Handmade Holidays 2011: Gifts for Mom

I decided to hand make everything I'm giving my mom for Christmas this year. She and my stepdad are very into wine so I thought she might like some wine charms. I found a DIY tutorial here. They were soooo easy! I did find that that the glitter that was more flaky worked a tad better than just regular fine grain glitter. They both worked, but the fine glitter ended up getting bubbles in it. I was able to keep adding layers of glaze to fix it. But I definitely didn't have to worry about it with the flaky glitter.

I have never worked with Amazing Glaze before so I made a practice set for myself first. Here are my supplies: And what they looked like when I was finished:
I did add a couple extra layers of glaze compared to the directions in the tutorial. Here are the ones I made for my mom. They usually have couples over for dinner so I sort of made "his" and "hers" charms. My mom LOVES pink so I wanted to make pink ones, but thought I should maybe make some more masculine ones to go with them as well.
We were shopping in Mt. Vernon, Iowa this fall and visited the Ben & Flo's yarn shop. The shop owner is the sister of a good friend of my mom's. And I found this interesting self ruffling yarn from Knitting Fever. My mom has a great cream colored jacket and we thought this color yarn would look fantastic with it!
And the finished product:
Finally, to go with the wine theme again...I made a wine cork tree inspired from here. Funny thing is that I don't drink that much wine so I asked my mom and stepdad to save up the corks from their bottles for me so I could make this for her.
It took no time at all. I just hot glued it all together. I thought she might like this because she doesn't really decorate for Christmas anymore. They always come up to Minnesota to see us for Christmas. I thought this would be a small easy decoration she could take out to make their house just a little bit festive during the holidays.