Hot plate pad

One of the other Christmas gifts that I made this year was hot plate pads, as shown below.

Each hot pad had the person's name hand embroidered onto it to give it a personal touch.  I used cotton cloth for the front side with embroidery.  I traced out the person's name in my semi-cursive handwriting, and embroidered along my tracing.  On the back I used heat-resistant cloth that I stitched with about 1 1/8" squares on a diagonal.   Inside was 2 - 3 layers of heat-resistant fill (called Insul-Bright) and batting, that I had sewn with the silver heat-resistant backing to keep it from bunching up.

I then used a red bias tape to close the edges in and create a nice loop to hang the heat pad from.

These ended up being trickier than I expected, it was hard getting the bias tape to stay in the right place with all the layers of fabric.  The end product ended up being worth it though!  A nice, personalized, hand-made gift to loved ones says volumes!

Cross-Stitch iPhone Cover

One of the gifts I handmade this Christmas was for my husband's iPhone.

We both have the same iPhone with the same bumper/cover.  We constantly picked each other's up!  I saw a post online about this little ingenious cross-stitch cover, which you can get from Purl Soho here: http://www.purlsoho.com/purl/products/item/8333-Leese-Design-iPhone-4-Cross-Stitch-Case.  It comes in a variety of base colors.  I choose black since I knew that was a comfortable color for my husband!

Purl sent my case cover to me quickly, nicely wrapped, and with a hand-made note!  I was impressed.  The cover itself is made by a Korean company, Leese design.  If you're interested, you can see their website here: http://leesedesign.com/shop/main/index.php.  Below are some pics of the packaging.  It was nicely made from all angles, I had no issues with the product at all!

(Note: scratches on the plastic are due to me stuffing this in random locations to hide it from my husband.  It did not arrive this way!)

The product came with three colors of floss, as shown on the Purl Soho site, as well as a cross-stitch needle.  I choose the dark bluish grey as a color that wouldn't pop too much, but would give my husband's phone a nice personal touch.  Clearly you could buy your own embroidery floss to work with as well!

Included in the packaging

The product also came with a pamphlet that covered how to cross stitch (this was my first cross-stitch project, but I mostly just made it up as I went!), and included a bunch of patterns that you could use on the phone including a power icon, car, scooter, teddy bear, hearts, and an ace of clubs.

Included patterns

It was a fun project and it came out great!

Handmade Christmas

I hope everyone has been enjoying a wonderful holiday season!  I had a busy month preparing for Christmas with many various crafts that I set up for myself as gifts that I wanted to give.  Below you can see the range of items that I made!

I'll talk through each of these in the upcoming days.  The first one was the Earbud Pouch, thanks to the tutorial that I posted about in November here.  I made a bunch of these for various friends that I felt would likely use earbuds on a regular basis.  So far I've gotten great feedback from everyone on them!  I even made one for myself since I was guilty of a knotted headphone mess combined with pens and whatever else got into the tangle being pulled out of my purse.  It's nice to have them in an easy-to-find, separated pouch from all the other random items that get stowed away in there!

Hiatus

Well then.  Sorry for the hiatus.  I ended up working harder than expected in Eindhoven, and I only briefly saw Amsterdam.  I really wasn't able to get any great pictures since I was only out and about when it was dark, and rainy!  So even though I had posted under the guise of "Eindhoven teaser" - that's all I've got.

Moving on to the rest of the month, I've been so busy creating new things that I haven't posted a thing!  While I can't reveal my creations quite yet - I look forward to some post-Christmas posts about the various projects I have been up to.

In the mean time - check out this wonderful site that I frequent and drool over!

http://craftgawker.com/

Enjoy and more to come soon!