…a few warm things I made for the kids so far this winter. The scarves are made from the sleeves of an old felted cashmere sweater and the kids love them because they are so soft.  The flannel pillowcases were supposed to be their St. Nicholas day presents, but I completely forgot about St. Nicholas day.  So they were whipped up in 10 minutes on St Nicholas night right before bedtime. A couple french seams and a big hem and voila! a custom pillowcase. I might make some linen ones for myself after Christmas. And the hat is from an old Martha Stewart pattern.  I’ve used the pattern a bunch of times before, but the sizing is always tricky. I set out to make one hat and suddenly the whole family has them. Usually I just make them from felted sweaters, but for this one I made two hats (one from a sweater and one from an old stripey knit shirt) then fit them together right sides facing, sewed around the edge, turned it out, topstitched and ta da.

I made this half eaten gingerbread man last year, but I thought I’d post it again in case you are starting to freak out about how soon Christmas is (16 days). He’s super simple to sew up. I wrote up instructions and there is a pattern you can download too. If you’d like to see the other mutant gingerbread man I made click here and to know why I made them click here.

Plenty of you want a tutorial for the string of lights advent calendar, so look for that in a couple days. Now get off the computer and finish those christmas presents already.

Ingrid from lottielulu.blogspot.com!

Thank you everyone for playing along (all 250+ of you!).  If you’re peeved that you didn’t win you can hop on over to my shop and buy the little people bag pictured above. There will be more of these in the shop early next week.  You can subscribe to my etsy shop’s RSS feed so you always know when new things are available.

Thanks again! It was amusing hearing what everyone had for breakfast.  Turns out there are two camps: those who eat pastries for breakfast and those who eat leftovers from dinner last night.  And it turns out there are a whole hell of a lot of craft blogs out there. If you are new here I hope you’ll look around and I’ll try to work my way through the hundreds of blogs that are new to me!

It’s giveaway day (thanks to sewmamasew) and I’m giving away this little people bag. It’s a drawstring bag made of muslin with vintage inspired little people appliqued on the front.  Tell a joke, tell me what you ate for breakfast, ramble on and on, whatever, just leave a comment if you’d like to win the bag. There are a ton of blogs giving away all kinds of stuff today, so go forth into the internet and win all your christmas presents.

*edited to add: the drawing will end at 8am central time tomorrow december 4th.

THE CONTEST HAS ENDED, BUT STICK AROUND THERE’S LOTS TO SEE HERE.

Ta da! The advent calendar is done, well pretty much done. It’s a string of chirstmas lights.   One of you guessed correctly! But there were some good ideas out there: an advent abacus, a ferris wheel.  Next year.  There are only twenty lights, but I figure I’ll save some making for next christmas or add them if I have time this month (ha!). There are treats in the bulbs and the lights fit in their little sockets, but they aren’t held in by anything–just the power of felt.  This calendar is for lightweight treats only or bits of paper with sugarless activities on them. I went with candy because my kids are still young enough to think it’s the best thing in the universe.

I’d be happy to write up a quick tutorial (with patterns) if there are a lot of you that would like to make one. It’s not difficult at all.  The hand sewing is a little time consuming, but it’s nothing a few movies won’t fix. If you sewed the bulbs on it would make a nice Christmas decoration for this year (or next).  If you’d like to see more pictures of it you can click here and here.  And there are lots more fantastic calendars here and here.