A Homemade Christmas Present

Last week, I decided to make a Christmas gift for a friend’s daughter.  The little girl is about the same age as our son, and we get the two of them together every month or so.  They’ve evolved from looking at each other, to poking each other in the eye, to running around the playground and taking turns on the slides. 

I wanted to make her some wooden blocks, and a bag to put them in.  The project ideas came to me while I was out on a walk with the dog, and the whole thing was very simple.  For the bag, I used fabric from a huge mu-mu that I wore to a costume party (and got at a thrift store).  As an outfit, it was pretty horrible, but as fabric for a little girl’s bag, it’s fabulous.  I lined it with flannel from those sheets that I bought last year to make diapers (those sheets just keep on going – I’ve used them for a whole bunch of projects, and they aren’t even close to gone yet).  For the handle and the velcro tabs on the bag, I used a waistband from a pair of jeans that my husband didn’t wear anymore.  Here’s the finished bag, filled with blocks:

For the blocks, I bought two sizes of wooden dowel, and the rest are just made from scraps of wood (mostly 2x4s) that we had in the garage.  My cuts aren’t the straightest, but it gives stuff you build with the blocks a bit of a Dr. Seuss feel, which I think is pretty cool.  I didn’t measure anything, I just cut the wood randomly, so the blocks are all different sizes.  The most time-consuming part of the whole project was sanding the blocks, but even that was fun.  I sat on the back patio sanding blocks while my husband worked in the yard and our son played in the grass with the dog.  Here are pictures of the blocks:

I finished the blocks on Black Friday, which I thought was appropriate.  Sitting outside sanding blocks of wood was a lot more fun than standing in line at a store somewhere.  I spent $8 on the dowels, but everything else for this project was from scraps of wood and fabric that we already had.