Homemade Christmas Stockings

Stephanie Smith

I've always been a big fan of homemade Christmas ornaments because they seem to make the holiday season more personal and rewarding. Not to mention that planning and making homemade ornaments with your kids is a great way to spend time together. Your project can range from an easy to make Christmas ornament perfect for filling up a Saturday afternoon, to something more complex to work on throughout the holiday season. You'll be reminded of the sentimental meaning of those ornaments every year when you decorate for the holidays.

One very popular decoration is the Christmas stocking. My favorite Christmas stockings are the ones we used growing up... my dad's old work socks. You know, the gray woolen ones with the red and white stripes at the top. My dad had the biggest feet in the house and an abundant supply of work socks to choose from. On Christmas Eve my mom would raid his sock drawer and pull out all the clean ones she could find and begin filling them with treats. She'd put our names on them with masking tape so they could go back into the drawer on Christmas night without looking the worse for wear. I remember getting up Christmas morning and digging into a scratchy old sock that smelled faintly of my dad's cologne, looking to see what Santa had brought. Those socks were the true sign that Christmas had finally arrived!

I was in my teens when my dad progressed to synthetic work socks which just weren't the same at Christmas. Fortunately my mom had recently redecorated their bedroom, replacing the red velvet bedspread and curtains with blue cotton. That red velvet was perfect for new Christmas stockings and we pulled every scrap of leftover fabric we could find to decorate them with. We found green terry cloth to make little evergreen trees with old costume earrings as ornaments. Fancy, long forgotten buttons were used to decorate the gingerbread men we made from an old pair of pants. Striped fabric became candy canes with tiny bits of ribbon tied around them. Everything was stitched to the velvet with a simple zigzag stitch on the sewing machine, no fancy quilting for us! My mom and I had a great time making those stockings, and our budget was perfect - nothing! Everything we used was already in the house, including the leftovers of my mom's faux leopard fur jacket (circa the 1960's) which were used to make simple teddy bear shapes which we attached to the stockings.

It's been at least fifteen years since we made those stockings and my mom still pulls them out every year. Each one is unique and my mom still puts our names on them with masking tape. The stockings that were once used by my grandparents are now used by my husband and sister-in-law, so I guess the masking tape idea was pretty smart after all!

Seeing those stockings each year brings back so many memories, not just of creating them, but also of all the items we used to make them with. Instead of a memory quilt we unwittingly created memory stockings. They don't match the living room, but no one notices when they're rifling through them on Christmas morning.

Stephanie Smith writes for www.decoratefor.com, Decorate For is set up to provide helpful and simple decorating tips for the home and special occasions.