I've been a busy bee

Advent Swap

This is one of the reasons I haven’t been keeping the blog up to date. Not the only reason by any means as you will see, but one of them. Recovering from pneumonia was another reason, but mainly I have been putting most of my time and energy into doing the Town Square shops to finish accessorising them and doing the Advent Swap.

Before the sudden and unexpected demise of SaHMC, one of the online groups I belonged to (it has spawned two groups in its place), we had organised an Advent Swap and most of us decided to go ahead with it. So I have been making gifts for this. If you don’t know what an Advent swap is, it is like an Advent Calendar only with gifts for each day. The idea is to wrap up 24 small mini gifts. These can be any scale decided on by you and your swap partner. They can be Christmas items if you want but mainly the sort of things you’d give as Christmas gifts – only mini versions.
 The 25th and final gift, for Christmas day, is a bigger one, in value at least. You post the whole lot to your partner in time for the first one to be opened on 1st December.
 This was great fun to do though I did underestimate the time it would take to do each day’s gift. Each parcel is labelled with a number – the date on which it is to be opened.

Doing these things was not only fun but it was interesting to find things that would be suitable and that I was able to make. Several things I had in mind had to be discarded because of time constraints and other quicker items substituted, or items for which I had the materials, or which worked out more successfully. Being a fully paid-up member of Perfectionists Anonymous of course it took several tries for some of them and I’m not totally satisfied even now. However I very rarely am.


Would you like to see them? I wish I could have a little window to click on to open but I don't so here they are:

What's that?   Well, yes of course they are all wrapped up! I couldn’t show you the gifts all nekkid and unwrapped, could I? Can’t spoil the surprise for Jane lol!


I hadn’t quite finished when I took that photo. But you can see that being me, I also spent a lot of time on the wrapping. I printed out Christmas bags and boxes in different sizes, each gift was wrapped in gold tissue, put into its box or bag of appropriate size and numbered. Then I went crazy with gold gift tie, on most of them at least. I just love curly ribbon!


Then the next step – what to put them in? I had a posting box but didn’t want to just put them straight into that. So I made a box to go inside, covered it with gold giftwrap. The little gifts fitted perfectly in two layers.


I didn’t want all those loops and curls to get too crushed so I made a removable tray with legs the appropriate height to keep the layers apart. A lid over the top and it all fitted snugly into the postage box. Who, me – obsessive? Whatever would make you think that vbg? I just hope that Jane gets as much enjoyment from the gifts as I did in making them.