Episode 448: Handmade Gifts for Everyone On Your List

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For many of us, the holidays can be both a joyful and a stressful time of year, especially when it comes to finding the perfect gift for everyone on your list. What we all really want around the holidays is more time to spend enjoying the festivities, creating meaningful memories…or just more time to watch Christmas movies and drink eggnog! Giving something handmade doesn't have to be time-consuming or costly to still be meaningful!  Elizabeth Stumbo, the art director of American Patchwork & Quilting, has a couple of suggestions to get you started.

We have free patterns for:

• Fast hostess gifts (includes tea towels, coasters, and pot holders)
• Gifts your sewing buddies will love
• The wine wrap our readers are obsessed with (or make our new foundation pieced one!)
• Spa gifts for the stressed-out moms, teachers, or students in your life
• Ideas for wrapping your store-bought items
• Gift card holders (for those hard-to-shop for recipients)

Elizabeth shares five inexpensive and easy-to-find office supply products that offer simple, but effective storage solutions in your sewing room. She talks about the uses for cable wraps, clipboard boxes, expandable coupon organizers, flexible silicone grip grass, and baseball trading card sleeves.

Lindsay Mayland shares our readers' best tips for handmade gifts and games for the holidays. From a batting snowball fight to creative wrapping ideas to ornaments that serve as a memento of past projects, these tips are getting us in the holiday spirit.

If you have tips of your own to share, we want to know about them! Email your tips to us at apqtips@meredith.com.

Doris Brunnette, the editor of Quilt Sampler, shares some fast finish ideas to help wrap up holiday projects quicker.

1. If you usually pin baste your quilts, use a basting spray instead. Pin basting can take FOREVER, right? Get a can of basting spray and make quick work of this step. It will wash out when you launder the finished quilt.
2. For quilting the project, consider tying it. The traditional way of tying a quilt is to tie it by hand, but there are tutorials online for doing it by machine.
3. Or just quilt it simply with your machine, such as straight lines or a grid. Start with lines up to 3-4" apart or whatever the max is according to the batting manufacturers guidelines, and after you've covered the entire quilt you can go back and add lines that are closer together if you wish to.
4. Another quick quilting idea is to use free form wavy lines in either one direction or multiple directions. Because it's freeform, you don't have to be precise. If the free-form look is not nice enough looking for your tastes, try using the serpentine stitch on your sewing machine.
5. Bind your quilt by machine instead of by hand.

On today's show, Jess Zeigler of Threaded Quilting Studio chats with Holly Lesué of Maker Valley/Stately Type, an e-commerce apparel business. Holly is a talented quilter, art director, and mom to four girls. Holly and her husband David built Stately Type from the ground up, and Holly talks about that process on this episode, as well as how the business has evolved throughout the years. Holly also designs quilts and sells the patterns and quilt kits on her website. Her quilts are deliciously scrappy, so she shares tips for making scrappy quilts. She also offers scrappy fabric bundles for purchase.

Follow Holly on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest to keep in touch.