Give and you shall receive!

I hope you have enjoyed your holiday break!  Mine was busy with finishing up work & school mixed in with a frenzied efforts to complete handmade presents for friends and family.  I also got sick a few days before Christmas, so I had a few late nights sat in front of my sewing machine in a delirious state, pedal to the metal, frantically trying to finish up last minute projects.  Luckily, everything turned out just great, and in the end I was so focused on finishing up my projects for everyone else, that I didn’t even have time to wonder what I might get in return.   However, this year I became convinced that what goes around comes around because all the handmade crafty work I sent out came back to me like karma in quilt form, but before I get to that, let me tell you a little bit about what I made and gave.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was completely inspired by the coin snap purses that Karyn Valino gave as Christmas presents a few years ago, and since I took the coin snap purse class earlier this year at the workroom, I thought it was well worth putting my knowledge and skills to use for my presents this year.  It was really fun to choose different fabrics from my hoard of supplies and try to ascribe the colours and patterns that most suited each of my friends & family members.  Unfortunately, most of the purses were wrapped and distributed before I could document them, but I photographed my mum’s purse and I have plans to visit each of my purses, and their new owners, to photograph them over the next little while.

I used the alphabet stamps (that I wrote about in an earlier post) to write personal messages to each recipient.  It was so nice to send a personal greetings, it is like attaching a card inside a gift.  Also, I can be pretty certain that there won’t be any re-gifting going on with these purses.

Here’s the one I made for my mum:

Now for the best part, receiving…

A bit of back story first:  Last summer, I took my Aunt Nancy (a.k.a expert quilt maker) to the workroom to show her all the gorgeous fabrics that they stock there, but also to choose out a bunch of fabric for a quilt that she said she offered to make for me.  After several months, I put the fact that there was a quilt in progress for little-old-moi out of my mind, and honestly I had no expectations for receiving it this year.  So imagine my surprise on Christmas day when I was presented with a LARGE Christmas bag filled with fabric-like material (my dad tipped me off that something was going on when he pulled out his camera and said this was a “special gift” and that he had been ordered to capture the moment on film, or rather on pixels.)  It was so fun to get the quilt and cool to see all the fabric that I had picked out mixed in with what she had chose.  Since then it has been located on my bed, where it shall remain.  Thank you Aunt Nancy for my gorgeous quilt!

• alphabet stamps
• Aunt Nancy
• bag
• Christmas gifts
• coin snap purse
• fabric
• labels
• patchwork
• personal messages
• purse
• quilt
• quilting
• sewing
• sewing projects
• stamps