Easy Gifts on a Budget III--Button Bouquets and Embroidery

Clara and her friend Josefina made these sweet button bouquets this morning (idea from this Kiddley article). The girls (both turned 3 this summer) were a lot more independent than I thought they'd be. They especially enjoyed choosing buttons--I had them each choose two from a dish of buttons, taking turns choosing in pairs until they were all gone to practice mental visualization of quantities greater than one. Then they put them in pairs of 1 larger and 1 smaller button, which they also had an easy time sorting and pairing. Josefina, in particular, was great with threading the buttons onto the wires--I just did the twisting of the wire in between button sets. Our wire was a little stiff (19 gauge, it's what we had)--if I were purchasing supplies I'd go a little lighter, but these worked okay.

And...how precious is this?I was embroidering and Clara wanted to, too. I have let her practice on muslin before, but today she wanted to "sew a picture" for her friend. If I'd known how serious she was about it I'd have gotten her a new piece of fabric and taken more than half a second for the design. She did have help with this, especially keeping track of which side to poke through on each time, but was great at poking the needle on the line and got fairly even stitches, I thought! I just used a disappearing fabric marker to draw the heart. It was nice on light-colored muslin because if you held it up to the light she could see the line on the wrong side, too, to know where to sew. She stitched it and then later I removed the pen with water (she probably would have enjoyed doing that step, actually). What darling pincushions, little bags, scented pillows, etc. these could make. Too bad the hoop isn't smaller, you could just back the whole thing with fabric or a decorative cardboard and hang it on the tree!

Looking for gifts you can make for kids? Try this link for a lot of ideas! And I love this simple advent idea from Maya Made.