VickyC.me

First post of 2012! I just want to start by wishing all of you lovely people a fabulous New Year!

I decided to do Christmas on the cheap this year. Well, no. It wasn’t strictly by choice, it was partly out of necessity. There wasn’t really much time for Christmas shopping. And let’s be honest, braving the crowds during the holiday season is really unenjoyable!

In fact, in Christmases past, my shopping trips would usually end up with me perched on a bar stool, surrounded by shopping bags and feeling absolutely exhausted!

So this year, I decided to make my own gifts! my step sister’s both expressed their love of the crochet sock monkeys, so I made one for each of them in beige and green. I also made them a magnet each.

I love how the white stitches pop against the dark felt. These magnets are so much fun to make and look absolutely perfect!

For the men in the family, I decided to go with a fermented liquid present. My step brother-in-laws both got wine and my step dad got a bottle of cognac.

At around 9 pm on Christmas eve, I decided that it would be a great idea for me to crochet my own wine bags for the bottles. Yes, this certainly was a great idea.. But it left me with very little time in which to design and to make the things!!!

After much making and undoing, I had successfully made up my very own wine bag pattern

Because the bottles were different shapes and sizes, it was important that the bags have some “give” to them, as I wanted to make a bag that would fit all three bottles. This was especially true for the cognac bottle as it was quite wide around the middle. Making these bags on Christmas eve did not leave much time for coming up with unique patterns for each bottle (unfortunately!!!).

I ended up going with a granny square type of stitch, which has a very generous stretch to it.

The gaps between the stitches were perfect for threading a ribbon through.

While wine is a good gift – especially at the holiday season, being able to give it in a handmade bag makes it a little more unique I was really happy with how they turned out and I can’t wait to make more of these cute bags I’d love to do some with an applique on them.

 

Tags: Christmas, Craft, Crochet, Handmade

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Craft, Crochet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.