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.

One of the easiest ways to make a cross stitch project more personal is to add text to it. Whether you’re adding the names of people getting married to a generic floral cross stitch design, birth information to a project on theme with the new baby’s room or just adding a word or phrase that’s meaningful to you, adding words to cross stitch projects make them that much more special.

But if you’re not working with a project that already has text built in, or you want to change the text that’s there, that can feel a little daunting.

Caterpillar Cross Stitch has a great guide to adding names and words (as well as numbers) to projects, which talks you through what to consider and how to actually go about adding text to a cross stitch project successfully.

You’ll need to think about what kind of font you want to use and if you’re using back stitched letters or larger filled letters, how much space you need and how the letters work together in the text you’re planning to make sure it’s readable.

Their post includes common pitfalls such as running out a space or ending up with text that’s off center and how to avoid them (spoiler: chart out your text before you stitch!).

The whole post is really helpful if you’ve never added lettering to a project before and don’t know where to start. I like to use block letters in back stitch when learning how to add text to cross stitch, but of course there are tons of lettering options. Check out this collection of cross stitch fonts if you want to see some different things you can try.

And head over to Caterpillar Cross Stitch to get more tips for how to successfully add lettering to your cross stitch projects. They also have their own alphabet and number charts you can buy to add text to your stitching.

Have you ever added text to a cross stitch project? I’d love to hear how it went!

[Photo: Caterpillar Cross Stitch]

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