Crafts abound

As mentioned previously, my older sisters birthday was this past Tuesday. I actually kind of surprised myself and had planned her gift weeks in advance and completed portions of it. Who am I?

The first gift was an idea via Make it and Love it, which after my blog gush, my sister devoured and sent me a 'suggestion' for a July goal. It was Ashley's water bottle sling. I didn't think anything of it because I personally had no use for one, but my sister's a teacher, coach and overall pretty active person, so I can see how it could come in handy. So I tried once on the leftover fabric from the drapes that never were, and it was actually pretty straight forward (once you had the tension right). Once I was confident that was correct, I tried it on some cute upholstery fabric I picked up. In the end, I was able to sew a (mostly) straight line and there's only a few spots where the tension was messed up.

Here's (an awful photo of) the finished product:
Next, since my sister and her husband were returning from a year living in St Maarten, I wanted to get them something that could remind them of their time there. I brainstormed but couldn't think of anything appropriate that wouldn't be better if they chose it themselves. Then I came across another blog where they were raving about Wordle. I went and played around with ideas, searched through my sisters facebook page for names of places they went/loved/etc and tried to remember amidst the drunken stuper of our visit some strong memories.

Then I had to decide on colours. I thought beachy would make sense, but you needed a bit of a dark colour in there too, and their wedding colours were brown & turquise, so I went with that. Unfortunately wordle doesn't have any colour schemes like that, so I had to find codes for web colours. I found a pretty wicked one, Colour Codes that made it easy-peasy.

Here's the finished product:
I think it's pretty cool to have such personalized art, and I'm deciding what themes to make for our own place.

Third, of course, was a card I had to make in accordance with my monthly goals. Admittedly, it's a little juvenile and she's an ancient 31 years old (:P just teasing), but cute none the less:

And the finished gift (unwrapped of course):

Which she genuinely seemed to like (although her husband made fun of her having a water bottle sling-whatever she asked for it!).

I never set out to be so budget conscious on her gift, but these were 2 things that I knew she'd like and took an awful lot more thought and effort than a La Senza gc or a random last minute purchase. Sometimes homemade doesn't have to scream homemade or cheap, so I think I may put a bit more thought into other gifts as well-it was kinda fun.

Have a great weekend!