Tutorial: Recontructing and decorating a Holiday Stocking

As I promised, this will be a tutorial about how to take a premade stocking and reshape it into something you like much more.
The shapes are endless that you can, do- this is just one of many ideas!

Background: At work, we were give one standard red and white felt stocking from the dollar store and told to decorate it for a contest with in our department.
This is the journey of my stocking:

 

Supplies Needed (for this particular stocking):

 -Stocking (stocking used was your standard red and white stocking from the Dollar Store)

-Fabric Pencil, chalk (tailors or chalkboard chalk will work too)

-Scissors

-Sewing Machine or Thread and needle

-E-6000 or hot glue

-Grey Felt

-Spool of Pearl Trim

- 1/2 yard of lace trim

-letters (I used stick on letters from the scrapbooking section)

-Christmas babbules (one white branch of snowflakes, one green ball and holly leaf clip on)

-buttons

So, now that you have all your trims and supplies and got them laid out in front of you, the first thing you are going to do is to take your stocking and your pencil/chalk/etc and lightly mark out the shape you want on your stocking. You can clearly see that I wanted a booted ice-skate for my final look, so I drew in the shape of a women's boot that I liked.

once you are satisfied with the shape of your new stocking, you are going to need to sew around that line. I did mine with a sewing machine, and it went VERY quickly. You can do it by hand also if you do not have a sewing machine. 

The picture above is of the stocking after coming off the sewing machine.  Once you are fully sure that you like your shape, you can cut away the excess fabric. Don't be afraid of this! Just go slowly, and use very sharp scissors. You want to stay close to the stitchline, but not cut into it. Take your time.

Once you have the excess fabric trimmed off, you should have a stocking that will hold your holiday goodies and they won't fall out through any holes. (Make sure you didn't cut your stitchline!)

Guess what?? The hardest part is over! YAY!
Now the really fun part begins-gather your trims up and get ready to decorate!

The first step in trimming my stocking that I did, was to take the grey felt, lay the edge of my boot on top of it, and use that pencil/chalk/etc from step 1, and mark out the shape of my skate blade.

Then cut out the blade of the skate! Be sure to leave yourself enough of an underlap on the grey felt so that you can glue down the boot toe and heel on top of it in the next step!
This is the cut out blade

Go ahead and glue down your boot ontop of your blade using the E-6000, or your hot glue gun. I prefer E-6000 to hot glue as it tends to hold better.
After I glued down the blade, I started on the edging with the pearl trim. I used a spool of pre-strung pearls and glued them down over top of the stittchline using it as a guide. I also added some rhinestone trim to the bottom of the blade that I had left over from another project

Next thing, was to take the lace trim and I added that to both the bottom edge and top edge of the cuff

I took the little branch of snowflakes and cut the snowflakes off from it, and glued them around the blade, toe of the boot, and onto the cuff as was appealing to me. Then I took those letters and glued them onto the cuff. Even though they are sticky already, it won't permanently hold to the felt, so I added an extra dab of glue to make sure it stayed put.

Next,  thing , was to remove the clip from the green balls and leaf decoration (save that clip for another project down the road!) and glued that to the cuff. I added glue to the leaves, and one of the balls to really make sure that it stuck.


My final step was to glue down my buttons and the just wait for it to dry!
Voila'! You now have a wonderful unique stocking that's all your own!

Be sure and post photos of your stocking that you made! I'd love to see what you come up with!

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