2010: Handmade Christmas Gifts Part 1

Let’s all jump into my way-back machine to one month ago…… Wow! Doesn’t the past feel so backwards! I mean, seriously, look at the size of that cell phone! And my hair! HAHAHAHA!!

Not funny? Well I tried damnit….

So a month ago my manfriend and I were running around preparing for the holidays. I had saved my vacation days to spend the last 2 weeks of the year with our families back east. We were splitting the time between my family in Kentucky and his in Illinois.

He’s spent some serious time with my family, including two family summer vacations and a Christmas already. On the flip side, I have had really minimal contact with his family. Now his brother lives here in Denver and is actually moving into our spare room in the next few months, so I have had more than my fair share of contact with that particular relative. The only other relation I’ve met is his mother who has come to see her boys three times since I’ve been in the picture.

Now, I love Mama Manfriend. She’s a pretty laid back and a genuinely great lady – PLUS she totally raised my favorite person in the whole world. I’m a big fan of her! But… you know… I don’t really know her. So when it finally hit me that I was going to need a gift for her… I, um…. Panicked. That’s the word. Panicked.

I had this awesome plan for a really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gift, but then I got really sick the day before our flight. The day I was scheduled to do a significant amount of the work on this really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gift. So, no one got really great and thoughtful and useful handmade gifts. I woke up after a sleepless and miserable night and started packing.

I got to Kentucky with the following items:

3 individual shoes

1 pair of pants (the pair I was wearing on the plane)

1 sweater

7 bottles of perfume

5 pounds of fabric

1 portable hard drive

1 finished gift for my brother

1 wrapped gift for manfriend

It was embarrassing. And made leaving the house very difficult since my ankle high converse were no match for the snow and ice.

Luckily, it was just food poisoning and I was up and running in time to open my stocking. Unluckily, I still needed a gift for Mama Manfriend. So my mother and I whisked over to the local craft store, picked up a few items and checked my portable hard drive embroidery patterns.

In just a few short hours with a needle in my hand, I whipped up this little fellow courtesy of the Forrest Friends patterns from Sublime Stitching.

This was really only my third or fourth finished embroidery piece and I think it’s adorable!!

Mama Manfriend was appreciative and I got bonus points for making it and wrapping it with a super cute bow, but I have a little paranoid fear that she’s just going to hand it off to one the grandkids. Whatever, right? I survived the visit, the gift disaster, and food poisoning. I’m going to count it as a win!