This year, as you know, I've tried to give consumable gifts... or at least handmade and useful. I tried to think of things that Kid might be able to do (or help do). One of the things I thought of was fleece scarves. Essentially a skinny 1/4 yard of fabric (that I painstakingly straightened at home using my wood floors as a guide... because if you've ever bought fabric you know that that is NOT how the fabric ladies cut it!). In theory this could have been a no sew project... but we embellished ours (and by we of course I mean me... Kid just told me where to put things). I thought Kid would have even been able to cut the fringe but I miscalculated both her hand strength and her attention span. She did *help* me cut by placing her hands on top of mine in the big sheers and applying pressure as I cut (yes this was very annoying... but I summoned the patience to push through it because I wanted her to feel involved). She did like going to the fabric store and picking out the fabrics and buttons.. boy did she like picking out the buttons... a lot of editing had to go into a kind of cohesive theme for each scarf. These scarves could have been 75 cents apiece... but Kid's expensive button taste pushed these up over 6 bucks a pop. She is quite proud of them as you can see...
Ah yes... there are buttons for everyone... even the men in your lives.
I also made this little felt baby doll head (with bells inside) for Mr F's baby niece. It seemed like a cute toy that a baby could poke and chew and rattle with out fear of Chinese poison (I jest... kind of).
I'm not loving it to be perfectly honest... I would make some changes to it next time. I didn't have pink felt or I might have made some rosy cheeks... I think it's missing that. The bangs didn't come out looking the way I wanted BUT Baby grabbed it out of my hands as soon as I was done stitching it closed and yelled "My baby!" and ran off with it. So I guess it looks enough like a baby for a baby. And since a baby is my intended audience I guess it's not so bad after all.
This is the back... like the bangs I topstiched texture to make it look like hair. I hand sewed the facial appliques and machine stitched it together. I didn't use a pattern I just traced a saucer and went from there and used up little bits of scrap felt.
