The finished Christmas stockings!

So here they are, the finished stockings…

All four have been finished off with a ribbon loop for hanging on the fireplace on Christmas Eve (or on the tree as daughter did when she was two!), a Christmas button (santa or rudolph) and each child’s first initial.

I am really pleased with how they look and hope that they will last the years. Plus I’ve tested them out and there is definitely room for a satsuma or clementine and a pound coin in the toe as well as some chocolate coins and other fun things.

Roll on Christmas, I say, I’m feeling festive!

Christmas stockings!

Here’s another one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” projects. I rashly promised my daughter that I would make Christmas stockings for her and her brother. And then for their two cousins too. I had decided that I’d do a lovely patchwork design and they would be LOVELY.

Ahem.

it took many, many weeks to make these. And many, many swear words too. I’ll update with a “finished product” post soon, but here are the “how I made my stockings” work in progress pictures.

I bought a few different festive materials for the stockings. The red Nordic style is disappointingly thinner than I’d hoped for. And the grey reindeer fabric is very, very similar to the colour of the blue reindeer fabric which caused me quite a headache when planning out the pattern. But I LOVE the reindeer print  and the red Santa print is super cute. I bought about a metre of each and cut the fabric into an approximation of equal sizes.  And that’s where it stopped for a while. Because I had LOADS of time you see, and didn’t have to hurry to make the stockings.  (I am a FOOL and should stop listening to myself when I witter on like that in my head.)

I started to piece together the squares into a stocking shape. To make matters as complicated as possible for myself, I decided to patchwork both sides of the stocking. Sooooo much pinning…

Here they are after starting to sew the squares into rows and rows into stocking shape. How jaunty!

And this is the inside material. Even more festive! I love the gingerbread pattern. The fabric is quite thin but fine for inside the stockings.

now, the complicated bit wasn’t making the patchwork outside, it was trying to figure out how to get a nice “quilted” appearance on the stocking. I read around a gazillion online tutorials and blog pieces about making a stocking and pretty much ignored all of them. Instead I did what seemed easiest to me:

• stitch the lining to the outer with right sides together, leaving a little gap to pull the fabric through leaving both right sides outside. This made one side of the stocking.
• then I stitched diagonal rows back and forth across the stocking adding a bit more interest.
• I did this on both sides of the stocking, so 8 times in total (2 for each stocking).
• then with the outer parts facing, I just sewed around the edge leaving the top open.
• i thought they looked a bit plain so added some left over white fleece around the top.

hey presto! Only 26385 hours of sewing, 28887295 swear words and 300 metres of red thread later, 4 stockings were made.