One of the things I looked forward to while trying to get pregnant was celebrating my favorite holidays with my new little family, and starting some of our own traditions. Like family Christmas stockings!
I knew I wanted to knit them, but struggled a bit to find the right pattern at first. Kristie helped me pick out colors at the yarn store behind our house. I learned to balance circular needles on my belly as it swelled, imagining tucking tiny things that would bring a smile to our son's face into the stockings on Christmas Eves to come.
So what I have for you here is sort of an amalgam of DIY tutorials and techniques from which I borrowed to make what I was imagining.
1. Start with this pattern for the stockings themselves (but beware – step 8 is wrong, but luckily has been corrected by an eagle-eyed someone in the comment section). I changed the cuff from purled stitches to ribbed, and obviously didn't use anything sequin-y.
2. Next, use the duplicate stitch tutorial and charts from this pattern to apply a letter to each stocking.
3. I was concerned at the knit stocking's ability to hold its shape when full of gifts, and decided to reinforce it with a felt sleeve. To make these, I folded a yard of felt (the same color as the yarn, or as close I could get) in half, and cut out the shape of the stocking, just a bit smaller.
Because I didn't feel like going upstairs where our machine lives, I sewed the pieces together by hand, which of course took three times as long.
Then I inserted each felt sock into the stocking to reinforce it.
A bit of leather cord threaded through both stocking and felt sock holds them together quite well, and provides a hanging implement for our (imaginary) fireplace mantle.
Reinforcing the stockings with the felt socks increased my confidence in their quality and likelihood that they'll stand up to a few Christmas' use, at least. I'm happy to have the notes of how I made them saved here as I'm way less confident in my ability to remember how I went about it by the time baby #2 comes around (in the far distant future). Who knows, maybe by then I'll feel the need to try something new for our family's stockings!
