{ Brianna’s Gift to Brooke }

As part of the gift giving this year, we really hoped our kids would feel what it was like to work hard and sacrifice to give a gift. Brianna had learned how to make these cute fabric flowers in Young Women’s, and had an idea that she was going to make a whole purse out of them for one of her Personal Progress projects. She was really excited to make it for herself, but realized how much more “personal” it would be if she made it and gave it away. Brooke loves bags and purses of any kind-she has a ton of them. She loves to always have a bag with drawing and writing supplies in it, books to read, or fancy lipsticks and brushes. Brianna measured Brooke’s notebooks to see how big to make the bag, and them together we drew out a pattern. We went to the fabric store and she found some cute fabric, used coupons, shopped sales, and made do to stretch her money. She wanted to use some of her money to have the bag personalized at a sewing shop, and also have some extra money to buy some smaller things to put in the bag.

With all of our supplies collected, the sewing began. Brianna started by locking herself in her room to secretly make flower after flower after flower for the bag. She had over 70 of them in all. Then we worked together having our mother-daughter sewing lesson so she could be able to sew the bag on her own.

We measured…

We cut…We sewed..   for many, many days.

The end result was absolutely gorgeous. I was so proud of Brianna’s hard work and dedication to learning something knew, putting in so many hours, and making something she knew she would never get to enjoy. I loved getting to see their friendship and love for each other grow so much through this.

 

The finished purse

Brianna had picked a super soft fabric for the inside of the purse. She had to sew the outside shell of the bag first, then lightly glue each flower to the outside to hold it in place, then HAND sew each flower in place so it would be stronger, than sew the flowers to each other, then the inside of the purse to the outside, and add handles. Brianna ended up getting blisters all over her fingers from hand sewing the flowers on. As the blisters became bigger and bigger one of them turned into the shape of a big heart. Truly a symbol of the labor of love she had.

Brianna giving her gift Christmas morning