Stockings

We finally have stockings for everyone in our family! And they are even hung! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. I really get into Christmas. Yes, I'm the crazy lady watching Christmas movies in October because I'm that excited. So about five years ago when my husband and I moved into our first house, I was determined to go all out with Christmas decorations, including making stockings for each of us. I found this really cool spiral stocking pattern in American Patchwork & Quilting, and started on my husband's. This pattern is paper pieced, and there are A LOT of pieces. And this was one of my first paper pieced projects. It turned out really neat in the end, but I won't lie, it was a lot of work. So of course my motivated stalled after finishing this one.

Because my husband is pretty non-traditional in his tastes, I chose non-traditional fabrics and colors. He liked it. Or so he says ;-). Fun fact, because there are so many tiny pieces and I wasn't confident in paper piecing, I left all the paper in the patchwork. The stocking has a bit of a crinkle to it, haha.

Fast forward to last winter. Having Lorelai renewed my motivation to make stockings for our family. I decided to move away from the spiral stocking and went with simple, sweet patchwork squares in colors and fabrics that made me think of Lorelai. Red, pink, aqua, a little grey/cream. And those little gnomes appear again!

Scrapping the same stocking pattern as before meant needed a new pattern. But I wanted the stockings to be the same size and shape. So thinking I'd be smart and avoid tracing the finished stocking for my husband, I used the individual paper pattern pieces from that project. Well, obviously something was lost in translation. Lorelai's stocking ended up much bigger! Oh well, more room for goodies I guess.

The process for this one was pretty simple. I basically made a piece of patchwork that would cover my stocking pattern/template, trimmed it to that shape, basted it to some batting and quilted it. I trimmed my batting down, and then I used this tutorial to add a lining and cuff. I had to figure out my cuff dimensions though, they were not the same.

I plowed ahead and completed my stocking in November. I wanted it to be similar to Lorelai's in that it would have some kind of pieced body with a solid cuff. I didn't care too much whether all my stockings match...I wanted them to reflect each family member. So for me, it had to be those polar bears. They come from Laurie Wisbrun's Brrr collection. This is an older collection, but I drooled over those polar bears in the red/turquoise colorway for months. When I finally purchased just two small cuts of fabric I hoarded it for many more months, waiting for just the right purpose. I'm so happy to have these pretty fabrics turned into something lovely in my living room!

So here they are, all finished and waiting to be stuffed with treats on Christmas Eve :-).