Thursday, December 22, 2011

Gift Guide to Buying Local in Spokane

I do love supporting local businesses and I haven't done as many posts as I would like to about them.  If you need some last minute easy gift ideas here are afew.  I've listed my favorite little spots in Spokane.  I used to not love Spokane, I just had to dig a little deeper to find the good places!  This little post would also be a good little guide to fun places to check out if you are visiting.

For the food lover:  Get a gift card to a restaurant.  Here are my favorites:  South Perry Cafe, South Perry Pizza, Luna, Madelines, Chaps

For fun little gifts head to Atticus or Ferrante's, or for pretty paper flowers go to Anemone

For vintage lovers get a gift card to Pink or The Vintage Rabbit, those are my top two Antique places for Spokane.

For coffee lovers get a gift card to The Shop, or Rocket Bakery

For someone who loves clothes Fringe and Fray is the perfect spot.  This shop is so awesome!  They have great prices and they have a great eye.  They only carry really nice and cool things.

For Green people go to Sun People Dry Goods

For the sewer we have a lot of great places, there is The Quilting Bee, The Quilting Cottage, The Top Stitch, and Sew Easy.  I love all of these shops.

Our Decorations












 We hung a giant bulletin board in our entry way.  Come on upstairs.








Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Christmas Craftathon: The Projects


3 Block Ornaments:

Jewelry: (4 pairs of earrings, 8 bobby pins, and 4 hair clips)






 8 magnets and a cute tin to hold them:
 8 Gift Tags:



 10 large clothespins and 3 mini clothespins:
 Freezer Paper T-Shirt and 2 Tote Bags:
I wish I had more pictures.  Some people did a deer image, some did a doily, some did fishing lures up the sleeve and some people did a tent image.
Wood Tree:



3 Fabric Rosettes:
 Set of 6 Cloth Napkins:
 Paper Garland:

 Last weekend I hosted a Christmas Crafting extravaganza in our vacant downstairs unit.  Courtney helped throw it.  (I linked to her post on her amazing birthday party)  Courtney also does farm chicks and together we have enough stuff to throw together any pretty event!

We had a lot of fun coming up with crafty ideas.  I think we each brought 50 ideas and pared them down to 12.  12 is crazy, and maybe a little too many for one day, but it worked out well.  I wanted to use up my stash of stuff and get the most bang for our buck.  We did all of this for $25 a person.  I was proud that I came in pretty much right on budget with the supplies.  Thanks to many trips to hobby lobby with a 40% off coupon and all the stuff I already had.  I may do a little post on some little tips do doing crafts on a shoe string budget.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Christmas Craftathon

The night before the craftathon I was able to snap a few photos.  It looked so pretty and cozy at night.





 
The key to making all of these projects work was prep work!  I knew that I had to be VERY organized.  This is something that doesn't come very easily to me!  I spent nights getting ready.  (Of course the thing that took the most time was the cleaning.  This is our vacant apartment that we have been working on after we had to evict the tenants)  I made sure everyone had an individual space with all of their supplies sorted out and ready to go.  I spent an afternoon sorting jewelry, one afternoon cutting 64 napkins, one afternoon chatting with Court and punching out circles, one afternoon making jewelry, one afternoon making the tags, a couple all-night cleaning sessions, and a couple days of decorating.  Everyone totally saved us in the food department.  I ran out of time and didn't get a chance to precut the shapes for the freezer paper, this really slowed things down on Saturday.  One friend made soup, someone else brought coffee and cocoa, another girl brought soda and chips and salsa, and hummus and veggies.  Friends and family watched Luna.  Sam was sweet enough to babysit any kiddos upstairs who needed a little supervision.  He helped get the food together.  So everyone really came together to make this work!  I absolutely love doing this stuff.  It's so much fun for me.  I love using the stuff I have to craft with and all of my old junk to make it look pretty.    
 





 We made sure we had examples of all the crafts.  Of course we had to display them cutely!  And you can't craft without salty and sweet snacks (especially when you have pregnant crafters!)