This year, my family did something we’ve never done before, we did a handmade + books Christmas. Late in the game, we added thrifted as an option, but no one really had time to go thrifting. Some of the books were second hand, for assorted reasons, such as the desired book being from 1983 and only used copies were available.

We defined handmade broadly, to include everyone’s skills. Handmade could mean traditionally handcrafted, and also 3D printed, laser cut, custom programmed, or a poem or song written. Gifts of service were also welcomed.

I made soup cozies and tote bags! Most tote bags had a book in them. I customized one tote bag with slightly longer straps, for a tall family member.

Soup bowl cozies made by Elaine Luther, December 2025.

What did we receive? Among other things, snowballs! Today, the day after Christmas in Chicagoland, it’s over 50 degrees! Which is super weird, but yesterday, we unwrapped two snowballs! Hey, they’re handmade, so they qualify! Hilarious, and we appreciated the effort and creativity of thinking ahead, storing them, and then finding a way to wrap and deliver them, unmelted!

Our gift of handmade snowballs!

How did it go? Highly recommended! We did this because no one needed anything this year. But you always need a book. It was a challenge to think of useful handmade things to make and wonderful to spend the time making custom gifts for each other. Various family members did custom 3D printed creations, hand painted or drawn items, a personal history book, and more. We’ve long emphasized spending the day together and doing fun things over gifts, but this amped up the chill factor even more. Highly recommended, and we’ll probably do this again, not withstanding the one person who wants to eliminate gifts altogether. Hopefully, they enjoyed the books and handmade and will let go of the no-gifts concept.

Oh, and we also gave and received homemade baked goods!  And dairy free ice cream!  And jam!

Also in December, I made a new curtain for the kitchen window, here it is!

My new kitchen curtain! Made with my own fabric, printed at Spoonflower.

The impetus for this new curtain was that I made a waterproof curtain for my corner cabinet that’s next to the dishwasher, that custom fabric is from a different printing company (Spoonflower doesn’t have waterproof fabric). It needed a coordinating fabric in the room for it to make sense. Here’s that curtain, in progress:

Custom fabric shown on the sewing machine.

The recipe cards in this fabric are scanned from real recipe cards, hand typed in the 50s and 60s, that I own. Fabric design done with technical help from Becka Rahn. You can see the fabric in my Spoonflower shop.

And in a true Christmas miracle, I almost completely cleared off my studio table:

An almost completely clear studio table!

And look what I found while I was cleaning:

Things you find when you clean… These are perfect for measuring when making the darts for a soup bowl cozy.

If you’re feeling end-of-year-ish already, I wrote my art-life year in review in late November, it’s here.

P.S. I made a little instruction/info. tag for the soup bowl cozy:

I don’t have a tutorial to link to for how to make these, but comment if you want to know more. This is how we make them at work, where I teach sewing.

The tote bags I made are from the Purl Soho Easy/Easier/Easiest Tote Bag tutorial. I’ve taught dozens of people to make that bag – it has French seams, a total beginner can learn to sew and make that bag in 2-3 hours, and they’re always so proud of their work and begin to use the bag immediately. I have all the measurements for this memorized, so it goes even more quickly for me.

I cut out one for myself out of a favorite vintage fabric. It will be lined and have a pocket. Now that Christmas is over, I’ll finish it.