In the swooping rush of the holiday season and the unwinding that followed, I never got around to blogging about these Christmas stockings. My apologies for still talking about Christmas stuff but I had so much fun making these; our silver and gold, charley harper stockings.
I knew that I wanted to make new stockings as soon as I opened up our box of Christmas and almost gagged looking at all of the bright red and green. Our old stockings were made a long time ago and I was just sick of them (and all of our “overly Christmas-y” decorations, to be honest). I fell in love with Nurture; the new Charley Harper line of fabric while shopping at my favorite fabric shop and nabbed four prints along with silver and gold Cotton + Steel basics. As you can see, we don’t have a fireplace, so I put small hooks into the underside of our side table and placed wooden animals on top of the table to hide the hooks. Who needs a fireplace anyway? Not when you have stoic wooden animals and charley harper stockings!
I used the fox, penguin, giraffe and bird prints. I just love all of the Charley Harper fabrics, his style is so brilliant and was meant to be on fabric! The marriage of geometrics and animals is so delightful. The boys were wild about them, which was great.
Each hanging tag was embroidered with silver or gold embroidery thread (which is a complete pain to get through a needle’s eye, by the way! Oh man, the swears.) and the fold-over has gold metallic ric-rac. So much silver and gold is out there in the world right now and I couldn’t be happier about that.
To make the identifying letters, I decorated and affixed wooden letters. I started by drilling holes with what has become one of my favorite tools…a hand drill! With a little bit of effort, the hand drill goes through balsa wood (and with more effort it can handle denser wood, as well). Then, I painted each letter in either silver or gold paint smothered it in mod podge glue and applied glitter and another layer of glossy mod podge glue. I had to check in and make sure that my holes didn’t disappear under the mod podge and glitter by occasionally pushing a toothpick through the holes as I went.
I stitched the letters onto the stockings using the silver and gold embroidery thread.
I had grand plans to add lots of silver and gold embroidery to the body of the stocking but my struggles with the embroidery thread combined the boys growing anxiety about not having stockings made me change my mind and finish them already. Up they went, our completely unconventional, silver and gold, animalia-style Christmas stockings on our completely fake fireplace!
Beth says
Oh, Melissa, the love and sweetness that went into every detail! There is a lot of Momma love that went into those stockings. They are so very beautiful!
Melissa Q. says
Well..that Momma love part is sure true! Thanks for your kind words!
Jill Dorsey says
These are so very awesome! I love that they aren’t a traditional Christmas theme. And what a great idea a our the table. We don’t have a mantle either. My wheels are spinning.
Melissa Q. says
Yes! The fact that we didn’t have a mantle always made me so sad at Christmas, finally I decided it was time to make my own! Thanks Jill!
Pat says
So beautifully cleaver and cute. Awesome really!!
Melissa Q. says
Thanks!