Handmade Christmas II

Sometimes coming up with a handmade gift idea for my husband is hard. For our very first Christmas I made him this vest. He loves this vest and it might be time to make another. Finding good wool takes some pre-planning though!




One year, after I had spent all my spare time making dolls for the girls, on Christmas Eve I put together this little organizer for over his carpentry bench.






We moved to our new house just last year. All fall I researched the history of our land and put together this book for him.










I found old maps and linked photographs of our neighborhood to the homes on the map. I discovered stories of the land being sold during the Great Depression when many farms in Vermont were abandoned and stories of the boys who farmed our land going off to the Civil War.

Eventually, using parts of this map, I traced the ownership of our land back to some of the first families who came up the river by canoe from Connecticut to settle. It was a very fun project and we look at our land so differently now--there are shadows on our land. We have an inkling of who tapped the maples and laid the stonewalls, and it is making us want to be even better stewards of this place.

While I began by saying that sometimes it is hard to come up with handmade gifts for my dear husband, I actually have a little list for this year. Time to get cracking!