A Homemade Christmas – Sending Presents Home

Due to us being from different countries Mr. H and I have never had a Christmas, and never will, where we see both our families. Then last year and this year we have seen neither due to his schooling and our remote location. It is fine though as it was something we knew when we first started dating and seeing as this is our 6th Christmas together we are pretty used to it and like I said before have started some fun traditions for just the two of us.

One thing we have not been able to do though is send presents home, whichever home Sweden or the US, but this year I was determined to send at least something small. So I started thinking and planning way back in late September what would be good, low cost, and easy to ship. I also wanted the presents to be something that they could keep or use for awhile and I thought it would be fun to make them so they had more meaning seeing as they would be small.

While pondering all this I was working on embroidering a canvas bag I had bought in California and one day I was like this is totally what I should do! I then found a great site based in the UK that would ship to Sweden called The Clever Baggers and put in an order. They have great prices and got my order to me in less than a week which surprised me and was great as was worried about getting everything in the post in time.

I ordered some plain canvas bags with long handles as well as some plain canvas wine bags.

I decided to go with a classic style for the wine bags and did the recipient’s last name initial as well as a simple design.  I also did two others but sadly it seems I did not get pictures of them.

For the bags I wanted them to be a bit more fitting to the recipients personality.

This bag was for my best friend and her husband and I used a pattern from Colonial Patterns.

This bag was for my in-laws, I let Mr. H pick out the pattern from the supply I have and he chose this kitchen themed one also from Colonial Patterns.

For my grandparents I also wanted to do a bag but wanted it to be specific to their hobby of used book shopping or as they call it a book crawl. So I wrote out book crawl and made a transfer for it and then added a partial pattern of the coffee cup and cupcake as they tend to go for coffee when they are on their book crawls.

Lastly I took a piece of plain white fabric and did a white tail deer for my father. He can frame it and hang it in his garage with all his other hunting and fishing paraphernalia.

I loved working on these projects and they were so easy to pack up and ship was was great.

I wrapped up each family gift like this and put in a flat card I had stamped and wrote a little message on under the ribbon. Then put them in large manila envelopes I bought this summer in California.

What do you do for family member presents that are far away?