Holiday Gifts

Here are some of the gifts I made this holiday season. The first picture is a holiday snowflake pail filled with goodies- gloves, lip protection, hand lotion, notepad, tea, chocolate, photo/note holder or a 'purse' magnet. I gave these to the twelve people that work in my group except my assistant and my managers who received a store bought gift.

I made similiar ones for Brian's and my siblings except the contents and pail were different. The adult nieces and nephews recieved goodies in a small gift bag. We have twenty nieces and nephews so we just filled the bags with little things like packs of gum, chapstick, deck of cards and chocolates. We don't usually give to siblings and the nieces and nephews but I wanted to do something a little special and started hunting for stocking stuffer type items as early as August. All in all, I made nearly over forty holiday pails and gift bags. It was a lot of work but fun and definitely worth it to give an unexpected treat.
Below is a picture of how I decorated the banana walnut bread that I baked for my colleagues on the leadership team for our group. I loved the way these bread bands and tags turned out. I baked eleven loaves...and didn't even save one for us. What was I thinking?!?
This last picture is the gift I made for my best crafty girlfriends. The glass jars started in life as a Starbuck's Frappuccino bottles. I got the idea of using SB glass bottles from SCS except they were filled with M&Ms. As you can see, I filled my jars with buttons (not m&ms), and I also gave each friend a SU! keychain that was tied to a red ribbon bow. I had purchased the key chains over the summer when I was a demonstrator. The jar lids were decorated with a stamped circle image and ribbon was wrapped around the lid edge. I stamped each friend's initial in red, outlined with a green glitter pen and then punched and layered on top of a double band of designer paper.

I didn't realize until I took the picture that my friend's first name initials (Monica, Linda and Jody) are the same as my full name initials- MLJ.

Hope you had a wonderful Christmas! Happy new year!!