I am the best Secret Santa and I will hear no argument to the contrary. When I pulled one of my closest work friends’ name for our work Secret Santa, I knew I wanted to put together something special. I nixed a bunch of ideas before coming up with a bag themed around her favorite Taylor Swift song, “All Too Well.”

The biggest project was knitting a red scarf. While it knit up pretty quickly, in comparison to everything else, it took the longest. Specially for this project, I learned how to soften acrylic yarn by soaking the finished product in a mix of water and hair conditioner. It turned out well and is definitely softer than other acrylic-based projects I’ve made.

The keychain is a shrinky dink I made by tracing a design I put together on Canva. Thank goodness for Canva and its ability to make designs neat and crisp. I also used Canva and a Cricut for the tote bag‘s lyric, “Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it (all too well).” The final Canva project was the Spotify playlist cards for each of T. Swift’s pen style songs. I grabbed her quotes talking about gel pen, fountain pen, and quill pen songs and made them pretty. And of course, the pens to go along with them.