Christmas Shoebox Time!

Yay! It's that time of year again when I am allowed to be buying Christmas presents without it seeming too early as I need to buy things for my Christmas Shoeboxes!

I planned to do 2 boxes this year, but as usual got far too excited shopping and have ended up doing 4. Here are some of my favourite finds for the boxes:

Mini connect 4, a giant pencil sharpener and cats cradle!

49 Days Till Christmas...That Makes It Christmas Shoebox Time!

So after a few weeks of hunting for the perfect shoebox sized presents, and a little bit of knitting my boxes are finished and ready to drop off! Handily there is a drop off point in Westfield so it's just an excuse to visit and do some more of my non shoebox Christmas shopping while I'm there.

Here are the finished boxes, all festive looking. I can't wait to imagine the smiles these will hopefully bring someone on Christmas Day!

A Knitted Bobble Hat & Other Lovely Christmas Presents

It's the exciting time of year again for Christmas Shoeboxes and this year I've been even more excited than usual about doing them, and for 2 main reasons. The first is my discovery that the Operation Christmas Child website has knitting patterns what you can make to add to your boxes, and the second is my discovery of a fun shop called Tiger.

I was so pleased with my first hat I knitted from one of the patterns on their website that I just had to knit another one. A more girly coloured one, and with a bobble too! I love it!

Tiger is my other exciting new discovery - http://www.tigerstores.co.uk/ and I just can't believe how many cool things they have in their. I bought these awesome wild animal finger puppets for one of my girl shoeboxes, along with some skipping ropes, cats cradle, books, pens for my other boxes. 

So here are two of my almost finished boxes, I'm very excited to finish them all off and post them soon. 

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas....Jumpers!!

I don't know what's going on in the world at Christmas this year, but there are a lot more Christmas Jumpers making appearances. Maybe it's a new comfy weird craze, like onsies, or maybe its due to yesterday being the official Save The Children 'Wear a Christmas Jumper' day. Anyway, I've seen a massive amount more Christmas jumpers around this year, from the normal funny patterned almost ski style jumpers, to the amazing reindeer, Santa and penguin themed numbers.

We decided to celebrate the 'Wear a Christmas Jumper'  day at work yesterday, for the fun of wearing silly jumpers, but also to raise money for Save the Children. I was out Christmas shopping a few weeks ago with a friend  and she wanted to go into Primark. No I usually avoid Primark as it gets manic, and also I don't like looking like I'm wearing cheap clothes, but as it was a Monday, and so wasn't busy, I though 'why not?'. As soon as we got in we were bombarded with Christmas Jumpers. They were pretty cool, but nothing that made me feel really excited, and also I thought 'well everyone will be wearing them' and I HATE seeing someone else wearing the same clothes as me.

My boyfriend also has the same day at work (although on Christmas Eve bizarrely) and he wasn't too bothered about looking for one, so I thought I'd go downstairs in Primark and have a look at the Men's jumpers to see what was about. The children's section also happens to be downstairs and as soon as I came off the escalator I'd found the Christmas jumper I wanted!! Sadly they had already sold out of the bigger sizes (other adults I bet!) so I had to get a 9-10 (which actually didn't fit too badly) and I was so so so excited about what I was going to do to this jumper!!

Now above is the jumper so I bought it, which was pretty cool, but I immediately thought what can I do to it. Ideally, I would have wanted to make my own jumper, but having never actually knitted a while jumper before, there wasn't at all time to learn before the day, so whilst I was very happy with this purchase, I felt like it was a challenge to customise it as much as I could! So I started with bells for all the snowmen's scarves, so now I had a nice little jingle, and then went onto sequin stars for the tops of the Christmas trees.

Now the back sadly is just plain Navy, so of course that would never do! I painstakingly cut out the letters 'Merry Christmas' and hand stitched them onto the back. Much better. I also added some red pom pom tape around the next, just to finish it off. Again, much better.

Now the final touch was my exciting plan, which was that I wanted it to light up! I excitignly found some coloured LED battery powered lights which were perfect, and thereaded them through the knit in the jumper and voila! It was finished, and perfect. The reactions of most people when they saw me in work were 'Oh my goodness - did you make that???' Exactly the reaction I was going for and it made me very happy!!

(teamed of course with my Johnnie b tutu skirt!)

I'm now planning how many more occasions I can wear it on!! I've got at least 4 others planned which I am very very excited about!!