Inexpensive Homemade Christmas Gifts

Today at Tater Tots and Jello everyone is sharing their homemade Christmas gifts.


I don't have any gifts completed for 2010 to share with you, but thought I'd share some photos of a few very special Christmas gifts we made for a couple of our children when they were small.

We lived on a very small budget the years my husband was in seminary full time. I found a bag of fabric remnants at a garage sale for $1 - perfect for our Christmas gifts budget. The lady I worked for at the time was a seamstress for bridal wear. She gave me fabric that I used to sew look a like dresses for our myself, daughter and her doll.

Our children came down with chickenpox a few weeks before and during the Christmas holidays. This meant we were house bound, creating time for me to sew the doll clothes.

I wish I'd taken photos of all the doll clothes I sewed, but here are a few photos where you can see the clothes strewn about as she opened them.

We were also creative/thrifty with our Christmas decor... see our tree ($3 garage sale tree) decor in the above photo.
We used packing "peanuts" strung together with fishing line to create garland.

Don't fear! Our son didn't go without gifts that year. My husband is very creative, and made a Harvester Silo for him complete with a chute for the corn to slide down into a wagon. Gluing three large coffee cans together adding a plastic tube for the corn slide to the chute. (Shelled corn was placed inside the silo). He painted it and added Harvester and a flag on the outside.
He then went on to build a large red barn made out of scrap wood.

Here's our son happily displaying his silo and barn gift.
(See all his Dad's study books behind him.)