Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

For one reason or another (children and uni) my craft activities have been next to zero for the last couple of years. Determined this year to change that, I have set myself a challenge of giving all handmade gifts for Christmas this year to non-immediate family members. This includes, parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and teachers.

I’ve been pondering this for a while, almost six months actually. I’ve been coming up with ideas. Brainstorming. Trying not to get too excited about it.

But after Christmas I’m even more excited than ever.

And today, after finding this fantastic list of 100 tutorials that Frogdancer pointed me to, well, let’s just say my imagination has run away with me, and I’ve been drooling over tutorials for the last couple of hours.

So I decided that I’m going to do it. I need to learn to sew to make M&M’s school uniform, so I may as well transfer those skills to making Christmas presents (despite a mother and mother-in-law who could sew for Australia, I managed to get out of sewing for myself until now. I can sew enough to survive, but have never got much beyond that, I think I just need practice). Combined with some of my other crafty endeavors, I think I’ll be able to come up with a wide variety of presents that will be useful to the recipients, and it fulfills my other plan of making myself make time to create, craft and relax.

So the next step was to make a list of the guinea pigs lucky recipients of my creative endeavors. I came up with 17. So if I work on completing 2 a month I should be done well in advance and probably have some time for other projects as well.

My next step is to carry looking through the list of tutorials (see how I justify wasting spending my time?) and get some ideas for various people.

As it turns out, I pulled out my cross stitch last week, and found some partially completed small pictures that I bought as a set of three. I’ve nearly finished the second one now, so once  they’re done that will be one present already completed.

Now I just need to figure out what to do for the other 16…