Better Late Than Never

Or if you're the overly optimistic type you could say I'm way ahead of the game for next year. Either way the fact is that I bought this fabric before the Christmas of 2011. Nothing super fancy, I was just planning on making it into a tree skirt for my Xmas tree. Well once January 1st (2013) rolled around I no longer wanted any traces of Christmas staring me in the face anymore and Matt and I made plans to get everything packed up and put away last week. After that discussion I was reminded about my yet to be started project when I saw the fabric with the empty decoration boxes. I'm still not sure what made me decided that I needed to get my tree skirt made ASAP, but that's what happened. I had made the decision that I was not going to put this sad folded up yard of fabric back into a box with other decorations until it became a tree skirt.

 

 

So the first thing was to cut it into the shape of a tree skirt. I chose round as you can see in this picture. There were more geometric ones, but that involved math and I like round ones better. In addition to cutting this into a circle I also cut some felt that I had bought to be the underside of my skirt. Now that I'm writing this I realized that I didn't take one single picture of the felt. Oh, well. It's not really that important.

 

 

Once I had the fabric and felt cut to size and sewn together I wanted to see how the size played with my tree. I'll say that I was waiting to put the tree away until I tested out the skirt, but you can draw your own conclusion. Either way I think it fits quite nicely.

 

 

Then I was stuck. I didn't have any bias tape to finish the raw edges with. What I did have was some more of this fabric left and some momentum. Not wanting to waste either I decided that stockings would be a fantastic project to go along with my skirt. So I found an old jankey stocking to use as a template. I just took a pencil and traced around it right onto my fabric.

 

 

Here is the first one cut out.

 

 

Since there are three of us in our little family I needed to repeat the process two more times. For those ones I just laid the cut one on top of the fabric and cut around it.

 

 

After sewing the stockings together I cut the seam allowance with my zig-zag-y shears, that seemed to help it lay flatter when I turned it right side out. This part was pretty lame and made my fingers go numb a little.

 

 

After that I realized that I would need a liner so I found some plain white fabric and did all of that three more times. At this point I was not feeling so motivated and decided that since I didn't have the supplies to complete the stockings or skirt I would be done and go watch tv. That was some time last week.

 

 

It wasn't until Sunday (I think) that I actually went to Joann's to get the rest of the stuff I needed. I got some bias tape, some furry blanket type fabric to make a cuff, and some thread. Actually, I forgot to get the thread and had to go back. Lame.

 

 

Sewing the cuff was pretty easy, I just folded it over, cut it, and sewed it. Sewing it to the stocking fabric was easy too.

 

 

But sewing it to the lining proved to be difficult. Not because the fabrics didn't work well, but because I had to figure it how to put it together so that when it was all said and done it was facing the right way. I had to do that for each one! I couldn't really remember clearly and I even sewed one inside out.

 

 

I did prevail though! The last thing to take care of was the hole that I left to turn everything right side out again. Once that was stitched up I was done-zo!

 

 

Here they are in their completed form! I didn't take many progress pictures of the skirt, but I watched some YouTube videos (this one and this one) to learn how to sew bias tape to the edges. I chose to go with gold and it took just under two packs. Sadly, you'll have to wait until next year to see them in action, I already put everything away.

 

 

Please tell me someone else is still working on something Christmas related!