A patchwork Christmas

So this Christmas I decided to *go green*, *get frugal*, *be cheap* what ever you want to call it. ~reuse~reduce~recycle~ With this in mind and a overwhelming want to go minimal, to see how creative I could get, keep things basic and still have a fun Christmas I decided to wrap most of my presents for my own family this year in fabric. Now normally this would not be cheap and would be wasteful if you weren't going to reuse the fabric, but I have more fabric collecting in my closet then any one person should have. For various reasons it has been collecting in there patiently waiting for someone not so busy to make something beautiful with them. Well I still don't have time to do much of any thing with the fabric, but in the mean time I found it can double as an an excellent wrap. I didn't want to cut any of it, because I am going to use it for something else some day, so that made it a bit difficult, but I managed. My friend and I were going to make reusable fabric gift bags together but I of course didn't have the time. She made some though and they are really cute. I love anything frog, so I just had to use this fabric.

This present is for my mom, and I know she will love my choice of fabric for her present, she might be disappointed though when I tell her she can keep it, the fabric that is...

Another favorite, star and moon fabric. This one I experimented with wrapping so that I could tie it at the top and I really liked it this way. I have seen fabric wraps you can buy that show you how to wrap them a certain way. I was trying to make it look something like that.

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So now onto presents. I didn't have a lot to spend on them this year and I have a few special children in my life that are not my own that I wanted to do something for so I made them stuffed animals. A few kids got Sock Monkeys, which only cost me the price of a few sock, which I got a good deal on. A couple others got Bella Bunnies. Now this project didn't cost me anything because I already had the fabric, but I should have tried it ahead of time to work out the kinks, because it was harder then I had anticipated. Either way I finished them, and as long as they don't see the beautiful ones that my friend makes I'll be fine. By the way if you want to see what they are actually suppose to look like check out her blog treasuresunderthewillowtree.blogspot.com (I don't know how to link, sorry) there is also a link to her etsy shop from there. She is the friend that makes fabric gift bags too, she is one creative lady! She is also the one who showed me how to make the sock monkeys, except mine look nothing like hers. The very first quilt I ever made, I made with her. Nobody got quilts this year though, not enough time!

Here is one of the sock monkeys, this one was made from a really soft sock which made the sock monkey really squishy and nice, but was really hard to sew!

One of my daycare mom's is having a baby girl soon and asked if I would make her a sock monkey for her little girl, so I actually gave this one to her at her baby shower which was a few weeks ago.

This is a Bella Bunny. It has a cute little tail on the back. It's for one of my daycare kids.

So here is another one of the presents I wrapped, my son loves animals so I wrapped his present in a zoo animal print. Our tree is going to look like a patch work quilt this Christmas, cool!

Another monkey I made for one of my daycare kids, the brother of the soon to be sister. He just had to have a sock monkey too, he loved the one for his sister.

This Bella Bunny is for Bella. I wanted to attempt to make these just for her, so I could give her a stuffed animal with her name. I didn't use as soft of fabric for the head and arms and legs as I did for the other one, which I regretted in the end, but I wanted to use the purple color.

Frogs again, I'm telling you I have a thing for frogs, I collect frog stuff actually, have been since I was a teenager.

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So there yeah go, I attempted to go *sort of* green this Christmas. I even reused paper and gift bags from last year. I bought some of my presents for my boys from a mom who buys stuff at thrift stores and such and cleans them up and resells them. She is a stay at home mom and make pretty good money doing this. She cut me a deal, which was nice of her. I bought their books this year from amazon, used, and got a really good deal that way. We gave minimal gifts, meaningful ones, and I am really excited for tomorrow. Each boy got one bigger gift, and since big brother already has a bike, we got the little ones wheels to ride, they are going to be so excited!

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I still haven't figured out what I am going to do about the whole Santa thing and how to tie the whole thing into what the true meaning of Christmas is for us or how far I want to take the whole Santa thing, and Christmas is tomorrow. You think I would have had this all figured out by now, after all Bubu is over three years old, but I keep changing my mind, and I have a general ideal of what I want our holiday traditions to be surrounding these topics but that's all it is just a general idea. Actually I'd rather just focus on Saint Nicholas, but I am not sure how to tie this in and if we should only focus on him and not Santa at all...Bla, bla, bla...Oh I don't know!

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I wasn't raise with the Santa thing, so I don't even really know what it's all about. I guess the dilemma is I haven't decided if this was a good thing or not.

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Well I hope your Christmas with your family is a delightful, and hopefully less confusing, experience! Looks like we are having a White Christmas around here after all! It's been a long time since we have had one of those.

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!