Handmade Holidays: Patchwork Stocking

This is the secret project that I've been working on for the past two weeks or so and I am absolutely thrilled to share it with you today. As you know, my quilting projects tend to take a long time (as in years), so starting and finishing something within a month is positively thrilling. You should have seen me when I finished this—I could hardly contain myself I was so excited.

My Grandmom Palanjian knit stocking for my immediate family, each one with our name and birth year knit into them (though my Dad's says Noel since he was a December baby). I'm bringing Josh home for the holidays and when I realized that we needed a stocking for him, I decided to carry on the handmade tradition by making one for him. As I'm not the best knitter, I went with patchwork since that is what I know. I found this tutorial from Maggie Makes and used it for the basic instructions and for the template. I cut my squares to be the size I liked, with a few rows of tiny squares for added interest.

The fabric is an old corn feed sack bag that I found when I first moved here, which with its red and green letters, seemed like a great fit (and also, Josh is a writer and an English/Lit professor, so the letters seemed appropritate). The trim fabric was a fat quarter picked up at Amana and the backing fabric was linen leftover from another project. Which means that the whole thing cost less than $5.

Eventually I need to embroider his name onto one of the top panels but I might not get to that this year. But I'm not worried about confusion on Christmas morning since this is the only patchwork stocking that will be hanging by the fire.

I didn't keep track of how many hours this took, but I would guess around 15, which seems like nothing given how much joy it's already brought to my life. That said, if I could figure out a way to do these faster, I'd totally turn this into a side business!