Stockings!

My niece has gotten involved in 4H recently...which involves lots of community service, apparently. One of their recent projects is to put together a lot of stockings using donated cloth and stuff. And guess who got tapped to help out!

I can't help it when they ask so nicely...

So here's the end of my most recent project.

For starters, they were all pre-cut into the stocking shape by the 4H leader, so that saved a lot of time/effort. I forgot to take a picture, but my first step was to fold the top of each half of the stockings and sewed a thin hem.

Next, I pulled out the *dun-dun-dunnnnnn*... Bias tape machine! That thing is awesome, I swear.

After cutting some 2" strips of red cloth, I fed it to the bias tape machine, folded the resulting tape in half, and then stitched the longer length into one long bias tape.

Finally, I cut the tape into 4" strips - that should be plenty of tape to form the hanging loop.




 Next - piecing them together. After pairing them together, inside out, I folded over the bias tape so that it formed roughly a 2" loop. I lined it up with the outer seam in between the layers of the stocking, at the rear upper corner. With the sewing machine, I sewed the halves together with roughly a 1/2" to 1" seam depending on the size of the cloth pieces and how the sewing machine was cooperating.





As you can see, here's the finished result.  As with a lot of my recent stuff (I'm still in the learning process after all), they're a little rough, but I think they'll do!

There was a rather...interesting variety of cloth patterns, but hey - I doubt they were going to turn down donations. Hopefully they do the trick and bring some smiles to their recipients!