How To Make Your Own Christmas Stocking

This weekend I’ve been fairly busy preparing both house and soul for this year’s Christmas; my first Christmas in our new house. Handmade is the theme – I plan to stitch as much as I can so that when the big day arrives I can marvel at my greatness and have a range of items that I can use for years to come. I’ve also created a new Christmas category – click here to see it! It’s full of all my posts that feature Christmas crafts, including Christmas cards and decorations.

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Anyway – this weekend I was paid a visit from my uttermost favourite, crafty friend. She brought with her a plan to make Christmas stockings, sheets of colourful material and bags of sparkly felts and threads. We are one and the same.

Everything was laid out on my dining room table (and all over the floor) and we set to work creating our homemade Christmas stockings. First we drew the pattern on baking paper, traced it onto the outer fabric and lining fabric and cut it all out. I’ve used a mixture of green and red patterned and plain Christmas fabrics (all fat quarters). If you’re doing this yourself, you’ll need 4 stocking shapes altogether – 2 for the lining and 2 for the outside (2 fat quarters in all). I decided to do different patterns on the back and front and then plain inside and for the cuff.

Next we machine-stitched the pieces together as following the pattern (a very easy tutorial that my friend found online) and turned them right side out. At this stage, the lining is pushed down into the inside so that you can fold over the top of the stocking and create a contrasting colour cuff.

And then it was time to embellish. I chose to stitch a gold ribbon around the edge of the cuff, with a line of gold braid to cover the stitching at the top. I then sewed 10 little gold bells all the way around the ribbon so that the stockings sound just like Christmas with even the slightest movement (a foolproof plan to catch Santa in the act this year no doubt). I added a piece of gold rope to the side so that we can hang them up and again covered my stitching tracks, this time with a red bow. I even cut out our initials in felt and attached them alongside a Christmas-themed button just to make sure Santa knows he’s got the right house.

If you’re looking for something super-personalised this year, I suggest giving this idea a go. The pattern is very easy to follow, they don’t use a lot of material and then end result looks great!