Christmas Gifts 2022, Gift One: Cup Cozies

So, for our first gifts of this year, I wanted to make something kind of special for my daughter's boyfriend's family.  The daughter and her boyfriend have been friends since they were really little, so we've gotten to know his family rather well and they are super sweet people who give us some fun things every year.  Last year they even gave us some honey from their bees!  So, I wanted to return the favor and wanted to do a bit more than just making them cookies like we did last year.

When I was going through my material I found the beautiful snowflake material you see above and knew this was the year I wanted to make something with it.  I then looked over at a pair of jeans that had torn out at the zipper but the denim was still in really good shape in the legs that I could use for fabric as well and thought, "Bingo"!  I went online and found this free pattern for cup cozies and it had a really easy tutorial to follow.  So, I printed off the pattern and decided to use the pattern for the hair elastic and button version, but instead of hair elastics I had some really thin elastic you'd lose in clothing that I got from my step-mom a while back as I didn't really have the money to go out and buy hair elastics special to use for the project (yup, broke we be :).  I used buttons that I had in my button jar and I used some scrap fabric to use for the batting.  The results were some actually really nice cup cozies that are decently thick and will protect your hands well from heat.  You can even make the cozies wrap around a mug if you fish the elastic through the hole for the handle...it's a stretch but I tried it out to make sure.  

Some quick ways to make these cheap.  One, if you use some thick denim from some old jeans (my torn pair weren't the thickest denim) you could skip the batting piece, which would cut down on time too.  For the top material you could use an old pillow case, old sheet or other materials you have around your house, so long as it looked nice.  So, use your imagination on that one!

So, hopefully they will find the cozies useful.  I made four more than seen above to give to others as well (and have a few more to go).  It is a decently quick project that you can complete in between this and that.  Cutting the pieces of fabric was actually the most time consuming part of the process, but they came together decently quick.  So, I have to say it was nice getting at least one gift down already.  Now onto others!