The Gifts We Made

This pink dorset button sunflower became a piece of jewelry when I added some felt and a pin back to it.  I also gifted one of the yellow sunflowers I had made back in the spring after also adding a pin back to that one.

The smaller pink flower that I had experimented with was too small for the smallest pin back that I could find so I made it into an ornament.

This next group was a little last minute idea I gave to HWNSNBP.  I had seen this on one of the FB pages that I follow - Do It On A Dime.  The woman/hostess on that site was giving some easy homemade gift ideas and this charcuterie board, or "chatacoocherie" as he pronounced it, was indeed easy.  I showed him the video and asked him if he had seen the wooden disks at Home Depot and he said yes and the hunt was on.  He went alone first and had to get someone to help him get to them as they were on a shelf out of reach.  He told the woman who came to help him that she could just leave the rolling ladder with him and he would get it but she said customers weren't allowed up there.  So she climbed up and handed him one.......which, after his initial inspection, he didn't like. And he didn't like the next one, or the next one, and I don't know how many he went through but I'm pretty sure that she was regretting not letting him do it himself by the time he was done.  

We decided that he needed to make two more of them and that I should go with him to a different HD to help with the inspection process and to pick out the handles.  Luckily, at the second store the disks were easily accessible, but we did go through the entire lot of them to pick out the two best.  (Note: this doesn't mean that the others were unusable, he was looking for clean edges, no deep gouges, and no loose knots so there would be less prep work given the time frame.)  He sanded them down and then sealed with food safe mineral oil.  He also insisted that they should be put on a lazy susan apparatus, which the hostess had said was optional.  I helped him figure out how to find the center and to line up the handles and he did all the rest.  There are ways to make food safe stains for the wood but that would have taken more time than we had and he liked the look of this wood finish.  I know our SIL has used his already in his "man cave" and likes it.

This next creation was a gift from HWNSNBP to me.  He wanted to make something with swans as that is the theme of our bedroom at the condo.  We used to see a small bevy of swans on the water behind us but they've become scarce.  We're not sure why.  He found the pattern he liked and cut them out of wood with one of his saws and created this shadowbox to put them in.  The only help he had, which he got from our DIL, was choosing the colors for the water and the background. 

He used a paint pen to put their faces on and there is a personal note on the back where he signed it.

I was totally surprised with the finished product though I was aware that he was working on something that banned me from the workshop.  We'll be hanging this up when we open up the condo in the spring.