Gift Wrapping Idea for Christmas: Wrap Your Gifts in Giant Boxes!

Last year we had a very fun family Christmas.

My mum and I hatched a plan to make everyone's gifts a surprise: we put each present in a HUGE box.

My dad and my sister were very surprised to see such a giant pile of gifts by the tree!

Each parcel was an exciting mystery package: no guessing what it could be by the shape or the size. Was it going to be the book you asked for? A DVD? Those earrings you saw on Etsy? A chocolate orange?

Some large rolls of cute wrapping paper cost us just a few quid (we bought ours from Wilko), and we saved up boxes from online deliveries and got some appliance boxes down from the loft (the box for the printer, etc). You could also use shoe boxes, office storage boxes or even buy a pack of moving boxes. 

I scrunched up newspaper to fill each box, and nestled the gifts in the centre so they wouldn't rattle about and there would be the extra fun of hunting through the newspaper to find the present. I used the biggest box for the smallest present, of course! For added sneakiness, you could put ordinary household objects in the boxes as well to disguise their weight.

The trickiest part of the plan was wrapping all those big boxes in secret on Christmas Eve and sneaking them into the lounge that afternoon when no-one was looking but luckily I managed it.

Just a few boxes was all it took for an extra fun and memorable Christmas - I highly recommend trying it with your family! This might not be the best idea to try with young children who may be disappointed that a big box doesn't mean a big gift, but as we're all grown up we loved it.

I'm Making a Christmas Quilt!

Last autumn I bought some lovely festive fabric to make a quilt for my sister. She loves Christmas and all things cosy, so I thought a Christmas-themed quilt for her sofa would be a nice gift.

 

I washed the fabric, ironed it, cut it into squares, planned my layout and started sewing.

I'd initially intended to blog about the project as I went along but I decided that I'd rather keep it a secret to make it a special surprise... so I just posted a photo of all the leftover scraps instead (what a tease!)

Here are a couple of terrible photos of the planned layout:

It took a while to get a good balance of all the prints, but I got there in the end!

Hand stitching these squares together turned out to be the perfect project for me last winter. After lots of work deadlines, it was great to put my feet up and relax with some simple, repetetive stitching. I spent many happy hours sewing while watching cheesy made-for-TV Christmas movies - the perfect accompaniment to a festive sewing project.

Of course, hand stitching a quilt takes a lot of time and I (sadly) couldn't spend all my time sitting on the sofa sewing... so I pushed my deadline back to Christmas 2015. I neglected the project a bit for a few months, then picked it back up this summer. Here's how it was looking when I had about six rows totally stitched with six more still to add:

These are dreadful photos, but you can hopefully get a good idea of how the quilt is looking. I just have two more rows of squares to add now, then I can start the actual quilting.

But why am I blogging about this quilt if it's A) a secret and B) not yet finished?

Well, unfortunately it's not a secret any more! I totally forgot to put the quilt out of sight when my sister came to visit last week and while we were chatting in my office she said "oooh... what's that?" and picked it up and lo, the quilty cat was out of the proverbial bag. Oops.

Luckily she likes it! (Phew!) She might not have had the fun surprise of opening a big squishy mystery parcel on Christmas day, but now she can have it to look forward to and I've got a fixed deadline to make sure I get it finished for this Christmas.

Plus: one great thing about it no longer being a secret quilt? I can blog about it! Hurrah! Expect to see lots of quilty progress pics popping up over the coming weeks :)

Surprise Loveliness

Look at all the loveliness I got in the post this morning - a surprise parcel of treats from my crafty chum, Laura:

Perfect timing, as I have been feeling a bit ill and a bit "ugh" for days and definitely needed some cheering up. What a star!

You can find Laura's shop full of prettiness, LauraFallulah, HERE.

A Surprise Parcel

A lovely lady who won some felt in a giveaway on my blog sent me a surprise gift as a "thankyou" a few weeks ago... a pretty quilted bag, decorated with some of the felt she won:

The design was inspired by the pretty tape I use to seal all my parcels. There were many oohs over it when I  opened the parcel.

The bag is totally gorgeous and perfect for storing & carrying my "in progress" knitting.

 

 Such a lovely thing to get in the post!

Folksy Goodies (and a new assistant)

A couple of weeks ago, the British craft website Folksy (where I've had a shop for a few years now) got a snazzy new look.

I have to admit to having been a teeny bit stressed by the prospect of big changes at my busiest time of year, but I love the colourful new logo, the new shop layouts look great, and the new "one page" listing process has already proved to be a huge timesaver when running my shop.

While the revamp was happening, the maintenance page had a sudoku puzzle on it to "keep you entertained" while the site was down overnight. My mother is a total sudoku fiend, she is completely addicted to them and happily works her way through the most complicated ones she can find. I am under strict orders to save her any sudoku puzzles I find in newspapers, etc, so I printed off the Folksy sudoku and gave it to her, she filled it in during her morning coffee, and I then tweeted that she'd finished it.

Then this week, the lovely staff at Folksy (who has seen my tweet) sweetly sent her a little parcel of goodies to say congratulations for completing the puzzle!


They sent her a set of Folksy badges and a Folksy notebook, both from the new "Folksy Collection" which launched this week.

Needless to say, my mother was totally thrilled by her surprise parcel! She was quite blown away by the unexpected kindness of the gift, and is very much in love with the notebook...


... she also likes the badges but has decided that badges aren't quite her sort of thing, so she's kindly passed them along to me. Hurrah! :)


The badges also got some attention from this big bundle of fur, who came to "help" me take photos... perhaps I should make him my new studio assistant?

"Oooh, what are these? Are they for me?"


"You don't want to take photos of these boring things. Take my picture instead!"


"I'm ready for my close-up now..."