I love Christmas. I love the decorations, the smell, the food, the presents, and everything about Christmas. My favorite part about Christmas is giving gifts to my friends and family. I just really love being able to give something back to the people I love. Every Christmas all of my brothers and sisters, their spouses, their kids, and my parents get together for festivities and to exchange presents. Our only problem is that 
we have never “graduated” to drawing names for gifts. Every year we talk about it and every year we conclude that we simply enjoy giving gifts to everyone too much! I am the youngest of four and all my brothers and sisters have kids of their own, so we have a lot of gifts to find.
My husband and I have always been on a fairly tight budget for Christmas. With so many presents to buy, we long ago decided to make our gifts each year and my Pazzles Creative Cutter has been a huge help! Last year we bought some long wooden plaques at the craft store, wooden clothes pins, wood glue, picture hangers and Pazzles vinyl. We then glued the clothes pins to the bottom of the wooden plaque and cut out my nieces’ and nephews’ names in vinyl and attached them to the plaques. We then put the picture hangers on the back of the plaques. After that we hung them on the wall and my nieces and nephews could hang their artwork on the clothes pins for all to see. So much better than a refrigerator! There are so many things you can make with your Creative Cutter for Christmas between using vinyl, iron on, or stencil material. I can’t divulge what we are making this year (that is still a secret!) but I believe it will involve personalized stencils made with stencil plastic and some paint.
What about you? Do you have any plans to use your Creative Cutter this Christmas to help you stay on budget?
I have to agree and even if you are fortunate enough, not to have a budget a handmade gift is so much nicer. My husband and I are going to make name plaques for our family using last name’s and meanings or a short one liner to hang over their door inside or out. Now to just inform the husband of this. Hee Hee.
I like both of these ideas. Years ago, when I was in college and dog poor, I used to cross stitch the recipient’s name and all of its meanings per different languages….and they loved that. People like to learn about themselves and their heritage…both of these are good ideas.
I however…for this year…am going to make journals for the grand kids that will include pocket pages, pages with pockets for secret trinkets, and pop-ups with their individual interests. We will see…..that is my intent. Time will tell if I can get them done…otherwise…this gift will spill over to their birthdays.
I love these ideas. I have a few ideas for handmade gifts using my Pazzles, I just have to not be afraid of wrecking anything! Dana
Thanks for the great idea Amanda. I have to really do more with vinyl!!!
Great idea…I may just have to do this for the grandkids…I’m doing some more of the glass bricks that I shared last week and a few little small things..I love my Pazzles.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the iron-on material. My sister’s birthday was a couple weeks ago, and she was in town for Thanksgiving last week. My brother wanted to do a custom hoodie for her gift. I told him we could do it with the iron-on material, and so off we went. We found a plain hoodie at Target and used the glitter and flocked iron-on to customize it. Her daughter stopped by and helped me design it, and suggested adding her name to the front. She loved it!
I had so much fun with it that I made a shirt for myself last weekend with the flocked iron-on, and have plans to do a couple more. It is SO cool to see fun shirts in different stores or at cafepress and know you can make them yourself, customized your own way, for so much less!