handmade gifts of xmas 2015

 I'm very late to share (some of) the gifts I made this Christmas.  I'm having major problems getting pictures off my phone and have had to email these one at a time via Whatsapp, so apologies if they're not great pictures.  And, yes, I do bore my friends frequently with my crafty progress reports!  Ha!

 My sister and I used to make peg dolls quite often, but I hadn't done it for years.  I made these for Dulcie's best friend.  Some of them I deemed not good enough to include, but then Dulcie declared them her favourites, so in they went, into this old wooden tea box I had lying around that just happened to be exactly the right size.  Every time we've met Dulcie's pal since, she's had at least one peg dolly about her person, so I think they went down well!  I'm definitely going to try to make some more peg dollies in 2016, some for Dulcie and some more special/artsy/detailed.  Hopefully etc.

I found the idea for this car roll-up on Pinterest and whipped it up for afore-mentioned friend's lovely wee brother.  I got the cars for £1 in the charity shop and used materials I already had, except for the grey for the road, which I had to buy a small piece of.  Lovely gifts on tiny budgets bring me much joy and satisfaction and not (only) because I'm a skinflint.

 It turned out super cute and I'm told the new owner loves tidying the cars away even more than playing with them.  Aw!

 Also for Dulcie's best friend, we put together a mix CD of ten of Dulcie's favourite stories and made a wee cover for it.  Dulcie helped me pick the stories out and we made a copy for her too, which is great because it means we have one CD where she doesn't keep wanting to skip tracks etc, all her favourites in one place.  It was only after making the track list that I realised how many of Dulcie's stories feature strong/clever/brave women or girls, which I was very pleased about.  Hopefully she's blanking out marriage, kissing and handsome princes riding to the rescue and focussing on sisters doing it for themselves.

 I now have so many nieces and nephews that it can be hard to make handmade gifts for all of them and it seems unfair to make for some and buy for others.  For my four elder nieces/nephew in France, I bought a few wee bits and pieces then made them each a personalised Christmas decoration with their name on it plus a tin of these Buggles, again an idea I spotted on Pinterest.  They are made from those glass pebble things with paper glued on the back and googly eyes stuck on the front.  Kind of random, but really cute and I made a wee rhyme to stick inside each tin in the hope of making them seem like a cool craze instead of a crazy auntie's random makings:

Buggle hide, Buggle seek

Every Buggle is unique

Buggle go, Buggle stop

Will you keep...or will you swap?

 I'm told they were well received by the French contingency, but the set I made for Dulcie left her distinctly underwhelmed and she pulled they eyes off within ten seconds.  Jeez!

My new nephew, Ross, is too little for Buggles and hadn't had a handmade gift when he was born in November, so I spent a bit more time on his present and crocheted this sweet soldier rattle, AGAIN via Pinterest.  It was super simple and turned out really sweet, though I wasn't too impressed with the face I stitched on.  I find it so hard to embroider over crochet.  There was much hilarity as I was making this as my Whatsapp craft updates left my friends believing I really was making a willy warmer for Graham.  I swear I thought they knew I was joking...  I didn't realise my friends held my husband in such LARGE regard.  Ha!

There were a few more handmade gifts too, but I failed to get so much as a Whatsapp snap of them - lots of decorations made from clay or melted pony beads, as well as a few of these nifty cup-and-saucer bird feeders.  God bless Pinterest and all who sail in her, that's all I can say!  I did also make some things from my own imagination, but they mostly involved gluing magnets on various objects - vintage buttons and the like - so I'm not sure how much imagination you could really say went into it...

If you want to see more of what I've been pinning (be warned, I've pinned some truly AWFUL needle felting stuff lately) you can find me here.