Christmas Gifts

I wanted to post about the gifts I was making for my nieces for Christmas, but I didn't want to ruin the surprise. So even though everyone is over Christmas (I was so sad putting my tree away yesterday!) I am posting about them now. In my family we rotate which family we give gifts to each year, and this year I got to give to my sister, her husband, and their two cute little girls, Jane and Lucy.

I decided to make Jane a personalized matching game. After a few trips to Roberts, a little saw action from Seth, some Cricut crafting from me, and about four layers of Mod Podge this was born:

These matches are my favorite:

And for Lucy I decided to make some magnetic letters for her to play with. They are nice and soft and have a lot of colors, so I hope she will find many games to play with them. Until she knows her letters a little better she can match the letters that have the same pattern, or find all of the ones with pink on them, etc. And even if she doesn't want to play with them yet I made sure that the letters LUCY and JANE look really good together so they can go up on the fridge or a magnet board and look fabulous. You can't really tell but the letters are about four inches tall.



And I did make the drawstring bags for them. Super, super easy. I didn't make the flowers for their hair that I clipped on their bags...but I do admit that I bought a turquoise one for Charlie and have worn it a couple times myself.

And even though we didn't have my niece Addison for Christmas I had to make her some letters for her name. Right now she is doing the funniest thing, when you ask her to sound out her name she says "Pa-Pa-Pa-Addison." I guess she just likes the sound of the letter P! And when I was little I thought it was so weird that sometimes I would be called Tricia and sometimes PAtricia I started calling my family "PaMommy" and "PaDaddy" and "PaJared" and "PaTiffany". Addison and I are on the same wavelength! So I thought that Addison needed a P with her name.

And, no, I didn't make anything for Charlie this year...but I have big plans for her birthday. I have six months to make it happen!

And I got the idea for the matching game here.

And the idea for the soft letters here.