East, West, Homemade Is Best!

Like most crafters I always feel the urge to get creative over the festive season: but this year I knew I would be working on one large sewing project, which meant that I would have to keep all of the other crafts relatively simple. 

So, what does one do when one needs to create something that's both fabulous and flippin' easy??? Why, one turns to Martha Stewart, of course!

I decided to put together a 'pamper hamper' for my sister-in-law and her two adolescent daughters using some of the bath treat ideas from Martha Stewart Living. I live close to a herbal apothecary so I decided to make some of the 'tub teas', and bath salts, using lavender, lemon verbena and chamomile (and, for the salts, some essential oils that I already had to hand). I purchased two packets of empty teabags online via Amazon, and some jars of various sizes, from IKEA. I used the smaller jars for the bath teas, fitting three into each jar, and used the larger jars for the salts. I tried my hand at the 'bath bomb' recipe as well, but couldn't quite get the colour to set as I wanted (they're yellow 'cakes' in the jar, but I was trying to make them blue...) - I packaged them up anyway ;-) 

Bath fizzes, bath salts, hand soaps and tub teas...

I also decided to add some simple 'melt and pour' soaps to the hamper, using a pure vegetable soap base from Mystic Moments and adding a few drops of essential oils and a swirl of food colouring. Needless to say, the gift basket went down a treat!

However, my main creative concern this Christmas was assembling Vogue 8940 for my husband...

I had, quite literally, lost track of time as the December days skipped along the calendar, and so found myself with less than two weeks to get this surprise completed. Luckily, my local sewing emporium had the pattern in stock, but, as I am used to drafting patterns rather than using commercial ones, it seemed to take forever to lay the pattern out and cut the fabric, which stunted my progress a little: I had to resort to banishing him from our home on Christmas Eve in order to do the lining and buttons!

Thankfully, though, he loved the outcome :-)

Trust me, that is him looking pleased....

Not sure how I'm going to top this next year....