So, it's been a while. I don't think I ever mentioned it, but I picked up a side job. It's not related to art/design, but the extra paycheck is significantly helping to wipe out what's left of my student loans (hooray!). The set hours also has me sleeping like a normal person for once. My family thinks that's great, I think it's weird. I never realized how much times zones factor into talking to customers online until I stopped being available to talk whenever. It's safe to say between that and the holiday rush, I've been adjusting. Understandably I've fallen behind on things like blogging, but now that it's January - I'm reorganizing and catching up.
As is tradition, I spent some of the holidays making gifts for friends and family, and as is tradition, I waited until January to post photos of these gifts on the blog. Apologies for the not so great lighting, it gets dark really early here in Nov./Dec.
The first gift was for my pint -sized niece. She loves apples, and her grandma has some decorative plush apples that she loves to play with, even though they probably weren't intended to be toys. So I decided to make her a few kid-friendly plush apples for her to enjoy at home. While I was on an online adventure looking for apple inspiration, I came across an assortment of bloggers making happy little PB&J (how cute), and I ended up making some of those too. Everyone thought the toys I made should come in a basket (I agree, apples belong in baskets), but this gift had to be mailed (I feel like baskets don't mail all that well), so I wandered around a few stores until I found the basket-like blue bag everything is sitting on here - worked out really well. My niece loved the red and gold apples, she kept holding them and excitedly talking about Snow White. She also put the two halves of the P&J together and pretended to take a bite. My brother made some comment about how he didn't expect her to get all that excited about some apples, but hey I know my niece.
I ended up free handing my own patterns for these, but did some blog reading to figure out the stems of the apples since the ones I had in real life use cinnamon sticks (not kid-friendly). I you want to give these a try I recommend While Wearing High Heels - Amy has some great patterns/tuts available there. If you do some digging, you should cross paths with some sandwich tuts too.
----------
Next batch of gifts were for my out of town friends. A little bit of a back story here - I live in Western New York, which means I'm from Buffalo. Funny thing about the city of Buffalo, it wasn't actually named after the animal (check wikipeia - no one is really sure how "Buffalo" happened) and what Americans keep calling "Buffalo" are actually Bison. (go figure) That said, if you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods, there are "Buffalo" statues everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. Entire herds of them are set up along the highways and everything. Imagine growing up thinking this was a perfectly normal thing to see everyday, now imagine leaving town and not seeing all the ridiculous Buffalo everywhere anymore. A darn shame, right? Well I thought so. And so I made some Buffalo, and mailed them to my friends.
Made 3 of them, and added some string so they could be ornaments
No links for these, I drew up the patterns myself, based off of a public domain photo of a Bison.
----------
Last, but not least, a previously mentioned pint -sized niece had a birthday after Christmas. I wanted to make some owls. There you go.
Man, I am getting good at this making my own patterns thing. Aren't they cute? I have no idea if she'll play with them, but they did get a hug, so I think she liked them.
Originally the plan was to make an owl inside of an egg, but then my brother, still being home from school, suggested that I should make a mother and baby set. I liked that idea, so I forgot about the egg and made a baby owl instead.
And there you have it, the handmade gifts of 2014. ^_^
Now what? Well, if you follow me on Facebook or Tumblr, you can probably guess, but if not, I'll be back with another post soon.
