Made with love. . . just for you x

This Christmas has been a particular busy year for making presents, in a bid to save the pennies we decided to make a lot of our gifts, when I say we I mean me doing the making and Jason the reminding me that things needed to be made!

All in all I made three moss stitch snoods, two knitted hats with wooly poms made by Jason, one chicken cross stitch pattern, one hamster cross stitch pattern (with up-cycled frame sanded and painted by myself), one pair of oven gloves, one pair of knitted gloves, around 30white air drying clay Christmas tree decorations, 24 cranberry and orange shortbread biscuits, 30 gingerbread men/animals, one Christmas cake, one spice cake and 24 mince pies!

As well as three batches of fudge, two of coconut ice and a chocolate roulade that Jason made, it's safe to say that we were exhausted by the time the 25th December arrived, making right up to an hour before Jason's family arrived to wish us both a 'Merry Christmas!' on the 24th. I'm so glad we persevered, there were times when simply going to a shop and buying equivalents was looking tempting but everyone loved their gifts, and I picked up a lot of new crafting skills along the way.

Below are some of the makes and where to get the bits and pieces from that I made them with.

Knitted bobble hat . . .

. . . and the gloves -

These were fingerless gloves with a sloth for the thumb on the side, I then stitched some bows on using some satin ribbon that I had. I used a super chunky wool to make the hats, gloves and snoods from Hobbycraft.

Oven gloves

- I made a pair of oven gloves for Jason's Mum, they're similar to the gloves I made Jason.

I decided to make the quilting diamonds smaller than those I did on Jason's and I think they look better, I also used a thinner wadding. I got the strawberry fabric and bias binding is from Fabric Land.

On these gloves I added a loop so that the gloves can be hung on a cupboard handle, I simply made this by folding a length of bias binding in half and catching it when I done the bias binding.

Scrummy Mince Pies

- I thought I'd try something a little different from the norm, this is what the pies looked like before they went in the oven.

Sugarcraft

- My first attempt at sugarcraft didn't go quite so well, my penguin came out looking a little bit 'special', this one didn't quite make it onto the Christmas cake!

Christmas cake

- The finished cake! with Jason's brilliant fishing penguin, and my snowman held together using some handy toothpicks. We made the igloo by using a hemisphere tin that we got from Lakeland, we bought this one.

Clay Christmas decorations

- These were really easy to make (expect a future post coming soon on how to make these) and everybody loved them! We've got some on our Christmas tree too! I used white air drying clay, letter stamps, a selection of cookie cutters and a rolling pin.