Presents, Presents, and more Presents!

    October is a big birthday month for our family in the first place, but this year has been particularly eventful since it was also the month my grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary (which was actually on Sept. 1st,) as well as the month that dear, family friends of ours had a housewarming party to show off their beautiful, new home! So, with our very modest budget, I had to get really creative with all of our gift giving. I started a good month in advance to give myself plenty of time to really come up with unique, thoughtful, and fitting gifts for each individual and occasion. Miss D had a homemade birthday (see tomorrow's post for details) as well as my brother. I forgot to take pictures, but I made him fire starters out of dryer lint, wax and egg cartons, and the girls dug him up some "big, juicy worms" from our yard for fishing. We had fun decoupaging the container (an old pancake mix canister) for the fire starters and reporposed jar for the worms. I feel bad because it is definitely harder for me to come up with and make nice homemade gifts for men, and even though I'm sure he appreciated the effort, my brother did seem a little weirded out by our homemade gifts. Then again, who wouldn't be a little weirded out by worms?! 
     In an effort to make up for his lame gifts, I decided to make a birthday cake for my brother's birthday dinner celebration. One of his favorites is carrot cake, so I used our home grown carrots and homemade applesauce (in place of oil, which makes it SUPER moist) to make my go-to gluten free carrot cake recipe, and simply used food coloring to color the cream cheese frosting. The cream cheese frosting is a little bit harder to work with than decorator frosting, but it is much yummier so it's completely worth it! My mom always decorated our cakes for us when we were growing up, and I am certain that they were prettier but since I am not entering my cakes in a contest, I go for taste over beauty!

     I have really been getting into sewing lately, and since I have a few basics under my belt, I decided to venture out and try some more challenging techniques. With the next two projects, I tried my hand at reverse applique, which I LOVE to do! It's a bit more time consuming than regular applique, but I love the dimension it creates and for some reason I just enjoy doing fine, detail work, so it's right up my alley! I also gave quilting a try with this pillow that I made for my grandparents anniversary. Their first names both start with the letter M, so the "theme" of their party was m&m. My mother made cute little favors with custom made m&m's and I decided to follow the theme and make them a pillow. Over the summer they moved to a neighborhood in our town, only minutes away from our house, so I also thought it would be nice to make them something they could use in their new place.
     Now, back to the quilting...I stink at it! Oh. My. Gosh. One of my best friends makes beautiful quilted pillows and sells them in her Etsy shop, and after fighting with this lovely pillow for longer than I am willing to admit I am convinced that she should charge double what she does for them!!! I do think it came out okay in the end, and my grandparents seemed pleased with it, but I will probably not be attempting another one of these for a while.

    For our friends' housewarming party, I made them a set of monogrammed linen napkins, complete with upcycled napkin rings (from a cut up paper towel roll) that I decoupaged with coordinating fabric, ribbons and buttons. I put them all in a little, repurposed Easter basket and topped off the package with a cute, little, home grown butternut squash trimmed with craft supplies (flower, ribbon & fabric) that I had on hand.

      Again, I used reverse applique for the monogram on the napkins, but I also tried my hand at edging the two linen layers of the napkins with biased tape. The process involved an insane amount of pins, but after the first napkin, it became much easier, and I am surprisingly pleased with the results. I will definitely be making more things like this with bias tape, and I hope to get even more precise with the finished product over time. In fact, if I can perfect the process in time, I think that I will use some of the Christmas fabric that I stole acquired from my mother's stash to make some Christmas napkins and/or placemats for at least one of the three Yankee Swaps that we typically attend each year. 

Mrs. J :)