I can finally reveal the final four presents that I sewed for my family for Christmas. These four were definitely sewn in 2017 but they still count as Handmade Christmas 2016, right?

My niece and nephew were both two this Christmas (or close to it) so I made them color books! I used my own tutorial, which I’m so glad I wrote because otherwise I’d have to be reinventing the wheel every time I make these! The last one I made was for Marko, over two years ago.

And because I know my mother likes to see the inside of these also, here are the inner pages. Finding all the different fabrics for these books is probably my favorite part of sewing them.

I figured I shouldn’t totally ignore Annika and Andrew’s families however, so for Chris and Katie (Annika’s parents), I sewed an owl from the Fancy Forest quilt pattern (same pattern that Rachel’s fireflies came from). For those of you who follow me on Instagram, here’s the front of that crazy bunch of orange seams!

I drafted the paper piecing pattern for that arrow myself.  It’s not perfect but it was fun!

had fun doing some irregularly-spaced diagonal quilting on this one!

For Jon and Leah (Andrew’s parents), I sewed them a Striped Star in blues and greens. I thought I knew the lesson that the less you use a color, the more you notice it but was still fairly surprised by how noticeable the tiny strips of green came out. I also had fun using the leftovers from Ellie’s Easter dress as the back ground.

inner green fabric also seen in Marko’s quilt and the blues seen in this table runner

As with the other pillows I made this Christmas, I closed them with an invisible zipper (using this tutorial) and backed them with soft, fuzzy flannel.

Here they are, all best buddies before the owl and Annika’s book headed to Alaska and the star and Andrew’s book headed for Belfast, Northern Ireland.

These four projects are also Finish-along finishes for first quarter, 2017!

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