In my "spare time", I make jewelry, and various other crafts, and attempt to sell them on a site called Etsy. This site offers a great, super-supportive marketplace, and community for independent artists and crafters.
Well, this year, in the spirit of avoiding toy recalls, and support all things handmade, the lovely crafters at Etsy started a campaign to get people to give only handmade gifts this year, either made by yourself or a fellow crafter.
Even though I didn't stick the icon on my blog (because I'm lazy and HTML, even copied and pasted, still freaks me out, I took the pledge to keep my Christmas handmade.
For the women in my life, the easy answer was jewelry. They would all receive a piece of jewelry. The men would receive scarves, the only thing I'm capable of knitting. For all of the kids, I decided to make fun, timeless, hand puppets. Oh, and for certain families, quilts. No biggie.
With the best of intentions, I went out and bought all of the supplies. Yards of fabric for the quilts. Fake fur, googly eyes, and felt for puppets. Glass, chain, and beads for jewelry. Piles of yarn for knitting.
Then my grandmother passed and I spent an unplanned for week in Vermont. And then I decided to go back to school and needed study time for the PRAXIS exam. And then my bum tooth got infected and incapacitated me with days worth of pain, followed by days worth of antibiotics and Vicodin. And so on. All of these things and more stealing away precious days of gift making time.
In short, here is the handmade gift total as of now, 10 days before Christmas:
1 scarf in a light lime green no man will wear
7 half completed necklaces
I blow. Does it still count if I hand make the cards?
I will keep an ongoing total of what I manage to complete from my overblown ambitions. Feel free to laugh and point, and taunt me freely.
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