To give a good gift, one must aim to make the gift receiver cry.
To clarify, I do mean cry in the way of overwhelmed by love and warmth, not just stomping on their toe. A great gift should facilitate your loved ones feeling considered and cherished.
I often give handmade presents in order to achieve this goal, they have a far greater capacity for love to poured into and are easily sculpted to fit within the heart of the receiver (kind of like a trojan horse but filled with affection).
Every year I tell myself I won't hand-make too many presents for Christmas, its a lot of labour during an already busy time and I often fail to meet the deadline, further filling the beginning of my New Year with stress. This year however, I have a number of new people I wanted to make feel loved and some damn good ideas to back it.
This year I made four presents for four cherished friends across a diverse range of my skill set, all the while prepping to host 18 people for Christmas. (I even finished two of them on time!) Lets jump in!
My beautiful friend Kaycea loves dressing up as a cat to express herself and wears cat ears she owns as often as she can. She is however sorely lacking a tail.
We made plans together long ago for me to teach her basics of sewing and support her through building a tail for herself. However, we've struggled to find the opportunity and after some consideration I knew she would love to have the object, and that by having one she could wear it and live with it and find out what she'd like for her next one!
This project was pretty short and straight forward, with barely an hour at the sewing machine and a little futzing. Guided by conversations we had had about what she wanted and a healthy amount of intuition, I found myself with a simple design I was very happy with.
More importantly than my feelings on, Kaycea adored it. She wore her tail throughout most of Christmas (a very high compliment indeed). She said it was one of her favourite gifts she had ever received. Eeek!
I think we can call this project a certified success. And I still can't wait to teach her to sew for her first project!
Luna is a very fresh friend and when we met, we instantly gushed over our shared love for zines and writing. I wanted to empower Lucy to share her writing and wonderful ideas and I thought zines might be a way for her to celebrate her work.
I wanted to make her a custom stamp, a kind of signature to install character and charm into what she makes. It was pretty straight forward, I used foam for the stamp and had a couple of cracks at it until I was happy.
I had played around with stamps before, I talk about how deep of a success it was here. Although I'm not quite as happy with this one as I was my spud stamp, I knew she would still love it. I also quickly made her some hand bound notebooks to even further encourage making!
Luna cooked six (6) meals for our Christmas, with a peak of 18 mouths to feed for one (1) meal. She fed us the heartiest and tastiest food I've ever eaten. She worked harder than anyone, all while bring so much joy to our home. Our hosted Christmas would've been nothing without her, in the end, the gift I gave did not feel like enough.
Although she didn't use the stamp, she is already making some amazing zines that I'm so excited to cook from!
My lovely friend Janet had been kind enough to specifically request a bath caddy for Christmas, making it really easy to decide what to make for her. She provided some basic needs and dimensions and I knew this would be a great excuse to test my woodworking skills on a small project.
Having just gotten my workbench project to usable state, I got the opportunity to play with my newest tool. I worked with some old pine I had around, wanting to keep it light and set out prepping my stock.
As I worked on this project I was proud of my design, but I was struggling with getting a surface finish I was happy with. Given we had a big Christmas to host, I realised disappointingly that I was out of time.
Its always difficult to not be able to give someone anything for Christmas because you've failed to manage your time properly. The only feeling that I allow myself to have it that it is all okay, so long as they receive the finished gift eventually.
So a little while later I was able to complete those final touches and apply finish and here it is!
My roommate Astral is very cool and likes some very alt music. She has shown me a whole range of music thats like nothing I've heard before (in the best way). One of her favourite albums of all time is Wallsocket (Director's Cut) by Underscores and I immediately found myself lost in that album for months. It emotional and deliberate, makes you feel guttural grief for 7 minutes, then in the very next track bopping around teh room. It is so full of ideas, both musically and within its story telling, and I cannot recommend enough that you go into it with a free hour, the best headphone you've got and wide open ears.
To celebrate enjoying art together I wanted to embroider a cap for Astral. We can often be found adding lyrics from it to our regular dialogue and nothing is more of a ear worm than the Good Luck! that is in every track.
I started with some sketches until I found something I liked the feel of. I specifically picked thread colours that match the Directors Cut album cover because I'm a dork.
I intended to surprise Astral with this present fully completed but in spite of even working on it during my lunch break, I quickly ran out of time and as I had another gift for her, I felt less guilty she would get hers later. So I did end up showing her the half finished cap.
But no matter how long it took, it is now all hers.