Handmade Does Not Mean Cheap!

I had so much fun on Wednesday when Amber, Christen, and I talked about all the handmade gifts we’ve given and received over the years. While some people may think handmade is the cheap way out, most of us who do a lot of crafting know that handmade items are anything but cheap, as there is a lot of time and effort that goes into making a handmade gift, and often the supplies to make them are anything but cheap. Skill, too, is a consideration, since a person can’t just simply decide to take up crochet and then whip out an afghan in a couple of days. And since handmade gifts are often specifically tailored to the recipient, there is a lot of thought and planning that goes into each gift.

One such example is the t-shirt quilts I’ve made for members of my family. I’ve done two so far, and have a good start on a couple more that I’ve shelved for the time being. Each of these projects took months of my limited craft time to cut and stabilize the t-shirts before I could even lay them out into something that looked like a planned and cohesive design. Then I had to find and purchase suitable fabric to use for the sashing, binding, and backing. The hours of sewing the blocks (called piecing) made for hours and hours of mindless sewing in front of the TV. Then the quilts had to be quilted, which is the process of sewing through multiple layers of the pieced quilt top (the t-shirts), batting (the inner layer that provides weight and warmth), and the backing (usually a solid piece or large blocks of coordinating fabric). For my husband’s rock bands quilt, I paid a quilter to sew it on her long-arm quilting machine, which cost almost $200. I chose to quilt my son’s school quilt myself on my used Brother sewing machine that I bought at an estate sale for $25. Let’s just say, you get what you pay for – the professionally sewn quilt has a beautiful design in a contrasting color of thread and is elegantly detailed.  The quilt I did at home took untold hours of work, has a lot of mistakes, and is not nearly as detailed since I just used an organic, wavy lines technique. Once the quilting was done, I was able to cut strips of binding (yet another coordinating fabric) and sew it around the edge of the quilt first by machine to attach it to the quilt, then by hand to finish it off. 

Don’t get me wrong, I do not regret spending the time, money, and effort on these quilts. I love the way they turned out, and I have plans to make several more, but this is why I get hot under the collar when people insinuate that a handmade gift is either cheap, easy, or a cop-out. The people who say that are the people who spend their time browsing Target or Kohl's or Amazon until they find something that will work, and then complain about handmade gifts because they have no idea how much time, thought, and effort goes into each one. It’s also the exact reason why I will NEVER make a quilt for hire. I get asked all the time how much I would charge to make a t-shirt quilt, and the answer is, “No! You can’t afford it, but I will teach you how to do it for yourself.” I feel the same about my hand-crocheted afghans like the NASCAR-themed ones I made for my Dad and my husband, Mark.

Along those lines, if you are interested in crocheting some handmade goodies for Christmas, I have a few free patterns available on my crochet website Cindy’s Crochet Pages. I have several patterns for easy/beginner items like neckwarmers (scarves), trivets, and washcloths plus more challenging patterns for a few NASCAR and sports-themed logos, as well as tutorials on some of the techniques I used.

I’d like to hear from you. Have you ever made handmade items as gifts? Were they received well? Has anyone ever insinuated that your handmade gifts were cheap or a cop-out? Leave your comments below, or join us in a discussion on our MMC Chat Facebook group. And don’t forget to listen to this week’s podcast!

TikTok Made Me Do it

It’s 2022. I hear this phrase all the time: “TikTok made me do it.” As I made my annual work gift sacks this year, I thought about that over and over. Last week, I was randomly scrolling on TikTok and I ran across this video “Gingerbread Latte” pour-overs by OneSweetMama and thought those would be the perfect gift to give my coworkers this year. Boy, I was wrong.

On the podcast this week, we are talking about handmade Christmas gifts. Every year, I make gift sacks for my coworkers. I put a lot of thought into making them, catering to each coworker. Last year, I bought a bunch of mini Christmas mugs from the store and filled them with different things such as snacks, mini lotion, and hand sanitizer. This year, I thought I’d take a step up and make the latte pour-overs for everyone and pair them with my annual pumpkin spice cake cookies. 

We mentioned on the podcast that sometimes handmade gifts can be more inexpensive to make than buying something. Generally, baked goods are not too expensive to make. The most expensive part of the pumpkin spice cookies that I make is the Lily’s® less sugar pumpkin spice chips that I use. However, I didn’t take into account everything it took to make these TikTok latte pour-overs. 

For starters, I had to buy a gingerbread silicone mold. While at Michael’s™, I also bought Sweet Tooth Fairy® vanilla candy melts. The recipe also called for a gingerbread spice blend and recommended one to buy online. However, I decided it might be cheaper to make my own (it wasn’t). The recipe also called for cinnamon (which I had) and instant dark roast coffee. I had only ever worked with candy melts a handful of times and every time I had, I usually burned them. So, I was very careful to get the melts to the right consistency before adding the rest of my ingredients to them. Working with a rack of silicone molds was difficult and I ended up making a mess getting the mixture into them. 

Gingerbread Spice Mix

My molds were also too small for what my recipe needed. The recipe told me to let them sit and harden in the refrigerator for 10 minutes (I waited for 20) and because the molds were smaller, they were also deeper, so, my test gingerbread bomb fell apart. The second one, I let sit overnight and I tried it the next morning. Man, was it strong!

My takeaway: working with candy melts is hard but practice makes perfect. The latte pour-overs in the small gingerbread molds came out sugary and strong. Next time, I will get larger molds. However, the flavors were amazing. If you use the small molds, I suggest eight ounces of hot water instead of six. The process was not as time-consuming as I thought it would be; however, it is a bit costly if you make your gingerbread spice from scratch. If you are looking for something inexpensive to make for your coworkers, I do not recommend this. If you are looking for a gift to give someone who loves coffee, I recommend this.

Finished Product

I want to hear from our readers. What handmade gifts do you like to give for the holidays? Have you ever tried making latte bombs before? How did it go? Let’s continue the conversation below!

Recipes linked below:

Gingerbread Latte Pour-overs

Gingerbread Spice Mix

Please check out our Downloads For Our Readers page for a PDF of these recipes.

Secret Santa Stocking Stuffers

Hey, it’s Cindy again, and I’m here to wrap up our talk about holiday traditions. I think we’ve already established that I like Christmas...a lot. I love giving gifts, something I got from my Dad, who was always giving surprise gifts to my mom. I think he really loved the part of Santa --  those secret gifts stuffed into stockings and piled up under the tree to be discovered on Christmas morning. It’s one of the reasons he was still leaving things for my sister and me long after we were grown and had children of our own. 

One of the things I loved was that there was usually a Santa gift for my mom, too. It wasn’t necessarily something big, just a token of his affection stuffed in her stocking or stacked neatly where she’d be sure to find it. I carried on that tradition with my own family, filling their stockings every year, even after the kids were grown and there was no reason to be secretive about any of it. But one thing always bothered me -- I loved the giving, but I missed being surprised. 

A few years ago, at a board meeting with my Aggie Moms group (that’s a whole podcast of its own!), the president asked us to share a fun Christmas tradition. So as we went around the table, one of the other moms told us how her family had an unusual gift-giving routine. Someone in the family would pick a store and everyone in the family had to buy a gift from that store. The store changed every year, and sometimes it could be a real challenge because it might be a unique specialty store, or even a gas station!

This sounded like great fun, and wound up being the perfect solution to my stocking surprise dilemma. I told my family about my idea, and we all agreed to give it a try. For that first year, we agreed to Dollar Tree as our store, and the challenge was for everyone in the family to buy one gift for each person in the family (we didn’t have any kids then). There was no price limit because...well, it was Dollar Tree. On Christmas Eve, we all stuffed each other’s stockings before we went to bed, and then we sat around the breakfast table the next morning, exploring what we got. We had a lot of great laughs and wound up with some fun little goodies that we might never have bought for each other or ourselves. After that, it was a tradition.

Over the years, we’ve shopped at Always 99¢, Daiso, Five Below, Dollar Tree (again), and others. Sometimes it’s easy to find gifts, and sometimes it’s a real challenge, but it’s always fun, and everyone looks forward to both giving and receiving the fun little trinkets we find. Notably, it never fails that someone buys me something with a llama on it, and I always find something for one of the girls that has a mermaid. Now if only I can remember what store we picked for this year….