Review: Festive Christmas Stockings

Crafted Christmas stockings are, like, the pinnacle of craftiness. You know there’s a hard-core maker in the family when everyone has a handmade stocking (in my family it was my grandma; my mom has since taken up the tradition of knitting stockings for everyone).

If you’d like to cross stitch stockings for folks in your family or as a gift for someone else, Festive Christmas Stockings by Herrchners for Leisure Arts is a good place to start.

The book only has four patterns, but they’re cute and have lots of fun details.

The Celestial Angels Stocking, designed by Barbara Sestok, features three angels making music, as well as a moon and stars and a row of hearts and snowflakes at the top of the stocking. Her Nordic Santa Stocking has space for a name at the top and a Father Christmas style Santa holding a Christmas tree and carrying a sack of gifts. This one includes charts for all letters in upper and lower case.

Linda Bird designed the Nutcracker stocking, which has four different sizes of old nutcracker men, as well as a drum and a teddy bear. There’s space for a name in all caps and an uppercase alphabet is included.

Finally the project featured on the cover is the Jolly Snowman Stocking, designed by Alma Lynne Hayden. This one has a sort of snowman/clown hybrid and is decorated with hearts and little repeating patterns. There’s also room for a name here and another alphabet to work with.

The book describes how to make the stocking using fabric to line and back it. A couple of the projects also use trim on the edges of the stocking, and a couple use beads in the stitching to make it extra fancy.

The charts are large and easy to read and while the patterns aren’t for beginners, they’re definitely fun projects that the recipient is sure to use for years to come.

About the book: 32 pages, paperback, 4 patterns. Published 2016 by Leisure Arts. Available as an ebook for $7.99.

Next Pattern:

Christmas Stocking Cross Stitch Patterns

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come.

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards.

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

get well soon
happy birthday
thank you
thinking of you
congratulations
anniversary
new home
good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total).

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like.

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered.

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try.

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?