We had Christmas in British Columbia this year, even though both our families are in Australia. We shared it with three other couples, in a house on Bowen Island: a very beautiful island close to Vancouver. Very close. An absolutely grand time was had by all, even though I think we all had moments of fondly reminiscing Christmas traditions from home. The snow was abundant, the power failures frequent, the fire roaring, etc. Very Bing Crosby.
Anyway, in a moment of creative sincerity earlier in December, I offered to make stockings for anybody who wanted them. This apparently struck a chord with our group. There were eight of us: of that eight, six of us wanted stockings (Riss still uses the beautiful stocking her Mum made for her many moons ago, and Sox wanted a bright blue pillowcase with his name written in a white cloud, just like the one from his childhood).
Julie seemed the most enthusiastic: she first requested feathers. Sean pondered what the opposite of feathers was, and wisely decided that he wanted ROCKS. Okay, feathers and rocks. Ummm, I could do that! Feathers changed to red sequins without any prompting from me (I think largely based on how we have all tried storing something feathery, then when you pull it out again later on, the spines have all crunched up, and they look so broken and sad ... ) - So, one request for red sequins (with white fur trim), and one request for ROCKS.
The rocks were an excellent little challenge: the gothic/punk girls at Dressew like me, as I keep asking them the most random stuff: "I'd like 50 cm each of the red sequins, orange satin, blue satin, brown broadcloth, red broadcloth, blue broadcloth, orange broadcloth, I'd like these fur trims, and do you have anything that looks like rocks?" "Yes, yes we do. In the quilting section, it is cotton that looks like rocks" I also went to Home Depot near my work and picked up a small panel of real-rocks-on-what-I-call-tapestry-canvas-because-nobody-can-tell-me-what-it-is-really-called. It was a small but heavy rectangle of rocks. I ended up getting the fear a bit about how heavy real rocks can be (insert logic here), so I carefully cut out the letter "S" from the rocks and hand stitched as many tapestry treads as possible to the front of the stocking. "S" is for Sean for those slow people amongst us. And "R" for Rocks was too hard.
I myself want everything to be either recycled or organic, and I loved the HUGE stockings Mum made for us when we were little: so big that Santa used to give us inflatable toys every year - already inflated. "Oh, cool! A beach ball!" Remembering I grew up in Perth, where Christmas is summertime and normally involves a swim, and can easily involve a stroll on the beach. Anyway, I digress. Mum made us red stockings, with white trim at the top, a little sprig of holly on the top left corner, and our names written diagonally across the front. I wanted something similar to that, but how to do it recycled??? Hrm ... well, there's that very LARGE top I bought at the Salvation Army that I have been trying to turn into a cocktail dress (don't freak out: it's a VERY large top) - the sleeves from that are almost wide enough, and they're all red and velvety ... Mmm. Sorted.
Derek and Nancy didn't specify any preferences for stockings, so I thought I'd surprise them. My first thoughts for Nancy were for a TARDIS stocking, as earlier this year we got her addicted to the new version of Doctor Who. Who wouldn't want a stocking that's bigger on the inside anyway? Sadly, early designs (or "scribbles on scrap paper") weren't looking promising: The TARDIS looks like an old 1960's Police bOx - similar to a phone booth. Difficult for me to shape into stocking form ... and basically a lot of detail for not a lot of time. So I switched tack. Nancy is a big believer in Java, which is a beautiful bright orange, with a white swirl like the steam rising off a perfect cup. I thought I would give Nancy an homage to Java. If I had time (mental note: must always start projects earlier), a little Java Duke-inspired guy popping out of the top would have been a fun idea. Maybe next year.
So, one red sequins with fur trim, one ROCKS, one recycled red velvet, one orange and white. That leaves Derek and Patrick.
For some reason, I found it difficult to choose what to make for Derek. He hadn't given me any ideas to work with, but I wanted to surprise him regardless. Inspiration struck: "Sean, what's Derek's team?" (please note, I am wonderfully vague with this sort of stuff. Google had to tell me what sport we were talking about: THAT's how cool I am). "Toronto Maple Leafs". Cool. I can do a maple leaf. I think.
At this point in time, I think I'd love to say how brilliantly my machine is working right now: I had some crunch-time mid year projects that were hindered greatly by a misbehaving bobbin feeder: about a metre of thread was getting looped on the underside every single stitch. Excellent. I pulled the whole machine apart and reassembled it a couple of times, and one day it just decided to start working normally again. I like that.
Anyway, Derek's stocking needed satin stitch, and I wanted it to look damn good. I must say again - thanks to my machine for not working dreadfully. Derek's stocking was also a success. Yay!
This left only Patrick: now, Patrick is a very intelligent and dryly funny man, with a penchant to dress as a pirate more often than most. I like this about him, he is always fun to be around. Riss had mentioned that his Mum still has his childhood stocking with "Paddy" in silver letters on it, so I now had two solid ideas for Patrick. He's going to get the only stocking with something on the back as well as the front. Back: "Paddy" in silver threaded satin stitch (yes, I used chalk to lightly sketch the letters onto the stocking so I didn't run out of room). Front: A pirate. Yes indeed. I chose to make the pirate out of the leftover bits fromt he other stockings, for I am frugal when it comes to fabircs. The pirate trousers are a curiously similar blue to the Maple Leafs, a brown belt matched the inside of Seans ROCK sock, a red velvety pirate shirt, white satin face that could well match the java swirl, black pirate hat that perfectly matched the back and lining of Patrick's stocking, and a beard that matched the trim of the ROCK sock.
I used chalk to sketch a quick skull and crossbones, and I must admit, once again the satin stitch worked well.
I feel a winter of successful projects coming on!
Oh, you want logistics? Pattern was free from
www.craftandfabriclinks.com , I enlarged it to 120% so that it fit on four legal-sized sheets of paper, and I am glad I did so: the letter-sized PDFs felt like the tops would be a bit too narrow. Each stocking consisted of two sides: each side was a strong weave broadcloth (as lining), a piece of batting, and the external side of the stocking. All special details were made before attaching the external to the batting and lining. Each side was completed by a lot of pinning, and zigzag stitch to hold all three layers together. I trimmed the excess batting as apparently I can't cut well first time around. Once all details were completeed for the front and back, I used basic straight stitch on a very small stitch length to attach the front and back to each other. My aim was to end up with something good looking but ROBUST. This left me with a zigzagged edge at the top of each stocking, which was successfully hidden by the fur trim. I only stitched the top of the fur trim to the stocking, as I did not give myself the time to stitch the fur base to the stocking without spending hours to then get the long fur untrapped from the stitches.
I'm relly quite proud of these. Thanks for reading!
