It Isn't Christmas Anymore

I know that Christmas was SO last year (har har...) but I am a slacker and the only post I have for the whole month of December was on the 31st. And I didn't even write it. And it definitely wasn't for lack of material to blog about, I just never made the time to sit down and actually do it. So, though this post is a bit late, I am going to post it anyway.

A few weeks before Christmas, Bradford's mom let me know that she would no longer be stuffing his stocking for him and that if I didn't want his Christmas to be ruined I'd better pick it up this year. Or, something like that... Anyway, since Bradford no longer had a stocking to call his own and mine (and my family) are hundreds of miles away, I decided that to stuff a stocking there must first be a stocking to stuff! Ergo, I had a project on my hands. I guess I could have just gone out and bought a couple stockings and called it good, that would have been the easy (and sane) thing to do, but apparently I relish a challenge (and am not sane, but we all knew that didn't we?).

Having never made a stocking, or even thought of making a stocking, I only had a general idea of what I wanted it to look like. I went to the fabric store, picked out some fabrics I liked and that complemented each other, brought them home, scratched my head a few times, stared at them, scratched my head again, and then held my breath and started cutting. I did have the idea of drawing out on tissue paper what I wanted the final shape of the stocking to look like and I used that as my pattern. I laid it on the fabric and used a crayon to trace around it about an inch from the egde of the tissue pattern like so:


I had linen fabric for both stockings and then a red striped fabric for one and a green fabric for the other. I cut out four shapes of the linen and then two each from the red and green fabrics.

After they were cut, I laid two of each piece together, marked with my crayon where I wanted the stitch to be, pinned them and then sewed them, leaving the top open.

Next, I grabbed one of the linen stockings and one of the colored stockings, turned them both inside out, sewed the openings together with a bit of lace in the seam, then turned them back right side out and the result was a lovely stocking that was reversible to be either red/green with a linen cuff or linen with a red/green cuff. And I must say, they turned out MUCH better than I expected them to. My seams were clean and straight, the shape turned out well, and they looked pretty close to what I imagined.


I decided to dress them up a bit by making pins for each of them. One had a bow and snowflake (the bow I made and the snowflake was an ornament I found at the dollar store) and the other was a rose that I made from ribbon (which was surprisingly easy to make and turned out pretty). I made them pins so that if I wanted to reverse the stocking I could unpin and re-pin them interchangeably.
I really enjoyed making these and it re-boosted my desire to get cracking on the ever growing list of other projects I have brewing up my sleeve. Hopefully I'll be getting one or two of them knocked out this weekend. Wish me luck!

P.S. Yes, one of those projects is to fix my blog background. Promise.