In decorating for our first Christmas together, I found out that Matt’s stocking was going to be staying at his parents house. My stocking was knitted by one of my great aunts, so I just couldn’t imagine one of those standard drug store stockings hanging next to it. So last year, I made him a new one based on ones I saw in Ballard Designs.

Matt said he didn’t have any requests as long as it was big. So I headed over to Joann’s Fabrics and picked up two yards of a candy stripe pattern, about a yard of matching green, some batting and green thread. In total, I think it was about $10 or $15. The Christmas fabric was on sale and the green was just the remnants of a clearance bolt. This was only my second or third sewing project, so you might want to keep that in mind.

To make a pattern, trace/draw on a piece of paper grocery bag or other piece of paper. This started out huge, but for various reasons, it got much smaller. So go big when you’re tracing!

This is what I call "visual" tracing. I put my stocking on the broken down grocery bag to see what the general scale was.

Here's my sketch of the stocking. In hindsight, I should have made this pattern piece even bigger.

You should only need this one pattern that will be used to cut out four pieces of the “stocking body” fabric and two pieces of batting.

Here's what you'll be working with for the body of the stocking. Note that if you have a stripe or patterned fabric, you'll want to think about how the front and back pieces will go before you start tracing and cutting.

Next, you’ll pin these pieces together. I sewed each set of fabric and batting together and attached the green panel (already hemmed at the bottom) to the top. Inside out, I then sewed the two body stocking pieces together. After flipping the right side out, I joined the green flaps together.

As you can imagine, doing that much sewing starts to cut down on the size of the finished stocking. One way to avoid this could be to use a thinner batting, another would be to make a bigger pattern and maybe you could sew all six pieces (four fabric pieces and two batting pieces) all at once. Again — I’m no pro and it’s been a year since I made this.

Finish it off with a scrap of the body fabric as a tab.

Matt's finished stocking!

Hopefully that made sense. If I were you, I’d also add a jingle bell on the end of the curled toe. Have you made any holiday decorations?