Time to get busy making hand made gifts again.Follow

Anyone else going to make Christmas presents for family and friends? Does it require using tools that have names that make you giggles with naughty thoughts?

I've been doing this for several years now, and while I'm sometimes racking my brain away to design personal gifts for everyone, I get a lot of enjoyment in both making items for gifts and seeing how much my family has enjoyed getting them.

Used to be my family would spend 2 days making cookies for teachers and co-workers, Now though I been putting more effort into coming up with personalized gifts for everyone. I only have to by the yarn for grandkids requested items and then normally use what I have on hand in way of art supplies for everyone else.

These can be as simple as drawing personal gift tags for everyone in my family, knitting hats and mittens for grand kids and some years sculpting Christmas ornaments out of Plasticine clay.

This year though, I been designing jewelry and decided that my daughter, sisters and in-laws will get necklaces. Each take about 2 to 4 hours to design and make out of a mixture of semi-precious stones beads and Czech glass beads. If I were to put them up for sale, They would go from $20 to $50 dollars depending on the beads and findings used and for labor. I would post pictures of the necklace I just made, but don't want my family to see it yet.

I figure that since I got back into making jewelry, I spent about $300 on supples, so I hope to sell several pieces of jewelry this spring. All because I wanted some pearls for a costume I hope to finish someday. Folk who have befriend me on facebook, can see some of the jewelry I made so far.

My nieces will get earrings, that I can create quickly. Male family members will have to just enjoy the coffee we always give to family. Of if I have time I may whip up something at the last minute.

I brought a Bead Reamer today, so to enlarge the holes in a few of the jasper chip beads, I used in todays necklace and can't help my dirty mind from thinking of ways to use them on people I hate, or just want to make feel pain.

I just got back into making origami recently and have been folding models for my friends and family as early Xmas gifts. Here are a few things that I folded this week:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/57617475@N00/4145037051/

I used to do origami a lot when I was a kid but hadn't done any for about 15 years. Then I recently found out that a friend of mine is an extremely accomplished origami artist (you can see some of his original work here along with crease patterns). He invited me to come and attend the meetings that he runs, and after going to them I've discovered that there's a whole lot more to origami than just following directions in books. One of the more interesting things that I learned is that "traditional" colored origami paper that you buy in stores is actually one of the worst types of paper that you can use if you're folding something even remotely complex since it tears so easily and doesn't shape well.

Rediscovering an old hobby like this feels awesome, and it's nice to have something else to fill the huge time void since I quit playing MMO's (and video games in general, mostly) last year.

Wednesday a friend and I made a batch of beeswax candles scented with lavender/chamomile essential oils. They smell absolutely divine. Just the beeswax (which is so raw we actually have to skim it before using it to get the excess bug parts out) smells glorious, and we might do a batch with just that.

We'll be doing another batch this week, and that will be our gifts for our families this year.

I have, however, discovered the reason I'm not into wax play. Some kinds of pain are good. Burning, however, is not to my taste.

You don't really want to use beeswax candles in wax play as it does get to hot. At least that is what elne warned me about.

I'm still working on a (very large) blanket for Mia. I doubt I'll get it done by the time the new baby comes, because I'm such a lazy ***** :(

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea, but none of the skills I have can be realistically be used to make gifts.

I've been canning all fall. I'll give out jams. I'll also make some caramels and toffee. Lastly I crochet up dish towels. People seem to like the hand-made wash cloths and they finish off a box of food stuff nicely.

Next year maybe I'll have some home made wine to share with friends for the holidays.

I've always thought making soap would be kinda cool, but lye scares me.




Edited, Nov 30th 2009 9:09pm by Elinda

As a child, I used to dip my fingers into the wax puddles of my mom's candles and make casts of my fingers