Here’s a pic of Wally in one of his pairs of leg warmers. The ones on the left are short - the ones on the right go all the way up his legs, but the short ones are plenty long for every day use.

I’m already loving them, because when we get in the car, his pants always ride up and leave his little legs exposed to the cold. The leg warmers help fill in that space between pants and socks.

Made some fake BabyLegs today. Or let’s call them “baby leg warmers.”

My original plan was to make a two-layer tube out of some leftover knits that I have, then add a cuff on each end, tucking all the seams away inside. Then I thought about taking adult knee socks, and adding a cuff made from knit fabric to either end. Then I decided to just knit some. (More on that later.) While searching for knitting patterns for baby leg warmers (to no avail), I came across this Flickr set and decided to first try the knee sock idea, but using the foot part of the socks for the cuff.

We went to Old Navy today, looking for some good bargains on winter stuff. We didn’t find any, but I did find some knee socks on sale, and found some good sale socks at Target, too. I bought a few pairs, the manliest ones I could find, and made up some leg warmers this afternoon - pretty easy!

Most of these are cotton/nylon blends - I wanted wool, but there were no wool knee socks on sale, so we settled for cotton.

I made a pair for my neice Joey, as well (she’s also getting a genuine pair of BabyLegs), and a pair for Wally’s little friend Bella, who recently moved to Montana.

(Sara - your package is on its way to Montana as you read this!)

Thinking about all the packaging and wrapping paper that is thrown out each year during the Christmas season makes me a little ill. Our family can easily fill two garbage bags full of packaging and paper. Ugh!!

Here is our solution - reusable fabric gift bags. If they don’t get reused for Christmas presents, they can be used for other things! We have made it clear to friends and family that they may not throw the bags away - they can either use them themselves, or they can give them back to us! Seems to work fairly well.

Of course, if you’d like your own fabric gift bags, you may purchase them at Wallypop.

Wally’s carseat is nice, understated, gray and black. A soft velour-like fabric on the edges, and a smooth nylon-ish fabric down the middle. Nice, but it gets very cold to sit on in the winter, or so I hear.

I had bought some Incredibles flannel on clearance a while back, and had no idea what I was going to do with it, so I decided to make a carseat cover. I was originally going to draft a pattern, but decided to just wing it. I actually added batting to it, as the original cover has batting, but when I put it on the seat, I decided that it did not have enough batting to be padded enough to be safe in an accident.

So, ultimately, I decided to put the Incredibles cover on OVER the original cover. This means that the Incredibles cover doesn’t fit as well as it could, but it still fits pretty good. I think I’m the only one who would notice the places that it fits oddly.

I will definitely make some design changes for the next one (if there is a next one) - it needs to be longer overall to fit comfortably over the existing cover, and the holes for the waist belt need to be longer - but I think it came out really really nicely.

I also cut and assembled the first draft of a new item I dreamed up last week. No details yet. If I can get it working/looking good enough and how I imagined, I will add it to my product line-up and possibly pursue legal protections for the design (or attempt to sell it to a big company). It’s something I’ve never seen before, that I personally felt was sorely needed. Intrigued? Stay tuned.

Wally and I finished up the bath and body items we started a few days ago. We were done before I realized the camera was still on the shelf…

But. We made bath salts (very easy, just stir together), Healing Salve, and Lotion Bars. The lotion bars were made with cocoa butter and they smell n-i-c-e. I’ve never made salve (just like lip balm, really) or lotion before, though I’ve wanted for a long time, and I was surprised at how easy it was! Just melt the ingredients together and pour into containers!

The toughest part of balms and lotions seems to be finding the right mix of ingredients to suit your own personal tastes. There are lots of website out there to help, though! My two favorites are Majestic Mountain Sage (where I purchased all my supplies) and Prairieland Herbs. I also remember browsing the Not Martha site, which then led me to see what Martha herself had to say on the subject.

So now we’re done with Phase II of making Christmas presents. I even finished up the (french seamed) gift bags that I’m going to put these little goodies in during Wally’s nap today.

So….I spent $70 on supplies (yike), including containers but not including things like honey and oatmeal that I already had in my cupboard. I used only a small portion of the ingredients I bought, intending to keep experimenting and making these well past Christmas. Plus I’m hoping that the recipients will return their empty containers when they’re done, so So…let’s say that 2/3 of that amount was for Christmas, which is still pretty generous, I think. So $46. I’m making gifts for 7 women, so that comes to $6.60 per person.

Add in the fabric for the gift bags: I bought it for $1.50 a yard, used 1 yard: $.21 per person. Add in some incidental expense for the labels (I already owned the label paper, but will undoubtedly need to replace it in the future). Those are $30 for a box of 100, $.30 each. I used 6 sheets, $1.80, so $.26 per person.

Total for all the women in the family: $7.07 each. Not bad.