Homemade Christmas

I thrill at an after Christmas sale as much as the next person.  The opportunity to buy a holiday gem at half price and get to add it to my holiday decor the following year.

What I love even more than sweet savings, though, is to create my own Christmas crafts during the holiday season....as long as they're simple and I won't tear my hair out trying to figure out something complicated.  The Christmas season is not the place for complicated.  I want to be able to enjoy the process and make it start to finish in an evening or less.

Here are my favorites.  Most use simple felt, thread, embroidery floss, ric rac and the occasional button embellishment.  Oh, and a pile of beads and wire, and some serious help from the bead lady.

Santa has special stockings that he puts goodies in for my crew.  They are ones that Mama personalizes and sets aside Christmas Eve for him to fill

Construction is simple enough.

Cut out two pieces of felt in the shape of a stocking.  This took me a few times to get the size just right, so they were big enough to fill with presents...or coal.   So, draw out a stocking template bigger than you think it will need to be. You can always cut it down if too big.  I would also say practice filling it to make sure you have enough space. 

Decorate the front of the stockings with whatever adorable felt pictures your imagination can come up with....or in the case of Daddy's stocking (and you are tired and just want to get it done), a Christmas tree and dots.  Embroider a name at the top, embellish with sequins, buttons, ric rac etc...whip stitch the front and back sides together and call them done.

Back in the days before I had any money to buy Christmas decor at half price, I made my own ornaments, again with felt. The Mister and I have been married a significant amount of time, but I still enjoy putting our first Christmas ornaments up on the tree each year.

The mittens are just two pieces of felt, blanket stitched together, with a piece of faux fur glued to the top.  You really could just use a single piece of felt and sew the blanket stitch around the edge for aesthetic reasons.

The stocking ornaments have ric rac sewn decoratively down the front.  Easy and cute. I sewed the front and back pieces together using the sewing machine.  If you don't want to stitch the ric rac on, a hot glue gun is your best friend.

Eventually you graduate from felt and move on to beads.  These are our Christmas spiders.  There's a lovely story behind them: They say an impoverished family had nothing to decorate their tree with one Christmas, and so a family of spiders spent the entire night, Christmas Eve, weaving and spinning their webs all over it to make it beautiful.  Santa came in and knew how hard the spiders had worked, but that the people might not see the beauty of a tree covered in spiders web, so he touched the web and it turned into tinsel.

Everyone, please have a Merry Christmas this year and if you don't celebrate Christmas, please have a wonderful holiday season.  And get out the glue gun and your pile of felt and see what you can come up with.

Happy Crafting!