Gifts for Friends and Family

Abbi @ Proverbs 31 Living is hosting a Handmade Christmas for the next few weeks. You can link up w/your own ideas or go to view others. She also shares her own thoughts and ideas. I think it's awesome! She is on week 2. Here is my link from week 1.

I think "handmade" puts a little something special in Christmas season. Especially when there are families you want to bless because they have meant so much to you. We just started this last year. I really liked the idea but had lots of conflicts when it came to making for family. Friends were easy to think for - bake! However, we have big families and though whom we actually buy for is a small list I wanted to make sure that what we made meant something, looked good, stayed in our budget, and wouldn't be tossed somewhere. So here is what we did last year:

Ornaments: The actual glass ornaments were only $1/each at A.C. Moore! Then we bought the ribbon and charms for about $5/all. The biggest expense was the special paper we needed. Which was this. If you decide to make these and buy that paper - make sure it is exactly that paper or it will not work. It needs to say print, apply, and transfer. For a total of $32 for 8 people ($4/person) plus tons of that paper left over for future projects or gifts!

Once we had all of our supplies together we picked out meaningful pictures for each person. Here are a few I found-

Left: Mother n Law -her deceased mother - a copy of one of her two pics. she has of her.

Right: Brother n Law - a pic. of him and my husband when they were little ( my husband is the cute blond btw ;)
Left: my Grandma - a pic. of her with all her children in their younger years, the young man on the right has passed away a few years ago. this meant a lot to her as she didn't have any ornaments w/her children on them!

Right: my husband's Grandma - a pic. of her and her husband - not only are there not many pics. of them but she had the scare several times last year of almost losing her husband! She was very grateful as well.

I was so happy that our first year of homemaking gifts was a success. Truthfully I was worried people wouldn't like it or think whatever about us.

Baking: Last year we chose to bake a variety of cookies for a few special families. We baked:

Salted Peanut Cookies

Soft Baked Ginger Cookies

Popsicle Chocolate Chip Cookies (a little fun for the kids in the family ... because cookies aren't already fun! LoL)

Decorated Sugar Cookies

Sprinkled Butter Cookies

We baked these on 3 different days and put them in the freezer until time to wrap & give. So we decided to wrap each type of cookie in a separate plastic wrap tied with ribbon. Then, we decorated paper bags to put them all in with their Christmas card. We decorated the bag buy cutting out Christmas song sheets from our newspaper and gluing it to card stock as a background. Then gluing a ribbon at the top for extra decoration. Our cookie gift total came to about $15 including everything! We gave to 7 families so this came to about $2.14/family! Some pictures I found of them -
Well those are my ideas from last year ... working on this year's! We all really enjoyed it!