Child brings home paper from school announcing a "trading post" that they need to bring items for. Homemade items, not costing any money, preferably! So I pull out my popsicle sticks, buttons and glue, and next thing you know, we've made about 45 snowflake ornaments. (We first made these for Madelyn's 4th birthday and they cover our Christmas tree and I love them.)
Then, my niece Emery's birthday is December 3rd, and she had worn out the bracelets that I made for her when she was a baby. So I thought I'd make her a new batch:
She loves Frozen, and I made the bracelet on the far right in Frozen colors. That got me to thinking......
Make ALL the Frozen themed baby/toddler/girl bracelets!!!
So I did that, plus restocked some of my most popular designs...
And then I made even more stuff, because December is my busiest selling time for my etsy shop.
Then, everyone at Mark's work needed treats.
Then a bunch more people needed treats. (I think there were 83 on the list this year...oy) I made mint brownies, homemade turtles and caramels, toffee, and everybody else got a store bought cookie or muffin mix with a new rubber spatula.
In the meantime, I was attempting to make 8 "I Spy" Bags without the kids seeing what I was doing. Ha!! This project dragged on forever. It was very hard to find time to sew when they weren't home, and since my sewing machine is just on the kitchen table....Madelyn guessed what I was up to.
I didn't really know what I was doing, but they turned out pretty cute. A lot more work than I thought, though!
The top three were Madelyn, Luke and Isabelle's; the left bottom went to Hattie, Jack and Gary, and the right bottom to Nathan and Ava, my nieces and nephews.
The kicker came when I decided that we MUST have new stockings for Christmas, because ours were never coordinating (which bugged me) and Isabelle didn't have one yet. I even took all three kids to Jo-Ann by myself so that they could pick out the fabric they wanted, which took an hour and a half and more patience than I really had. I had never made fully lined, big stockings before (I've made tons of mini ones) but of course that did not deter me! Oh no!! I will not be deterred.
So then what happened was that Christmas Eve dawned and I still had not made them yet.
l-r: mine, Isabelle's, Tiger's, Madelyn's, Mark's and Luke's
As you can see, they did get finished, but not until 10:44 pm on Christmas Eve.
Somehow, I figured out how to sandwich some Warm & Natural batting in there and adapted two different patterns I found online to make the fold over cuff method work, instead of doing a detachable cuff.
They turned out very cute!
So.....add to that all the normal Christmas shopping and mailing and craziness, throw in a birthday and an anniversary and two 4th grade book reports and a teething baby and that is why I was quite done in come the end of 2014.







