New Christmas Stockings

The day after Thanksgiving we started doing a little Christmas decorating around our house. When I pulled out the stockings, I remembered that I still hadn't made one for my two year old. And our exchange didn't have one. And everyone seems to think that the dog needs one.

So I decided it was time to make some new Christmas stockings. I made the current stockings a few years back in 2012 (I found a photo of them on Flickr, scroll down to the bottom of this post to check them out). They were some EPP (English paper pieced) hexagons using a single fabric line. They are fine, but don't really feel like the fit in with the rest of our Christmas decorations. 

I had a few qualifications: I did not want them to have a cuff, I wanted them to be big, and I wanted to use mostly solids. I saw these stockings on Instagram last week and thought they were great, so I wanted to do something similar. I basically used this tutorial, except I made them slightly bigger and used thinner fabric strips. 

Instead of using just solids, I mixed in some polka dot prints. This was mainly because I had very little red or green solid fabrics (not my favorite colors!). A few weeks ago I had picked up some of this print from one of Cotton + Steel's Christmas collections so I knew that in addition to red and green I wanted to add navy and a little bit of a lighter blue/teal-ish color.  

The children demanded that their stockings have their names on them so I used raw edge machine appliqué to add them to the top.  I am working on a tutorial for how I did this and will be posting it sometime this week (it's a little tedious, but easy!). 

I added a little hanging loop made of Essex Yarn Dyed in black. For the linings I used a variety of red, green, and navy solids.

And here is a photo of our old stockings. And no, I never got around to adding "Mom" and "Dad" to the other two stockings. Just another reason why I am glad I made new ones!