Dare to DIY - Week Four

Dare to . . . give homemade gifts!

Sorry this post is late. Been dealing with a sick kid (and semi-sick me) all day long.

I. LOVE. THIS. CHALLENGE!! SOOO MUCH. I love it because of three reasons:

1.) I am giving almost entirely homemade gifts this year.
2.) I love to see gifts that others are making and wish I could make them.
3.) See reasons one and two.

So I obviously can't show off a whole lot of things that I made, BUT some will be showcased. Be warned. If you are a close relative, might want to skip reading this post for a few weeks.

First of all: the food. Let me just tell you something: you (really do, sincerely) wish that YOU were MY neighbor. The reason that you wish this is because my street is awesome . . . and also because I like to make food for my neighbors and give it as gifts. This year, the bags of food will include the following:


*A jar of homemade applesauce or apple pie filling.
*The white chocolate peanut butter cookies I mentioned in a previous post
*Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge
*White Chocolate Peanut Bark
*Apple Cinnamon Muffins
*Little gifts for the kids from Nora
*A handmade card


See? You wish you lived on my street.

Now I will go ahead and share some of the handcrafted items. I recently learned this year how to make jewelry, so I am giving away some jewelry as gifts:

Also, because of the new jewelery thing I am able to make wine charms, so I made a few of those too. (Sorry, no pictures. I wrapped those up already.)

I also learned to hand embroider thanks to this website that Kim over at Newlywoodwards shared, and I made something similar to an item that we sell in the AtHome America Holiday Catalog (although I cannot find the link to it at the moment):

This shelf pillow is a neat decorative piece that I had never considered until I made one myself! :) Love it, and I hope the person I made it for likes it too.

I also got busy this week on making an advent calendar:

I wanted one for Nora (and potentially future children), so I decided to make one this year (even though I was fairly sure there would be no way I could finish by December 1st.) I made this one to go on the fridge, which is kind of funny because I will likely not put it on the fridge - I will probably buy a cookie sheet or something to stick it on and hang it up! Anyway, this one is based off "The Grinch" and Max the dog. (Side note: Max the dog is one of my all-time favorite cartoon characters ever.)



I am thinking of making more advent calendars out of baby food jars for next year for other people. Unless anyone wants a million baby food jars! Ha ha . . .

Until next time . . .

EDIT: the shelf pillow I was copying looks something like the one in this photo.