For my sister-in-law, I attempted to make a skirt out of a men's dress shirt following this tutorial. I hadn't realized how difficult it would be to take the measurements from my brother (he measured the waist of her favorite jeans with a metal measuring tape) and create a skirt that would easily fit over her head. The design did not have any zipper or buttons to make it easier to put it on. Of course, I didn't realize that fact until I had spent quite a bit of time working on it. I sent it, not completely pleased with the results but with the caveat that I would either fix it when she was around or that she could sew the bottom up to be a bag! She had the idea to make it into an apron! It's nice to have a crafty sis-in-law!

For my brother, I made a red wings t-shirt using fabric paint, contact paper, a clip art design and an incredibly soft t-shirt from Walmart! I think it looks quite good (Sara tells me he didn't realize it was handmade at first!).

For all the grandparents and dad, we revisited our summer craft and made mouse ear shirts for our trip to Disney World. This was a bit more difficult with larger shirts and we used several different stamping techniques for patterns.

For my parents, brother & sister-in-law and grandmother, I made up some fused Target bag tote bags. Each bag took 12 plastic bags to create. I made each one with a different color handle so that if we are all together with our bags, we can tell who's is who's.

Finally, the kids made wooden magnets for all the grandparents, great-grandparents and aunts & uncles, inspired by the Angry Chicken blog. To make these, I purchased a package of small round wooden disks, some strong magnets and some diamond glaze finish from Michaels. Using scraps from my paper stash, I cut the paper around the disks using my exacto knife. We used a glue stick to adhere the paper, then painted a diamond glaze over the top and sides. Boo then used the hot glue gun to glue on the magnet. While she liked the challenge of the hot glue gun, I think the girls favorite part was simply picking out and lining up the paper!

So, as you can see, we were quite busy the month or so leading up to Christmas, even if we didn't really have any original ideas! It was so much more fun to give the gifts of our time and skills to our relatives than things that they would just wnat to return anyway! Hopefully they all liked the gifts they were made as we don't do exchanges :o)