Christmas Gifts

The holidays are over…thank goodness. I was in a mad rush to finish all my StudioGatz orders and still have time to make all my family presents. My favorite gift this year was a quilted cover buttoned wall calendar I made my little sister. She has a new office and needed some “decorations.”

Calendar Photo

Quilted Covered Button Calendar

This is my first time to quilt anything. My mother is an expert quilter (check out her quilt blog I Finally Have Time), so I tried to channel her spirit while making this. In fact, I got the idea from a Zakka craft book I bought her for Christmas.

I chose this project also because my little sister had helped me make covered button earrings to sell at my Christmas craft show. She is a covered button maniac and was whipping them out faster than you can say “covered buttons.”

Here it is in her office (and changed to January):

Calendar in Office (notice the picture of Gatsby!)

Calendar in Office (notice the picture of Gatsby!)

I haven’t decided yet if this will make it over to the StudioGatz Store, but thought it was still fun to share.

P.S. For those wondering what’s going on with my Esty Store, well… I have no excuse, but I’ll try to sound pitiful while explaining.  I hate writing descriptions and being clever and tagging and everything that goes into making a great Etsy store item. BUT It’s a new year and with that come New Year’s resolutions…So Resolution #1: Post items in my store.

Anniversaries Are Hard Work

Anniversaries are hard work…for the children. I say that because last night was my parent’s 30th anniversary. And while, yes of course, it took a lot of work for them to get to that point, it also took a lot of work to make their present.

Let me start off by saying I’m one of three girls and we don’t live close by to one another (we’re spread between Boston, Chicago, and DC). So trying to plan something together is a bit hard. Thank goodness for group GChat! We started off by trying to meet in DC, where my parents also live, to celebrate, but couldn’t get our schedules to work.

Then SURPRISE! My parents said let’s go to Hawaii. They had been there on their honeymoon and we all went on their 10th anniversary (see our luau gear below). Well I was definitely in for that.  “Hey everybody its time to start working out, I’m going to be in a bikini early this year!”

Hula Dancers

Hula Dancers

Oh wait…just kidding… My dad, it turns out, has a meeting there this Fall. So “Sorry girls, no trip to Hawaii for you.” Way to totally rip my heart out mom (I know you’re reading this!).

So anyway… we loved watching our home videos, but they were all on VHS and my parents were paranoid about converting them to a DVD or digital format. Worried they would forever lose their memories. (Ummm the problem with that is you were still missing out on them because you didn’t have a working VHS player!) So we hired my baby sister to be stealthy and secretly grab the tapes and ship them off to be converted (I had a coupon).

Hello preserved memories! And while 13 hours of shaky video footage is oh so exciting, we needed something more. Enter iMovie (my new boyfriend and a new “Favorite”). This is why I’m so glad to be a MAC. This program was amazing–I was able to slice the old (now digitized) footage with pictures and set it all to music.

I then made these cute DVD covers using my Silhouette Cameo:

DVD Holder

And of course you can’t forget that Anniversary card. I made this one using the Cameo sketch pen feature. I had the brilliant idea to re-create their cake. I had that idea before seeing a picture of their wedding cake. It took some time (and a little simplification), but here it is next to the real cake:

Cake Card

So parents, please remember… it’s hard for all of us.