Christmas 2010 to take all this up a notch, perhaps with the help of a little set of hands. He needs to work on that hand-eye coordination ASAP!

I did have time to have a little fun with gift wrapping. I played around with that faux-wood contact paper on a few gifts. It was really easy to do (I was worried the contact paper would be about as fun to wrangle as Saran-wrap).


I made food gifts and my husband made soaps for some out-of-town folks and also as smaller gifts to give friends, co-workers, and neighbors.
I made two types of holiday breads--Gingerbread and Orange Cranberry. The Orange Cranberry had dried cranberries inside and I sprinkled candied ginger on top of the gingerbread. I found some really cute mini loaf pans from Bake It Pretty . You make the bread right in the loaf "pan" and you end up with loaves that are a variation on a muffin-sized portion. I just wrapped the mini-loaves in decorative parchment paper and tied with baker's twine. For each package I sent two of each variety.

As you can find in the previous post, I started playing around with making chocolate bark back in the fall. I ended up making two types--White Chocolate with Cranberries and Milk Chocolate Smores. I used the Smores bark at a cookie exhange party but shipped the White Chocolate with Cranberries with the mini tea breads. I was a little worried the milk chocolate wouldn't hold up as well unrefrigerated for very long. I also got these cute little "cookie" boxes from Bake It Pretty.



My husband made a holiday collection of soaps, again this year. The soaps last year were a hit so we played around with a few different scents and then had fun with the packaging using some images and paper from Paper Source.


We did three scents for 2009, stacked them, and tied them with baker's twine.
Snow Day was a mocha/hot chocolate soap
Christmas Cookie was a vanilla and gingersnap scent
Winter Forest was a mix of juniper and blackerry scents

The only Sadie Priss projects I had time to make for the holidays were these really cute fabric flower cuff bracelets. I've really enjoyed wearing the red and black plaid one for the holidays and I think they'll be really cute for gifts again at Valentine's Day and also to wear around in the Spring and Summer.