Holiday Wrap Up Day 3

Yesterday was pretty productive on the whole. I continued knitting on my project for Da, and the house cleaning came to an end. It was a tough job that took two days for me to be satisfied that it is clean, but now I am thoroughly enjoying a clean abode. So the English muffins are still waiting to be made, and I am going to start a new craft tutorial today since the cleaning is finished. I also have to make a trek outside to pick up some tea and other dinner supplies. I really wished our neighborhood had a small grocery store in it, but alas it does not. I will be relying on other places to acquire my supplies, mainly a World Market and BevMo. Let's hope I can get everything I need there. I am also going to cave in and take a nap since this cold is not going away. I need to get better before I fly out in two weeks.

In the holiday wrap up today are the gifts I made for Claudia. She is Brenna's younger sister who loves art, read as coloring, and is less into running around like her older sister. I decided to make her an I Spy bag. It was rather simple and helped me keep my goal of using up and buying less in the way of supplies. I used some pieces of red fleece that were leftovers from a shopping cart cover project for Jozef. I had to buy a bit of clear vinyl for the window, and this was my first time working with the stuff. It went pretty well, I just hope it holds up. I filled the interior with small pieces of plastic that are used for weights in stuffed toys or bean bags. I had those left over from a snow people project I did for my sister one year. I also had to buy the objects for her to find in the bag. I found these interesting buttons and button covers at a craft store that were on sale, so those became the objects. Some of the buttons were animals, some were farm related objects, some were food, and still others were beach things. It made for good variety. Here is the finished project:



I also made her a crayon roll. I found a great tutorial from Sew,Mama,Sew's Blog and their handmade holidays series. They do a great job of compiling great easy to finish projects for handmade gifts. They had a tutorial from Skip to My Lou. It was very easy and straight forward. The pictures were great and the directions were very easy. I made this entirely out of things I had except for the iron on vinyl. I made the interior fabric from scraps from Craig's gift, that is tomorrow's edition, and the puppet theater I made for Brenna's birthday last year. I also trimmed it with left over rick rack from an old Advent calendar project. Sadly I forgot to take a picture of it when I was done. I did make mine bigger than the tutorial so it would hold 24 crayons as well as a small pad of paper. I also did not put the iron on vinyl on the entire back piece after reading about how it made the crayons slip out. I made sure to keep two inches of the fabric uncovered. I figured any crayon marks on that part would not be seen any way due to the front of the pockets. Well that wraps up her homemade gifts.

Now I am off to work on a new craft tutorial for the blog. I hope to have that done and out to you once the holiday wrap up is over.