It’s that time of year again! That’s right, the spookiest, most haunted season of them all: Yuletide. The season for blood sacrifice, frantically cleaning your home as to not upset the visiting spirits, and of naughty children being dragged off to hell by a cloven-footed beast!
To celebrate another year survived, while soliciting gifts from the magical realm, I’ve sewn old-timey patchwork stockings for the whole family! We hang them over the hearth in hopes that wizened elves, a jolly old man, or a white-witch-transmutation of Frigga will leave us gifts.
After two years in the new house, we still don’t have all that much to show for dark solstice decor. One easy and cheap way to aquire high-quality curated holiday decor is to make it yourself. There are so many popular decorations that can be sewn at home. Stockings are just one example, and were the perfect excuse to try a little bit of quilting.
I’ve never really quilted anything before. Everyone always makes such a fuss about being exact with your seam allowances and how nothing is going to line up perfectly–oh it’s just so hard. No it wasn’t! I was so prepared to face an uphill, piece-mail battle, but it was SO EASY.
I made a pattern out of bristol paper for the lining and the shell so that all three stockings would be composed of about the same parts, and would end up being the same size. Then it was a simple matter of tracing the templates onto fabric plus seam allowance, sewing all the pieces together (right sides together of course), adding trim, embroidery, sewing the structural seams and joining shell to lining. Piece of Cake.
The project was as time-consuming as I wanted it to be. I was meticulous in choosing my fabrics and laying out my designs, and I machine-embroidered Jake’s name three times to get all my curves the way I wanted, but I could have made the project a lot simpler. This is a great undertaking for a beginner or someone who wants to reduce their scrap stash. The biggest challenge was joining two odd-weights of fabric together without warping the gossamer of the two.
Remember, there’s no sewing or spinning allowed on advent Sundays or a witch with a bird’s feet with claw out your insides and replace them with straw in your sleep. Who said Christmas time was only for children?
