Thrifty Jewelry Christmas Gifts

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year.  It's a good long weekend full of family, fun, and good food without all the other stressors that come with so many other holidays.  I love it!  This year we ate with Bill's family and the next day we hung out with my family.

We have a tradition now for the past few years that the girls (actually, nephews have been known to be involved before, too, making stuff for girlfriends) have a big crafting day, either after the food is put away or the next after everyone wakes up from late night/early morning shopping.  My sister, Leslie, and I had been checking out blogs, scouring Pinterest for this year's fun idea.  We never really came up with one big idea, we all kind of did our own things.  So I'm sharing this with you today to give you some fairly quick, all pretty easy, and mostly pretty cheap gift ideas you can whip up for those on your Christmas shopping list.

At my mom's house in the middle of the crafting L to R: my daughter, Cheyenne; sister-in-law, Alana; sister, Kristen; niece, Ashtyn, Mom, nephew, Mitchell, applying to college; sister-in-law, Geri; sister, Leslie; and daughter, Natalie.  Not a great picture, with two big windows it's kind of hard to take good pictures here.

I'll share a little of what we were all working on.  My mom has made great headbands and hats for many of the girls and she was busy finishing flowers and attaching them and stuff.  (I'm giving a headband away when I hit 100!)

Leslie and Ashtyn made this really cute necklace.  Here is the tutorial from Little Miss Momma, she did such a good job with it, why redo a good thing. :)  Here's my tip for this one, just from watching Leslie, the actual assembly of the necklace was fairly quick, but she already had a bajillion circles cut out.  So put on a good show and start cutting first.

Geri, scored a great deal on her Black Friday shopping and got a whole bunch of Swarovski crystal beads and charms for $1 a box.  So she got busy making a bunch of bracelets.  She just strung them on stretchy chord, tied them off with a square knot, and put a little super glue on the knot to hold it tight.  I believe she also made a pair of earrings to match by gluing a charm to some posts she bought.

Kristen (with help from Alana the jewelry making expert!) was busy making a really cute interchangeable necklace.  Come back on Friday and I'll show you how to do it.

I was being very frustrated making a leather wrap bracelets like Want to Get Crafty's here.  My advice - DON'T use sinew for the thread, it's way too sticky, and when you're working with a piece that's around 10-12' (yes feet!) long, it's a pain in the butt!  Then after I finally got it all done, I didn't like it, so that's in the redo pile.  This one was not so quick, but that was mostly because I was trying to figure it out for the first time.  Once I got the idea of how to do it, it went pretty quickly, and if I used waxed thread instead of the sinew it would have been even faster.  I'll redo it and let you know.

  However, I also helped several of my family make this bead necklace.  Again, come back on Friday and I'll show you what I did. (Part 2 here.) 

I hope this gives you some fun ideas for Christmas gifts.  It really is fun and so satisfying to say, "Yah, I made that!"  What is on your Christmas crafting list?

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