 Hello everyone and happy December. I cannot believe we have one month left of this year. This year just flew by. We're already in December, which means it is time to start thinking about gift giving. And today I wanted to share with you guys one of my favorite annual videos to create, which is a DIY holiday gifts people actually want. I've actually done this on a channel probably four or five years in a row, but I did miss last year because I was actually moving into this house right around Christmas time. And today I have four really, really great DIY holiday giftable items or projects that are perfect for like gifting, also perfect just for yourself if you want to recreate them or just a fun little crafty project if you need to do something during the holidays. But I did also want to mention that over on MyShopLoneFox.com we're having 20% off the entire holiday collection. So if you're still shopping for holiday, definitely take a look. I'll link it at the top of the description box for you guys. Let's go ahead and dive on into our first project which honestly might blow your mind a little. For the first project, which is also my favorite project. I have to say we are using a $20 Amazon chess board and we are just gonna be using the actual board and then the pieces. It also comes with the checker pieces as well but I'm not gonna be using those. And we are going to be turning this into a really unique wall hook. And this is actually not my original idea. I ended up seeing this art piece by Peter Marigold called Coat Check and thought it was so unique and cool. I've had it saved for quite a while and I thought I'd create a DIY version of it and it would be such a great gift. Imagine getting this so cool. So what I'm doing here is placing out the chess pieces on either side. Now the left side of this board is actually going to be the bottom that's hanging on the wall. So the right side's going to be the top, left side's gonna be the bottom. So keep that in mind. And I'm just placing tape down where I want my pieces to end up going because we're gonna be drilling holes into each of the squares where we're going to be having a piece. And I'm just using a Sharpie to mark each of the drill holes. And you can use a ruler if you want to but I just like to eyeball everything so I just dotted those and this is how it was looking. Now I got out my drill and just used a small eighth inch drill bit to drill a hole into each of those dots that we had done and all this pre-drilling is really going to make the assembly process so much easier when we get to screwing the chess pieces into the board. So I'm just placing them on top to get an idea for the placement once again before we go in and screw the underside or create a pilot hole on the underside of these wooden chess pieces. So using this drill here, I actually just laid it down on the table which I found so easy because I was able to then just kind of press it and move my hand with the chess piece over the top of the drill as opposed to moving the drill over the top of the really small chess piece and I felt like that just worked so much easier for creating a small little pilot hole on the bottom of each of these wooden chess pieces and that's just what you're gonna wanna make sure if you are purchasing a different chess board than the one I did is that your pieces are made of wood that way you can drill into them like that. Now I'm just using one and a quarter inch simple drywall screws that you can get at like your local hardware store and we are going to be screwing these in. It really is such a simple process and this project took me like 30 minutes to create and I feel like it's so substantial. Like if I was to get this as a gift, I'd be like, wow, this was really thoughtful and someone actually put a lot of time into this and it's also just like a unique piece to get someone if you just don't know what to get someone. Like this is such a conversation starter in someone's home I feel like. I mean, it was just so simple. I love how easily this piece came together. So I did have to use some pliers as you could see here on the left to hold the smallest pieces only. I just couldn't get a great grip on those tiny little pieces but every other piece including like the horses those were the easiest to screw in because they're like flat kind of. Everything else went in super simple and easy especially when you pre-drill all those holes and the pilot holes you could see here it's extremely secure. I was able to lift up the entire board with just one of those pieces there and I went all the way around screwed every single piece in on both sides. You can totally add as many as you'd like or as little as you'd like as well depending on how many hooks you'd want once everything is nice and secured to the chessboard this is your finished piece. We do have to add a little hanger to the backside so I got these picture hangers which you have to hammer in which I did off camera because I needed it on the edge of the table so I didn't break any of the pieces off so I hammered those in on the left and right side and hang it up and you're good to go. For our next project we're going to be using some wine bottle corks and also some just cabinet knobs. Now I have an entire box of just one off random knobs from extra projects when I've swapped them out in the past and as you could see here I'm going to just be using a screw to create kind of like a little pilot hole in our cork to start this just gets the process of screwing it in a little easier and what I'm doing is taking a knob and it is easiest to use a knob that has the screw already mounted to it and here I just need to go in and cut off a little of that knob because it definitely is too long to fit in our wine cork so once I cut that off I just screwed it directly into the cork where we had created that pilot hole with the screw and screwed it all the way down and it was extremely secure I was actually very surprised and then I got really excited and wanted to keep creating more of them so I had this little wood slice knob and I again used the tape just to mark it and this pair of bolt cutters I've had it in my stash for a while and I'll say that switching over to drilling in just to screw to create the pilot hole was much easier it created much more of like a straight line for your knob to go and then screw into now if you have a knob like this one where the screws separate and you have to screw it in from the backside just twist it really tight with your screwdriver so it's like really nice and tight in the knob cut off the head of the screw and then just go directly into the cork and that is how you're gonna be able to get those ones in a cork as well now this hand when I thought was really cute because it was kind of more it wasn't super knob like it kind of had more of a sculpt dress look to it and these would be so great to gift in a fun little set now this next project would be absolutely adored by a book lover I got two pieces of eight and a half by 11 felt and I placed them on top of just to kind of standard book and then I used a straight edge to create a diagonal to create a triangle that we're going to turn into a really cute embroidered bookmark and you guys like if I got this if I read books more and I used this it would just be such a nice thing to see every time I opened up a book so I use these awfully dull scissors which I had to speed up that 10 times the amount just so you could see how dull they were I then went in and did a little bit of kind of sketching with some pencil and grabbed a few embroidery floss colors that I wanted to use for this project because I'm adding an monogram A and then a little vine on the underside and I will say I saw this idea on Pinterest from Amy Sadler Designs hers was also a DIY project and I did an A on mine as well because I'm going to be gifting it to one of my friends that has the first name with the initial A I cannot disclose which because they might be watching this video so I did go through and I did stitch through the A and I did two passes of embroidery floss on each section just to give the A more of a chunkier look it was the same way that she had done it in her project which I thought looked so cute and once you add those little top and bottom hashes to the letter, it really creates that custom really cute monogram to feel and I just absolutely adore how this letter A turned out but you can totally do any letter a set of letters if you want to I just tied that off on the backside and then got out my green embroidery floss which we are going to be creating a vine with and the actual process of embroidery is super simple you're just going to go through the backside up with your needle and then when you go back down through the front side you're just going to connect it with your last stitch and that is how you're going to connect up the stitches throughout your entire vine and I'm just following the kind of squiggly line that I had drawn with the pencil previously I then decided that to my vine I wanted to add a couple of leaf shapes so I just stitched those on without drawing them I just kind of did four little stitches that created almost a diamond shape if you could imagine and then we're going to go in with a lighter green color in just a bit and that's what I used to create the center line of the leaf so I added just three leafs along my vine because I'm going to be adding some flowers as well so I didn't want to overfill it and this is how that was looking it was looking so cute now I'm going in with that lighter green color and just kind of haphazardly stitching along this vine to create a very handmade feel to the piece but it also adds so much dimension to the vines and leaf I also just love how it just kind of adds a bit more of a chunkier element when you add those double stitching lines over the top of each other now I'm going in with some red embroidery floss and just sewing on a flower shape now there's no rhyme or reason to doing this the first flower I did I was just stitching in like what I thought a flower shape could look like I ended up looking up a little tutorial on YouTube though and figured out you can actually create petals by going up through then going right back down through that same exact hole you went up through but don't pull your thread all the way through you wanna go back through this loop by then creating where you want the end of the petal to be and you're going to pull through the loop and then go stitch back down and that's going to secure that petal in place I also ended up using some yellow to add a yellow flower as well and a little center to the red flower I added with the yellow I just did a little knot and then kind of sewed the knot into the center which looked so cute now with this darker burgundy color we're just doing a blanket stitch on the edge and you're just going to go up through the backside just like this so I'll share with you you go up through the backside and then just make sure that you loop your thread over the top of your needle before you pull it through and that's just going to kind of clean up the edge and give it that very handcrafted just quilted feel and I'm doing it along the bottom edge of what we have been embroidering now you're going to stack this on top when you get to the end and you're going to sew the top edges of that A section like the top areas because the inside you don't want that to be sewn as we're going to be able to slip that over the top of the book page so you're just going to sew all the way around this edge and then when you get back to the beginning you are going to then stitch the backside of the opening so not the one that was embroidered but the backside that we had just added on and that is how you create your little bookmark I hope that was somewhat easy to follow it looks so freaking cute and I am obsessed with it now I've shared painted taper candles on the channel before but I will say I'm not an artist by any means and painting a taper candle is not very easy however I've come up with the cutest painted taper candles ever you're going to need a flat brush make sure that your brush is flat dip into your paint and create four even little kind of boxes along the bottom edge of your table so space them out as evenly as you can and create four boxes now using the flat brush makes it super easy it's just like one little paint stroke and as you're working your way up the candle you're going to then add a box in between the boxes you had previously done in the row and this is going to create kind of a checkerboard but because you're using the paint and kind of doing it freehand it really creates a very organic pattern and I just absolutely love the way that this looks like I am going to be doing this to so many taper candles and I could still see gifting these as a nice little set of like hand painted taper candles look how great this looks as you go all the way up and you could vary the colors if you'd like to you could do just half of the candle but I've always had kind of hard time creating those beautiful painted tapers that you see on Pinterest so this kind of gives you an alternate version that just felt a little easier to create you can also create these in mass if you wanted to and give them out as like stocking stuffers I don't know, really really cute use them for a holiday party but the vibe and colors of these it just really enhances the feel of a traditional taper candle and it also adds that handmade quality that we love so this one's a brown one I added amber to the bottom or like a yellowy color, like a mustard and I only did it to half of the candle which looked really cute and I wanted to share with you how I was gonna package these I just ended up adding two candles together with a little piece of tissue paper and then I wrapped them in the tissue paper like this and added just some velvet ribbon and a bow on the end and that's a really cute way to give to set of hand-painted tapers Thank you all so much if you have made it to the end of this video for watching I really do appreciate so much your support especially around the holiday times when there's a lot of different videos to watch I really do appreciate you supporting and watching the Lone Fox YouTube channel you guys all know I love you so much this is my 12th or 13th year on YouTube which is absolutely crazy so I have been doing this for so long but it feels so natural and normal to me I hope that these projects gave you a little bit of inspiration for the holiday season and maybe if you create one or two of them feel free to shoot me a photo over on Instagram which is Lone Fox Home I love when I see myself tagged in your projects on Instagram or if you just share them with me through DMs I love seeing them so make sure to do so and I will catch you all in my next one Bye guys, happy holidays