{Handmade Christmas} DIY Memory

I love giving gifts. I read an article this week that I couldn't have agreed with more: giving gifts is about thoughtfulness, paying attention and being generous. It's not about money, and at the same time refusing to participate in this consumerist madness around the holidays does not mean you have to stop giving gifts. Not being able to surprise each other or find something you know the other one will love is sad. I know many married couples these days stop getting gifts for another. "We just do something for the children at our family" is something I frequently hear.

I don't agree with that. I mean, it's everyone's choice and I wish them all the happiness in the world, but there has got to be something you could wrap for your husband or wife. Even if it's a good old fashioned love letter, a thrift store find, a painting, a favorite cake or spice mix.

Anyhow. End of rant about not getting each other gifts for the holidays.

So let's start again. 

I love giving gifts.

Even if I'm just sending cookies and toffee (just finished my first batch! Post to follow. Hopefully.) to friends. And since many of my friends have kids, I wanted something small to put in the package just for them. I don't know about your kids, but mine seem to get plenty of toys from Santa, so something simple will do here.

One of my Christmas strategies is to make as many gifts as I can.

Since I had two days off from work this week, I tried to get a lot of my handmade gifts done, especially the ones that require mailing. I did quite well actually, especially since I tried to stay away from my laptop as much as possible. I love blogging and reading blogs, but it isn't really helping me getting anything done.

A Christmas memory game was what I had bookmarked for small kid gifts. I got the idea and the gorgeous (and free!!) printable from Rebecca at simple as that. Go get it here.

I had downloaded the file ages ago. Today I was going to print it, and laminate it for more durability. Sounded easy enough.

And that was where the fun started. After ruining several batches trying a few techniques I was pretty ready to just give up and go curl up on the couch with a blanket. I tried sewing a different project on my list to distract me. Well, my sewing machine and I had a severe disagreement over this, so that landed in the garbage (the project, not the machine. And it was just paper, not fabric). Oops. Seems like just not my crafting day. Or maybe it was all just beginner's luck this week?!

So after a frustratingly large part of my free time little while I finally found a method that worked for me.

Relief.

Not that this is rocket science. But I told you I am bad with crafts. Anyway, what I ended up doing is printing the memory on both sides of a sheet of paper, laminating that one sheet and then cutting the pieces out, repeating that process for the second set. And then again. And again. And again. And...

You get the idea. I wrapped the whole thing in tiny brown bags I had on hand (haha, I can't believe I just wrote that. Sounds like I have all these cool crafting supplies on hand, right?), glued one side shut with some of the leftover material from my stupid mistakes previous attempts and used some stamps on the other side to add the recipient's name.

Please tell me I'm not the only one messing up seemingly simple projects!
Swenja