Tag Archives: diy gifts

Hello, faithful readers!  How’s everyone’s Christmas shopping going?  I still have quite a bit left to do and not a whole lot of time to do it!  If you’re like me, I’m always looking for new easy and inexpensive ideas.  If holiday shopping and DIY gift-making is your plan this week, I’ve got a special treat for you today!

I’m sure many of you remember the DIY Beard Hat Pattern I shared earlier this year.  I made this beard hat for Daniel as a Christmas gift last year.  He loved it so much, I wanted to share it with all of you, since I know I had a hard time finding the perfect pattern.  I had no idea so many of you would love it too!

Knitting a beard hat for someone is a great DIY Christmas gift on its own, but if you know someone that wants to learn to knit, there’s an even better way to present this gift.  A knitting kit!

I had a very sweet and talented reader contact me with this great idea.  She’s a graphic designer from Spain, and she created a wonderful printed tutorial based on my beard hat pattern.  She originally created it for her sister-in-law to include in a knitting kit for her, but she generously wants to share it with all of you as well!

You can download the Beard Hat Pattern tutorial here, and then simply print out the guide on standard letter sized paper.  You’ll notice there are small black lines on each corner.  Those are just guide lines for cutting each side, as the graphic is smaller than the paper.

She also included this handy guide on how to fold the printed tutorial.

Here’s how I followed the guide:

1. With the blank side of the paper facing up, and the Knit Beard Pattern cover closest to me.  Fold the cover side up.  You will now have steps 7-16 facing up and upside down.  This is Step 2 on the graphic.
2. Fold over the right side of the tutorial, you will now have steps 3-6 facing up (upside down).  This is Step 3 on the graphic.  This is just to create a crease, so then you will unfold the right side of the tutorial.
3. I then flipped the tutorial over, so steps 1-6 were facing up.  Then following Step 4 on the graphic, I folded both the left side and right side of the tutorial to the crease I just made.  You will now see the Knit Beard Pattern cover and steps 7-10 facing up.
4. I then folded the right side of the tutorial back (steps 7-10).  You should now be left with a little accordion booklet, with the cover facing up at you.  You can flip through to make sure all the steps are in order.

Here’s the finished Beard Hat Pattern printed tutorial!  Super cute, right?

This is such a great idea to include with a knitting kit, and a really easy, fast and inexpensive DIY Christmas gift!

If you’re not sure what to include in a knitting kit, you could always buy a pre-made kit.  This is actually the one I got as a kid, and how I taught myself to knit.  I still use a lot of the tools that came with it!

Here are a few more options for those that like to comparative shop:  Red Heart Knitting Made Easy Kit and the Learn Knitting! Kit.

I want to say a BIG thank you to Laia for her awesome idea for a printed tutorial and knitting kit.  And especially for being so kind and sharing her wonderful tutorial.  Be sure to head over to her website and check out more of her work!

Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a fantastic New Year’s Eve, I’d love to hear how everyone celebrated!  Daniel and I procrastinated, so we ended up just going out for dinner and then watching New Year’s Eve specials while drinking champagne at home.  Even though it was pretty low key, it was one of my favorites thus far!  We realized we had never spent New Year’s in our home!  It was fun to experience something new, and it was also our first New Year’s Eve in Portland!

Now that the holidays are over, I can finally catch my breath and start blogging about everything we did.  If you read my post about holiday party ideas, you know that pretty much all inspiration came from Pinterest.  And now I want to share my results with you!

Let’s start with food, shall we?  You may remember that I wanted the food to act as the decorations, and I had quite a few examples of festive cheese platters.

You can see I chose to do a combination of all of the examples I found, and did a mixture of salami, cheese, and grapes.  I thought it was pretty cute, and a very quick and easy appetizer to whip up before a party.

Another Christmas-y food I wanted to replicate were these cookie cutter pizzas.  They were adorable, and were a big hit with my guests!  I will say they were a little difficult to work with because they were so small.  If you can find bigger cookie cutters, I think it would be a bit easier.

Because the pizzas were a little hard to make, they took a bit longer than we had planned.  Luckily, we had a backup plan and made one full sized pizza… in the shape of a candy cane!  Equally as delicious and adorable!

For dessert I made melted snowmen cookies, and they turned out beautifully!  You can find the gingerbread cookie recipe and what I changed on my previous blog post.  The only suggestion I made that I hadn’t tried out at the time was replacing white sugar with brown sugar.  I made that adjustment for the party, but I didn’t notice much of a difference in taste, so you can really use whichever you prefer.

I made a simple royal icing with powdered sugar and a little bit of milk.  I definitely recommend making sure the icing is on the thick side for optimum results.  You can see 3 of the cookies have better coverage, whereas the one in the back is a little see through.  Merely an artistic suggestion, as they were all tasty no matter how the icing looked!

Here are a few more pictures!

Before placing the marshmallows on the cookies, we microwaved them for a few seconds to give them a more melty look.  And we used colored gel icing from the baking section at the supermarket for their faces and bodies.  Pretty good for our first try, don’t you think?

If you stumbled on my holiday party ideas board on Pinterest, you may have seen a champagne drink that gained a lot of repins.  So many repins that there was no way I couldn’t try it out at our party!

A very simple drink that had so much wow factor!  I found green colored sugar at the grocery store, which I used to rim the champagne flutes.  I bought pomegranate seeds already deseeded to save on time, put those in the bottom of the glass, filled with champagne – boom, done!  They were seriously too pretty to drink (almost)!

I also made party favors for my guests, which sadly I forgot to hand out!  Word of advice:  keep party favors in a prominent place, and near the front door!  Then you won’t have to sheepishly hand them out after like I do.

Other than forgetting to give them out, I was very happy with my results.  Very easy and quick to do!  Because I could only find large candy canes, I used two marshmallows for each (most examples I saw only used one).  Then I just dipped them in melted chocolate and coated them in crushed peppermint candies.

I found these super cute snowmen bags at the Dollar Tree store, and put a hot chocolate stirring stick with a packet of hot chocolate in each bag.  A very nice gesture that doesn’t require a lot of time or expense!

I also made a white elephant gift, which I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  All I did was Sharpie instructions onto the mugs and baked it in the oven.  I had a hard time getting the Sharpie to come out as dark as the original, but perhaps my pen was just running out of ink.  It was also a little difficult to find dessert in a cup recipes that had good reviews, but I finally found these that seemed to be the best (leave me a comment if anyone wants the recipes!).

Tip:  Apparently people have a lot of trouble getting the Sharpie to actually stay on the mug after normal use and washing.  A few suggestions I found were to increase your oven temperature to 425 and bake for 30 minutes, do not preheat your oven first, and allow the mugs to cool completely in the oven after they’re done baking.  I rubbed the writing pretty hard afterwards, and it seemed like it was on there permanently!

Last but not least, I had shared a holiday decoration with you all and this is how it turned out!  I already had the wine glasses, we saved trimmings from our tree, and I bought the ornaments and candles from the Dollar Tree store.  For a very elegant looking decoration, it only cost $2 and was super easy to setup!

We also used it for our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations as well.

Here are a few pictures of our coffee table and main table displays!

Looking back on it now, I probably took on a little too much, especially since it was my first time hosting a party.  But despite a few moments of stress, everything turned out great!  We had blast and so did our guests, so I’d say our first holiday party was a success!