Wednesday 16 October 2013

My First Tutorial!! *Blush*

Wow! Bit of a big moment this!

I've been making Christmas Stockings as presents for our immediate family and I suddenly thought it would be great to show off how I did it. I never do things the easy way if there's a harder path so I kinda had to wing it a bit. I was really lucky enough to get hold of 10 squares of material at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival. There is a lady who runs a stall there and she sells old sari and scarf materials and she was selling these squares off at 5 for a fiver. So I had two! At the time I had no idea what I was going to do with them but they were so beautiful and different.

Once I had hit on the idea for Stockings I started trawling Pinterest. Wow. There are a lot of fancy and not so fancy stockings out there! I had a rough idea of what I wanted and this is how I did it!

Ok, so when I got the material it had that gold border along 3 sides. I carefully unpicked and trimmed the excess off and saved it in my stash/notions box. As you can see, this one is a lovely sequinned piece. Then I made a template for the stocking shape. I had to do this for each Stocking individually as they were all different sizes (d'oh!). So when you have you shape place it on the wrong side of your fabric like this:
 Excuse Pumpkins' hand in there! For some of the other Stockings I had to have a seperate toe template and cut it out of the bit in the middle at the bottom, if you see what I mean. So, now you use this template to also cut out your batting to pad the Stocking out. When you've got all three things cut out and pinned together it should look like this:
 Pumpkin is determined to 'help'! Ok, so from the bottom, Stocking material wrong side up, batting, then lining right side up.
 Here you can just about see where I've had to cut a seperate toe and have joined them together. I will just stitch this together as a seam. Once you've done that, fold it in half right side to right side, with the lining uppermost, and stitch together! I just used a three point zig-zag stitch to give it lots of strength.
 Here's one with an extra toe. I quite like the rustic joining on this one.
Here's one that I 'disguised' with some edging from another square. I pinned these in place under the batting before stitching all the way round to keep them secure.

When I've finished all the Stockings I'll show you.

Wow! Hope that's ok for you to follow and makes sense!? Ask questions if it isn't.

XxXx

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