The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney With Care

I know I've been MIA for awhile. Things have been pretty busy over here.

Mostly because of this.

 

Yep. I'm almost 31 weeks pregnant with a little girl. We're so excited! But because of this impending bundle of joy, my little blog here has fallen by the way side. And in an effort to get ahead of the holiday game (while I still have the energy), we've already begun our Christmas decorating

(which is really early for us--I'm a "day after Thanksgiving" kind of girl).

 

We normally travel to Oregon to visit our family for Christmas. This year is different. Since I will be about 38 weeks on Christmas and my last three babies came at 38 weeks ... well, no traveling for this momma. So this will be our first Christmas EVER spent at home.

And I realized ... we need stockings.

 

So I pulled out any spare fabric scraps, old sweaters, trims, anything I could find ... and this is what I've come up with.

 

 

I love the way they turned out! They were very easy to make. I traced an existing stocking onto some craft paper for a pattern. These are fully lined so I did two patterns (one is slightly smaller than the other for the lining.) I just whipped up a bunch of cuffs, stitched on different trims to each cuff (the last "bow" stocking doesn't have a cuff), then sewed them together with a loop of fabric for hanging. Easy peasy.

 

I still need to make little nametags that will hang from each one. I found cheap little wooden name tags at Michaels that I'll paint and decoupage.

And I'm still not sure what baby girl's name tag will say.

Maybe that's the next project I should tackle!

 

Happy sewing!

Footstool Makeover

Over the summer the kids and I made the long 900 mile drive up to Oregon so we could visit my family.  While there I took advantage of the numerous thrift stores available to those lucky Oregonians (it really isn't fair--I have one measly little Goodwill down here.) Anyway, I found this footstool at a thrift store for $3.99 and thought it had good photo prop potential.  So I happily paid for it and packed it away in the van for the drive back home.

I finally got around to transforming this ugly duckling of a footstool the other day.  I made a fun discovery while taking apart the seat portion.  It was padded with shreds and shreds of old newspaper from the 1950s!  How cool is that?  I got to try and piece together little advertisements like "gloves for $0.77" and "plaid shirts for $1.34". My favorite one was for "Rayve" permanent for your hair.  The movie show times were fun to look at... although the only movie I recognized was Disney's "Treasure Island".

Anyway, back to the footstool. I took it apart then sanded and painted the wood frame.  I decided to give it a distressed look.  Then I recovered the seat with some Amy Butler lovliness.  This is from the Midwest Modern collection.  Love her fabrics.

Using the staple gun made this a breeze.  Then attach the seat back onto the frame with screws and DONE!

This one really was easy peasy pie.

And guess who uses it to reach the play kitchen?

She loves being able to reach the sink and stove now.

Here's one last before and after!

Happy crafting!