Well my punishment for getting a speeding ticket a few months ago finally arrived the other day. If I want to do traffic school (and save the point on my record and resulting insurance hike) I must pay $271 by December 17th. The good news: I have some time to save up for the payment. The bad news: My options for holiday gift-giving are severely limited. I’ve already decided not to participate in the Secret Santa thing at work. And I’m pretty sure my friends have stopped expecting anything from me gift-wise at holiday time. But this still leaves my immediate family and a few special buddies that I just can’t remove from my “Nice” list this year. So I’ve been wondering what to do and have come up with a few ideas so far:
#1 I am going to raid my Etsy shop. There’s only 4 items left in it, but they’ve just been sitting there so… <shrug>. I hate to give slow-movers as gifts though, so I am not sure this will work unless one of the items just happens to start screaming the name of someone on my list.
#2 Shirt.woot.com. The T-shirt of the day is only $10 with free shipping, so I’ve been visiting the site 
daily to see if the daily shirt screams anyone’s name. So far there has been only one t-shirt that screams anyone’s name and that name was MINE. So I bought it. I figure I’ll need something new-looking to wear on X-mas so the shirt I bought will have to be it.
#3 I am going to raid my succulent garden. The cool thing about succulent plants is how easy they are to propagate. I have lots of unused small pots in good condition. I will take clippings from my plants and pot them soon so that by the time I give the potted plants as gifts, the clippings will be somewhat established.
#4 cute erasers like these and other small items from the local Cute Stuff store at the Asian mall in El Cerrito.
#5 I am diving into a concept I will call Handmade Holiday on the Cheap. I got the Handmade Holiday idea from the SewMamaSew blog. The “on the Cheap” part is my own personal touch. Due to the circumstances of course. I have some ideas for things I can make that I have listed below. But I’m quite sure these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg.
- Reusable shopping totes from stash fabric and fast2fuse
- notecards from cardstock and rub-ons
- small pieces of art made from small cheap canvases, paints, and rub-ons
- finished and painted wooden birdhouses in bright sunny colors
- the fabric animal figures on the cover of this book by Mary Link
- calendars made from images of cute animals, or weird internet things (such as stolen from the People of Walmart blog) printed out on my inkjet and combined with nice cardstock
- t-shirts (bought plain then made interesting by me with fabric paints, stencils, printable fabric sheets, fast2fuse, etc)
- framed fabric wall art
- Small decorative IKEA mirrors embellished with Hambly rub-ons
- aprons – they don’t take much fabric and I could piece together fabrics if necessary
- dog clothes – for Bama and my friends’ dogs. Simple wrap-around blankets have simple patterns and velcro closures
- decorative light garlands, possibly somewhat like this
- pillow covers
- Floorquilts! from Ellen Highsmith Silver’s book
- placemats and matching napkins, table runners, and/or table cloths
- glass ornaments from microscope slides
- laptop cozies
- reusable sandwich wraps and snack bags from cotton fabric and vinyl
That’s all I can think of right now. Let me know if you have any ideas to share!