How I Made the Stockings

Embroidery has a natural affinity for flowers.
It can also, of course, represent nothing at all.
-Chris Rankin

More fun details on how I made the stockings: I went to the thrift store and I got a whole bunch, but the colorwork ones seemed the most promising and felted to the right texture - enough, but not too much. I made a template from my injured stocking out of a brown paper bag, cut the stockings, and sewed them together on a sewing machine. My sewing skills are as rudimentary as my embroidery (very), but even I could handle this (the Craftster tutorials were very helpful). After the first one, I realized that if I used the bottom sweater ribbing as the top of the stocking, I had a built in border. For the first one, I went back and blanket-stitched the ribbing onto the top. I was going to embroider (somehow) our names across the ribbing, but gave up after multiple attempts at a multitude of stitches, all of which looked worse than "country chic." We will tell them apart by their patterns.

Some helpful hints for anyone else felting entire sweaters and making things (anything really:)

• If the sweater pills now, it will really pill later.
• Thick Aran sweaters make really thick fulled fabric.
• For some reason all the red sweaters felted more. I don't know why.
• You CAN felt in a front loading washer. I used the "Superwash" setting and hot/cold with heavy agitation. Worked great on the first try, then I stuck them in the dryer. I don't have all year, after all.
• The sleeves creased at the fold line, so if you were going to do something involving the sleeves, I'd take them apart before felting.
• This is awfully thick for the sewing machine. Patience.
• There are some really nice sweaters at the thrift store. Shetland wool, etc. $3.99 a piece. Hard to beat that.

Highly recommended, and way faster than knitting the 17 stockings Tam is knitting at Knit Once, Purl Forever. Go cheer her on - that's an awful lot of work!