Now that Christmas is officially done and dusted, I can finally share some of the secret craft projects I’ve been working on. I had quite a few crochet gifts on my list this year. Some of these inevitably got pushed into 2024 as, like always, I ran out of time. It worked out for the best though, as I ended up making a smaller selection of really personalised gifts that were worth the extra time it took to make them.
I know what you’re going to say about this first gift: that it belongs with Halloween, not Christmas. But this project has a bit of a story behind it. A couple of months ago, my mother-in-law gave me the great gift of a bag filled with glow in the dark yarn. Her only request was that I made her a creepy crawly with it, and I decided to get this ready in time for Christmas. I opted for a spider, a simple design that I could add my own details to. For the main body, I used the chunky chenille yarn in a glowing green shade. I used this pattern for inspiration for the body: I didn’t end up following the whole pattern as the project was quite big early on, and the yarn wasn’t the best to work with for amigurumi. I did try to do amigurumi legs but it took me forever to do one; it would’ve taken me another week to do 8 of them!
Click here to see the free crochet pattern I used.
Once I realised I wouldn’t be able to crochet the legs, I went back to the drawing board. I wanted to incorporate the glowing yarn somehow and jazz the design up a bit. In the end, I decided to use green pipe cleaners in 3 different shades and wrap a strand of yarn around each one. It was quite a fiddly process as I had to glue each end, make sure the yarn was secure, and then stuff them into the body of the spider. The legs ended up looking a bit like candy canes, which helped make this gift a tad more christmassy. For the eyes, I used a combination of glow in the dark double knit and crochet cotton. I wanted to give the eyes a bit of extra detail to make them stand out more in the dark, so I did a white crochet cotton border around the white circle to emphasise the outline.
The next handmade gift is one that I’m really happy with. My brother-in-law drives a Jeep and I found a crochet pattern for a Jeep motif that I thought I could turn into a keyring. Even though it’s a fairly small project, it did take me quite a while to do all the colour changes, get the ends sewn in, and stitch the different pieces together. It was also one of those projects that didn’t come together until the very last second, so the whole time I was worried he wouldn't know what it was meant to be. But, after it was all stitched up, I sprayed it with water and flattened it between a stack of heavy books; after this, it magically turned into a Jeep!
I did add a couple of extra details to this pattern. The original made the body of the car in a bright colour, but I wanted to use black to make it the same colour as his own car. This meant that the tires didn’t stand out much from the body, and it made the overall shape a bit harder to recognise. To remedy this, I added half a border in grey to the tires to look like mudguards. This broke up the black pieces and added extra detail.
Check out the original free crochet pattern by clicking here!
The final project on this list is one that I’ve mentioned before. A few months ago, while writing our Cottagecore edition, I had the idea to make a farmer’s market jam jar. I finally got around to finishing this just before Christmas, and was able to turn it into a scented decoration like I originally planned. As well as using toy stuffing, I found some mini scented pine cones that smelled just like Christmas, and added a couple of cinnamon sticks.
That’s it for Christmas presents, but I also wanted to show you the wreath I put together using some of the handmade decorations from our Christmas Craft Along series!