One more... and then I'm DONE!

This is the last stocking; it's made for my boyfriend's mother, who loves Egyptian-like things.

I'll have to ask you to excuse horrible lighting from the dark walls and yellow lights, the brush ends and jar of glaze, the CDs, the woot monkey in the background, the fact that this is being hung on the ear of a stethoscope....and uh... everything else.   I just wanted pictures before I gave this away, and it was already Christmas Eve! 

Here's one more picture of it standing straight, just because I haven't gotten used to the charms dangling while the stocking is hanging yet, haha. 

My boyfriend picked out everything for this one, and of course he's not a sewer, so he picked out the slinkiest, hardest-to-work-with polyester lace weave for the decorative side of the stocking. It looks nice, but I had  to utilize some old wrapping paper to stabilize it while making it!  We bought the snake from the bead department of the craft store, and it's held on with some gold wire... as is the ankh, which I think turned out a little too gold for the stocking in comparison with the snake, but oh well.

I made the ankh myself, by the way, out of polymer clay that I had pressed some glitter paper onto to give some texture.  It also just happened to have some nice authentic "cracks" from when I was folding it to warm it up--perfect!  Add a stippling brush and some paint to make an uneven, mottled layer of gold all over, and it came out pretty neat looking...but unfortunately, I have no great pictures of it because of the lighting and flash. 

Here's the thing that I find the funniest of all about this stocking: the ankh symbol is associated with death/eternal life.  Perfect for a Christmas stocking...uh...right?!?!

Finished!

Finally!  Save for one or two one-off stockings, I'm done sewing for the holidays. Just in time, these need to get in the mail soon, anyway. :) Not to mention, I was getting soooo bored of sewing Christmas stuff, only Black Sabbath and Slayer could keep me interested!

Unfortunately there was no sun at all today, so my photos might look extra shadowy.

Here's the first set of stockings that I didn't get photos of before (the last one might look extra funny because it's a bit full already!):

And a detail shot, maybe this will be better than the first one:

Now, if you remember, the insides of these stockings as well as my Horde stockings look like this:

But the other eight stockings (the ones in the last post, and the ones I'm about to write about next) have a lining and a backing that looks like this, which is quite a bit more busy!

You see, the fabric I bought before wasn't on sale again when I figured out I bought way too little, so this Christmas fabric ended up being a bit cheaper.

Anyway, the last set of stockings were particularly inspired by my dad, who loves old Christmas stuff. I made what I thought looked like some old-ish ornament shapes and cut out my pieces--I just appliqued them on freely using an almost-satin stitch and my metallic thread.  I say almost-satin because I didn't want to pull the fabric too much, as I didn't use any stabilizer, fusing or starch, and I didn't want the pieces to stretch out of shape.  So instead of using a zig-zag stitch at "0", I used it halfway between 0 and 1.   To make them look like they were hanging, I used the same stitch to make lines (before I appliqued the pieces on, of course).  There's even a line on top of the big center ornament, but unfortunately the fur covers it up--that's a lack of planning on my part!

Aaaaaaand that's all for now. :)

More Stockings!

Here's my second set of four stockings, all completed.   The last set of four is halfway done, and I still need to take pictures of the full first set that I gave a preview of in my last post (I got a new camera as an early Christmas present, by the way, so hopefully my pictures will improve!)





The toes look a little funny in these photos, but it's mostly the angle and my fiddling with them to make them all lie in a nice direction to photograph. They're not all 100% the same shape, either, but they're supposed to be all unique, so that's ok!

As with the first set, I laid out the pattern pieces I made on top of my stack of four fabrics, and cut out the pieces for all four stockings in one go with the rotary cutter. :)

I added some gold ric-rac and trim to these, so they're a little more bling-y than my first set. The hanging tabs also have ric-rac on them, as you can kind of see in the first photo!

And my favorite part--I added some hexagon appliques!



I'm particularly thrilled with how they came out--I just cut out the shapes and ironed down the edges by eye, then sewed as close to the edge as I could manage. The only thing I would do differently again, however, is not use two threads on the top! You see, my metallic thread is a little more prone to breaking under stress, so I wanted to reinforce it by threading a strand of metallic and a strand of red thread through my machine at the same time... but I nearly caused tension and alignment issues when the red thread got too loose compared to the metallic and started bunching up in the bobbin area. Does that even make sense? I don't know, I'm just glad they look ok! You can see that stitching on the last two hexagons in the top picture look much more metallic--that's because I finally got fed up and took out the red top thread.

I'm also pretty impressed with these last macro photos: they're taken on my new camera with no flash! I'm not used to having the ability to toggle the flash on macros. Usually, I'm so shaky that without flash, macros come out a blurry mess. They were taken in quite blue-ish natural daylight (not quite sunny, but not overcast), so I did have to color edit them a bit to get them to look a little more true.

And now, for something different...

This is a hint as to what I've been doing lately: a whole lot of sewing!


(Disclaimer: I still don't have a good camera, and I now live in a place with few ceiling mounted lights or large, airy windows.  So instead of photos with bad incandescent lighting, I now have photos with varied angles of bad incandescent lighting.)

Actually, this isn't my biggest project, but I put that one aside to finish these sets of stockings up in time to ship off to my family for the holidays.  Since I'm not at home this year, I wanted to send my family something neat.

I say "these sets" and I only have photos of one stocking... oops.  I drafted the patterns on these and layered up my fabrics so I could cut out four stockings at once, and also so that each one would have a unique combination of fabrics.  I made all four of this style, but I only have photos of the first one so far.  I'm halfway done with a second "set" of four in a wonky stripe style, and a third set I'm planning to do with applique pieces... not fully sure how yet, though.  I didn't put batting or quilting on them, which I was kind of torn over doing, but I did try some metallic decorative stitching, and I did line them fully:



In addition to those, I also made these for my boyfriend's younger cousins:
HORDE STOCKINGS!



All I can say is, he better be right about his cousins playing Horde-side, too, because 1) he is known to have some faulty memory errors here and there, 2) it would be really hard to applique that little lion crest thing, and 3) why would you play Alliance anyway?

So anyway, onto the details.  I always wanted to make some geeky-like applique, and this was the perfect chance.  I used a method that I think is called reverse applique, and I left the edges raw, because I felt it fit in style with the Horde--I even roughed the edges up with my fingernails.  To make the design, I printed the insignia on some freezer paper, then cut it out  with an xacto and ironed it onto my stocking pattern that I had backed with some black scrap fabric.  I then carefully sewed OUTSIDE of the pattern, and then cut right about on the edges of the pattern itself, but only through the red part of the fabric.  After I sewed the rest of the stocking up, I thought it looked kind of plain, so that was when I added the gold "rustic" top-stitching, to make it look a bit more like, say, the banners in Orgrimmar.  Ideally, I should have done this before sewing everything together; I ended up pulling the black fabric a bit weirdly since I could not hold it flat properly when sewing. 

I tried taking some detail shots, but keep in mind, low quality camera + reds + metallics = not so great macros.  I still wanted to keep some documentation of what I did, though!





And there you go! Hopefully I'll have more stockings to post, soon.  Sheesh, and I'm not even religious.