Personal touches of time, attention and care make for presents to remember

Published December 13, 2011 in the Commercial Appeal

Debi Vincent, who lives in Germantown, won't be doing much Christmas shopping this year. Instead, she'll be busy making her gifts by hand.

"To me, giving a handmade gift is truly the essence of gift-giving. It tells the recipient that you cared enough about them to put time, attention and love into that gift," she says.

Vincent believes handmade gifts have a story and a soul. This year, she is making most of her gifts from recycled felted wool sweaters.

"Have you ever had a beautiful wool sweater and accidentally put it in the washer and dryer, only to end up with a teeny tiny sweater? That was felting," Vincent says.

Regular sheep's wool, lambswool, alpaca, angora and cashmere felt are best. Vincent finds secondhand sweaters, felts them, and then uses the resulting material to fashion a number of items like slippers, mittens, hats, iPad cases, banners and flower pins.

Vincent likes that she can control the quality and environmental impact of the goods that go into each of her gifts, but it's the actual creation and construction that she enjoys the most.

"I was encouraged from a young age to be creative, so it's always seemed natural to want to make things and share them. I hope some of that love comes through in the objects I create," she says.

Time is the most valuable ingredient in Vincent's gifts. She might spend 10 hours or more on a pair of slippers.

"The planning stages always seem to take the most, and then there's making the patterns, choosing and processing materials, construction, embellishing, and then finishing," she says.

It's all worth it to Vincent. She takes pride in the fact that her gifts aren't mass-produced and can't be found in crowded malls.

"Making things by hand helps put the humanity back into our everyday lives," Vincent says.

Midtowners Scott and Amy Banbury decided to start making their own holiday gifts 16 years ago for several reasons.

"We are both artsy and can make stuff, we were very poor 16 years ago, and Christmas consumption drives us both crazy," explains Amy, adding, "Personally, I think homemade gifts are the bomb."

Scott Banbury says he doesn't necessarily oppose the purchasing of gifts, but he believes they ought to be thoughtful.

"Making your own, or buying from local artisans invokes thoughtfulness. Waiting in line to get a deal on a mass-manufactured consumer product doesn't," he says.

They both agree that some of their early handmade gift-giving efforts were unsuccessful.

"The first year we did it, we just hot-glued a bunch of nature stuff on some fresh-cut logs, and months later, beetles were crawling out of them," he says.

"We called them 'yule logs,'" she explains. "Scott drilled a hole so they could hold a candle. My mom's caught on fire when she used it because of all the stuff we glued on them."

They've honed their skills over the years, and now that the couple have children, the whole family makes gifts.

"The kids are very creative, so they think it's fun. It's the one time of the year I don't cringe and complain when the house is trashed with art supplies," she says.

This year, Amy is embroidering tea towels and handkerchiefs. Scott is making wooden rubber-band guns, cutting boards and iPhone charging stations. Their son, Kade, is making blank flip books, and daughter Brighid is sawing off the heads of plastic animals and gluing them to wood scraps to make tiny taxidermy trophy heads.

All of their materials are found, reclaimed or purchased secondhand.

"Some of the flip books we are making are out of Scott's leftover (City Council) campaign fliers, and they all have recycled cardboard covers from Cheez-It boxes or whatever is in the cupboard," Amy says.

For her best friend, who is a "Scrabble junkie," Amy plans to make a refrigerator Scrabble set from game pieces she collected at yard sales over the summer. She says that after 16 years, "I think our friends and family know that it's hit or miss."

Julie Baltz, who works at the Memphis Botanic Garden, thinks it means so much more to someone when you make a gift for them or when the gift is handmade locally or regionally.

"It's important to support these efforts in protest to the mad spending at the typical mall shops and big-business stores," she says.

She's currently knitting washcloths to accompany some locally made soaps that she purchased from Peace Bee Farm at the Memphis Botanic Garden's Farmers Market. Other gifts she has planned are homemade bath salts or milk bath mixes that she can package in fancy or old-looking jars found at thrift stores. Baltz also plans to do some sewing projects using old T-shirts.

Baltz considers the bigger picture of gift-giving.

"I try to reuse 'garbage' in at least some of my gifts to try and offset the insane overuse of disposable packaging and wrapping paper," she says. In that vein, she is making recycled paper ornaments using leftover brochures from her work that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

She wraps her gifts in material, pretty scarves or brown paper bags that she decorates.

"Or I use the gift bags I nagged everyone about saving at last year's family Christmas," she says.

Baltz says making her own gifts saves her money, but requires a good bit of time. She knits about an hour a day, maybe more. Because she works full time and has a 2-year-old daughter, she says a washcloth can take two days or two weeks.

"I generally start knitting gifts around Halloween," she says.

Lynn Conlee, who works at Rhodes College, gave her mom a drawing she had done and experienced how much more personal it feels to share something you actually made with someone. This year, she has decided to make gifts for everyone on her list.

She was inspired by an art magazine called Juxtapose.

"Aaron Horkey was featured. He does these detailed illustrations, often of natural scenes," Conlee says. She doesn't consider herself to be an illustrator, but she took several of her own photos of leaves on the ground, converted them to black and white, and ran them through some Photoshop filters to give them the appearance of line-art illustrations.

"While I was playing with them in Photoshop, I noticed the leaves in one of the images had formed angel shapes," she says. "That's when it occurred to me that these could possibly become holiday gifts -- if I didn't screw them up!"

Conlee had them printed on a high-quality digital printer using heavier cover stock with a dull finish.

"The dimension I got from the black-and-white versions appealed to me, but I started thinking about adding some random color to the leaves," she says. "That plan turned into pretty much full-scale hand-coloring using color pencils."

The surface of the cover stock allowed the color to build on itself in an interesting way, almost like paint, Conlee says. She really likes the effect. "It's understated, but pops at the same time." She bought some standard-size frames with precut mats to complete the gifts.

If arts and crafts don't inspire, there is always the kitchen. Michael Hughes, a local food and wine expert, is making unique and edible gifts with husband, Kelly Robinson.

"When making edible gifts, it's best to make a variety because not everybody's tastes are the same," he says. So far Hughes and Robinson have made cherry liqueur and smoked whiskey poached cherries; rum and Meyer lemon-cured blueberries; ginger bitters; bacon bitters; soy-sesame-sriracha-sugar-lime roasted cashews and hot sauce. They are also making different kinds of chocolates, like dark chocolate-covered salted caramels, rum caramels and chocolate-covered whiskey custard.

"The way I see it," Hughes says, "most people, myself included, would rather have something they could eat or drink as opposed to yet another something to clutter up the shelves."

He says the rum-cured blueberries would be great over ice cream or cheesecake, in muffins or in a gin- or rum-based cocktail. The cherries make great garnishes for Manhattans or other drinks.

"When we made the roasted cashews, it was absolutely impossible not to snack on them," Hughes says. "They are perfect as a simple snack or to add some crunch and spice to a chilled noodle salad."