Handmade Christmas Presents 2011

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday!! 
I have had such a fun, relaxing time the past few days with my family -- baking, watching movies, web chatting with relatives, opening presents....I am a lucky lady!

Now that Christmas is over, I can post about a few gifts I made for family and friends :)

This was a hot item this year :)  My sister made a few of these for her extended family, and I made a couple for mine.  I had made myself a Roman Numeral Painted Sign a few months ago (you can find the tutorial here), and my sister had the brilliant idea to add the family name over the wedding date. 

She also made hers with spray paint, which I have never done before (I always use acrylic paint).  So, I made this sign with spray paint.  It is faster, but there are two things that make it harder to use (in my opinion) 1) There is no way to touch it up - so if you accidentally peel up some paint when the vinyl is getting pulled off, you are in trouble!  2) Spray paint does not sand down well - so if you want to distress your sign, it is easier to distress acrylic paint.  So, using spray paint is great if you are impatient, but be careful! ;)

I  made myself a set of Clay Rock Magnets a while back (the tutorial can be found here), and I love using them.  They are probably the favorite magnets I have on my fridge right now (and I have quite a few...I love making magnets!)
This year, I made a bunch with holiday themes, and gave little sets of them to friends, co-workers and neighbors.  I coupled them with a bag of chocolate dipped pretzels.  It was great because the  girls helped me make both the magnets and the pretzels, and they were easy to mass produce.

Years ago, I made a "Relatives Book" for my daughter - just pictures of our extended family - often with her in the picture - glued onto pages of a flip book.  She has loved it, but over the years it has taken a serious beating.  Pages have been ripped or torn out, and it has really been strewn all over the house.
When I saw this idea, to put pictures on CDs, I loved it!!  CDs don't rip or tear, they are a great size, and we had a bunch of old CDs around the house that we could use. 

I printed a bunch of pictures onto plain printer paper, traced around them with a CD, cut them out, and used spray adhesive to stick the pictures to the actual CD.  I put a picture on each side of the CD, and then used a power drill to make a small hole for the book ring to go through. 

This idea would be great for a variety of things - Alphabet Book, US Presidents, LDS prophets, Holidays, - and they stand up to babies!! ;)

The big surprise for Christmas this year: we are taking the girls to Disney World in a couple of months!!  I wanted some tangible way to tell them we were going, so I made these Minnie Mouse Ear Headbands to give them, along with an explanation of where they could wear them in a few months.  They are so excited - and now we'll be able to take the headbands with us :)  I found a great tutorial here for making these cute things.  (I didn't have foam around, like the tutorial said, so I used a disposable plastic plate to make the ears stand up.  Worked GREAT!) 

Don't those faces just tell it all?  We are excited! 

I hope you all have a relaxing and wonderful end of year.  I love being able to share all my crafty adventures with you in blogland - thanks for stopping by!!