It was fun and all, but quite a bit more stress than I wanted to deal with. Normally I don't get so stressed about Christmas presents and such, but this year I got this wild hair and decided that I was going to make all of my gifts instead of just buying them.

I don't recommend it!

Not that it turned out too badly, but I didn't enjoy the restriction I put on myself to have everything be homemade. (Except for the men in my life: Dane, my dad, and f-i-l all got purchased gifts, because men are hard to make for!)

Basically, it just meant that I had way more on my plate than anticipated, and that made other creative areas suffer, like this blog. I had intended on doing a write up of my gifts before Christmas, but I never had the time to! I didn't even get any good photos taken.

So instead, here's a list of links to some of the gifts I made, and a couple bad phone photos to go along!

• For my sisters I made some yummy little solid perfumes using this tutorial from A Beautiful Mess. I loved how they turned out, but working for an hour with strong essential oils (and then spilling some on myself) meant that I got tired of the smell pretty quickly!
• One of my sisters and all of my nieces got these adorable little sock owls! They were probably the most work of all my gifts, but they were still my favorite. I also made my honorary nephew a sock monkey from the same website!
• My actual nephew is at that difficult age in between child and teenager, and that makes gift buying so hard! I saw this travel sign on pinterest, and made my own version using cardboard letters from Joanne's and a vintage looking map from target. It worked pretty well, and it goes with the globe he got a couple months ago for his birthday. 
• Then I made a coffee sugar scrub, based on this recipe for my mom, m-i-l, and s-i-l. I just left out the orange essential oils, and used a combination of grape seed and coconut oils. 

And the only photos I took were of the little sock critters, so please excuse the bad lighting. They weren't intended for this use, haha!

With all of my gifts, trying to create new content for my shop and blog, and going out of town twice
for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, it seemed like everything suffered, and nothing got enough attention from me. 

I think next year I'll just buy everything in one shot on black Friday and be done with it ;)

How did your holiday season go? Did everything go smoothly, or did you have to sleep for a week after just to bounce back, like me? 

Also, it's Friday! Woop! 

Have a great weekend everyone!