Christmas Gifts - Up-cyling

Whoops I'll try to update this more often...

Every year one side of Will's family does a gift exchange (too many cousins to give gifts to all of them) and it always has a theme, this year's theme was "Up-cycle".  Well most of the projects I do aren't up-cycle - even though yes I do turn yarn into fashion accessories and ribbon into wreaths, that didn't really count - Will's projects are.  We had two names, Victoria and Aunt Shellie, to make gifts for but he had the perfect ideas. Here are the two projects/gifts:

Twine wrapped bottles

Victoria is a Sophomore at The College of William & Mary. Will took a standard Champagne bottle and wrapped it in green landscaping twine, and then stenciled on the W&M athletic name "Tribe". And then he took two small Champagne bottles, wrapped them in Jute twine, and then stenciled on her graduation year "16".



 

"I was wandering through Lowe's one day and found their dark green jute landscaping twine"
"Contact paper is my favorite stencil material for these projects; it's easy to cut with an craft knife and form fits the curved surface really well. It's also really easy to put through our Cricut for simpler projects, like our flower-stenciled bottles." - Will

 "When Tori unwrapped her bottles, she wasn't sure if she was getting a 16 for her graduation year or the "1693" for the founding of the school."
"By the way, these are 187mL champagne bottles from Barefoot. I wanted to make sure that they matched the shape of the larger bottle, and Julie likes bubbly pink wine." - Will.
It's true I do love bubbly pink wine!

String Art
Will made the first last name string art for our friend's wedding last year and he had been wanting to make another. This time instead of picking a random script font in Pages, he conspired with his cousin's to get Aunt Shellie's handwriting - specifically "The Gums" in her handwriting.  This turned out to be quiet the adventure (too long to type here).

"There are just over 300 nails in this string art.
They have to be closer together than some of my other ones to keep the curves of the letters recognizable." - Will

I'll share more pictures and behind the scenes commentary on other handmade Christmas gifts we gave this year in another post!

Thanks for stopping by,
Julie