Homemade Christmas Gifts

Every year I have a thought about doing some sort of homemade Christmas gift for some of our family. One reason this always appeals to me is because of the money saving possibility. We have been trying to stick to a fairly tight budget, and Christmas was no exception. I really wanted to do something for some of my family that we wouldn't otherwise be able to get gifts for. Now, in the past, I've never carried through with any of the ideas I've had, mainly because they end up being way too labor intensive or it ends up costing more than if I had simply bought them a gift. This year, I had my thinking cap on early and came up with, what I think, is my best idea yet.

Homemade Apple Butter!

Really, who doesn't like apple butter?

Now, if you read this blog regularly, you may have noticed the post I wrote noting that I had failed at my first attempt at the butter. Looking back, I think I just lacked patience, and given enough time, I would have had apple butter that night.

That's the first thing I found out, apple butter requires patience...and lots of it! After my experiments, I determined that the crock pot was definitely the way to go, so you could just let it cook low and slow all day. However, my crock pot apparently cooks a little unevenly, and when we cooked it over night there was some burning that occured, that was lesson #2 in my apple butter journey. I'm working on sorting through all my do's and don'ts I learned along the way so I can share them with you in my Recipes folder. Until then, I'll leave you with the finished project, including how I adorned them.

Here's a close up of what the tags looked like. I simply took a picture of Bailey and then designed the tags in Microsoft Publisher. I then punched out a hole in the tag and tied them on using rafia. It helps when you have a friend cut out all the tags for you...thanks Brit!