Sweater Stockings and Decorating with Old Christmas Card Pictures
/Who wants to hear a belated Christmas story?
(Or we can say that my blogging game is so strong that I am just that far ahead for next year.)
Anyway, back to my story…
Many, many years ago I saw some cute, upcycled sweater stockings on Pinterest. I was determined to try it, but year after year I never got around to it. Finally, I gave away our regular, old stockings so that I had no choice but to get them finished. Smart, right? Well, I forgot about them until Christmas Eve. So, there I was trying to whip up some simpler felt stockings so that we would have something. I totally cracked under pressure and sewed the same part backwards at least twice. It was not how I had envisioned spending Christmas Eve. I had bought pajamas to start a fun, new tradition and had dreams of surprising the kids with them before we all snuggled and watched a Christmas movie. So, while I was upstairs frantically sewing, my husband chose a stupid, mildly inappropriate, non-Christmas movie to watch. Then, one of the kids saw the wrapped pajamas in my room and asked to carry them downstairs… where they all then opened them without me! When I finally came down the stairs to that scene I completely flipped out. Like, I screamed and yelled at everyone. I am not proud of it, but the whole thing ultimately came back to my perfectionism, procrastination, and selfishness.
The next year we used gift bags.
Last year, I finally finished sewing the stockings. They were ridiculously easy, too! I put some hooks in the front of the collage shelf and they were hung EARLY! WOW!!!!
Here are some tips for the sweater stockings:
Interfacing. I tried one without it and it was harder to sew and did not hold it’s shape well, although it did stretch to accommodate gifts.
Clip or pin the bottom edges of the sweater together before cutting out the stocking to keep it from shifting.
Use something non-stretchy for an hanging loop. I should probably fix mine.
I absolutely LOVE the way the collage shelf turned out, too. I plan on redoing it seasonally. I have a lot of family pictures and not enough walls to hang all of my favorites. I have a lot of favorites! For this collage, I printed out old Christmas card pictures. If the colors were not red or green, I printed them in black and white. I even took the one with the red tractor and kept the tractor red with everything else in black and white! The red and white striped frame and red, cereal box star are borrowed from my July 4th decor. To mix things up, I added in some non-picture things, too.
These old pictures make me sappy.
When I fired up the old laptop to get some of the old pictures and saw just how much I tortured my young family with Christmas card photo shoots I felt a little guilty. It was the stocking guilt all over again, seeing my perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. I didn’t push for a picture again this year. I asked, but not surprisingly, the kids didn’t want to take one. I don’t blame them. Honestly, it has made me refocus how I take pictures of my family and I am aiming to capture more authenticity. (Refocus? Aiming? See what I did there?!?)
If you noticed, the collage shelf was very traditional- white, red, and green. I used to have more colorful and sparkly Christmas decorations but my tastes change as I get older. I don’t know. Maybe it is symbolic of how I am mellowing out a little.
Maybe mellowing out a little bit is not so bad.
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