handmade ~ birthday gifts

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Her birthday was at the end of May. I actually did pretty good getting most things made in time. Quite surprisingly I had her skirt and top sewed like 10 whole days before her birthday. This has never, ever happened before. I have always made the girls dresses, or once in a while now skirts, for their birthdays (and winter solstice). And I am always sewing in the days just before, and of course many times till very, very late the night before.

So it was nice to have some more free time to consider what else I might like to make her. Our gifts are always few and fairly simple, but still there is so much thought put into the specialness of each gift. Also for the set of books they always receive, often the only gift that is not handmade, how I love to choose their stories for the season or the year.

And since Chessa was getting two very sweet gnome books I decided that she must have a little gnome. This little gnome has been given the name of Leaf. She was very fun to make. I thought I would want to add some embroidery to her dress, but then I felt like I really like the plainness of her just as she was. Chessa loves her.


And I knew all along the other gift I was going to make her. My mother helped us get her this set of beeswax stick crayons. Since she will be beginning first grade this year! It would have been nice also to give her these when we were actually starting school in september, but this way it helps us so much when it comes to getting what we need for school supplies and books for the coming year.

So I made her a crayon pouch to hold all of her new crayons. I made crayon pouches like this for their block crayons, which they have had for a few years now, and it really helps to keep the crayons clean, organized, and all in one place. Chloe has a set of stick crayons but I never made anything to hold them. They are just in their tray, and Chessa uses them too, and that has worked okay, but not as nice as the crayon pouches.

And then there are always the handmade birthday cards. This one made by Chloe, because she knows Chessa likes when she makes her this kind of card, meaning a door that opens, the house opens up too. And she wrote "cats", I guess in case anyone was confused as to whether they were cats or mice, which is exactly what happened.

Cats can be very wild in the house you know.. (We know, we have four cats..) Do you see the one inside the house standing on it's head? That's the one you see when you open the door from the front. I think this is very funny...

The green top you saw in the last post. Chessa says one of her favorite colors is green. So I wanted to use this piece of treasured vintage calico to make her a top, to go with the green corduroy skirt that also has a trim of the calico. The skirt fits her a little big, which is just fine really (I always make everything big, but sometimes way too big) and I don't have any pictures of her in it yet. The top has a trim of light green on the front, really the pictures in the last post were better to really see the top.

Here you can see the back, it has some of the green corduroy to match the skirt. You can also see that the button is a little too small and the back keeps coming undone, so I will have to change that. I didn't have many button options, and Chessa always reminds that she doesn't like it when her gift doesn't have it's buttons sewn on. Just because that happened once...

By the way, in that last picture she is tying a rope to a little wooden rocking chair. All the dolls were having a picnic down by the garden, but then became to warm from the bright sun, so the girls had to quick get them all back inside, by making this rope pulley thing with the rocking chair and lifting each doll individually up onto the back deck.

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Also, I really like to make things. Really really really. I love to sew, and often it's all I want to do, and I feel like I could just go on making things forever, which I probably will.


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