Winter flowers for my girlfriends {crochet brooches}

I've been making most of Christmas presents this year, and was looking to make something small for my friends.

We usually don't even exchange presents in that particular group (we just get presents for kids usually), but I wanted to make something. Just to put smiles on their faces.

I was working with Noro yarn that I love and had some leftovers and when I saw pattern for these flowers, it just clicked. I loved making them, I hope they will like wearing them. Perfect to accessorise boring hat, or scarf, add detail to cardigan.

Quilted Coasters. Lots of them...

68 of them, to be precise.

When it came to 'thank you' gifts for kids nursery staff, I decided to make quilted coasters. Sets of 4. It all sounded easy until I realised that between 2 children in different nursery rooms there's 17 people of staff to make gifts for. So yes... 68 coasters :)

Jewellery box {decoupage}

This is no ordinary box. This is for a very talented Ann who does breathtaking phenomenally detailed paper-cut pictures. I offered craft exchange - her family tree paper-cut for decoupaged object of her choice.

Ann asked for a jewellery box for her little girl.
She said she liked dragonflies, so I hunted some down, so to speak, and made this.

UPDATE 26Jan2013:

Box went missing in action :( Royal Mail fail.
I have to make a new box now :(
I really am devastated and annoyed. It was beautiful, I was so pleased how it turned out. Oh well....

Christmas quilt

We have no Christmas traditions in our family. *Yet*.
I know it sounds somewhat sad, but reality is such, that we don't have any immediate family (parents or siblings) to spend Christmas with. My husbands parents passed away and my lot is 3 hours flight away. Besides I grew up in Soviet Union and Christmas didn't even exist there back then. So yeah, no traditions to speak off... Or to pass to our children.
But it's ok.
There's a silver lining to this though. We can MAKE UP our own traditions as we go. Isn't that great?! I think that's fabulous. So we started with Advent calendar, then Erline Elf came along. And now I decided that we need a Christmas quilt. It will come out every year when Christmas tree is decorated and will be put away again in January. I've got vision of children sitting on it by the Christmas tree on Christmas morning, opening their gifts. It makes me all warm inside :)

So there it is, our Christmas Quilt.

Erline Elf

My daughter is 3 and half years old now and I consider this to be her first Christmas. I mean - when she is consciously waiting, counting days and is crazy excited. First year she's talking about Santa and taking part in her nursery nativity play. Two previous  Christmases she just was playing with wrapping paper and was a bit scared of white bearded man :)

Accordingly, I'm making effort too. Lots of mums seem to be organizing little elves for their kids. Some of the elves are little grassers to watch kids and report back to Santa, some just having casual holiday from toy making.

So I thought I'll make one for my little girl. I came across Ernie and Erline Amigurumi pattern. Pattern is well written, I thought. Very easy to follow and after about a week's worth of evenings I had Erline the Elf ready.

My daughter was ecstatic. I, however, felt little sad having to sit back and let Santa take all the credit for my hard work :)

Very quick Advent Calendar

To be honest, I wasn't going to have advent calendar. However, my 3.5 year old daughter is now asking me if it's Christmas yet. Every morning :) I tell her that not yet, then she asks if it's tomorrow. Or day after tomorrow. Or day after after tomorrow. Well, you get the idea. I need an advent calendar to help her understand how many days there's left.

So I started looking for one. But none of the ones that I had seen had this clear visual count down feature.  Until saw one mama on the patenting forum make toilet roll advent calendar. That was it! It was perfect and I had to make one immediately as it was 2nd of December already (so 2 days too late by then).

I didn't have toilet rolls, so I used paper tube from gift wrapping paper. Cut it up, sewn the bottoms up, decorated (I went for messy torn paper look). Strung them together, pined some pretty paper onto cork board and then pinned strings. 2 hours later I had an advent calendar. Bit wonky, but will do the job perfectly. And I can remove one pocket each day, so my daughter can see, that there is less days left and can count them.