Our church received a request over the weekend for Christmas help for a family with young children. Several of us coordinated getting various things to “make Christmas”. I went looking for stockings and was appalled at the selection available in the big box store. Most of the stockings available were cheaply made of such grotesque fabric that I was depressed that anyone would use those as part of their family traditions. So despite the deadline projects hanging over my head I went home and started pulling out the ingredients to make some personalized stockings.
I cut the main body of all three stockings out of a thick red textured fleece and then pulled together a few wintry prints to make the contrasting heels, toes and cuffs. The boy helped me with the sewing. I was planning on using a white dimensional paint to write the names on the stockings but I did not read the directions until about 10pm. Since I didn’t have 24 hours for the paint to dry flat I had to come up with another plan! After fooling around a bit I pulled out the last piece of matte shrink plastic and the permanent markers. I picked out some (hopefully) appropriate typefaces to set their names in on the computer and then printed out a template to trace. A few seconds in the oven and a quick rubdown with the sandpaper, and I had some nice thick white ovals that I stitched onto the stocking cuffs with black upholstery thread. Although putting the names on shrink plastic tags was a last ditch idea, I like how well it turned out so I will probably find some way to use it again.
[/caption]Monday the boy and I made the solar system. That’ll tire you out! I happened to find the shrink plastic and the boy has been interested in outer space lately so I suggested making the planets. He got out his Wall-E Leapster game which has a game that shows the order of the planets, smart thinking! I got on the internet to find out what colors we should do each planet, which we sort of followed. It took us two sessions of cutting, coloring and baking to finish all the planets. Most of them were done in the toaster oven (one of my favorite crafting tools), this picture shows the kids watching the baking of the sun in the regular oven because it was too big for the toaster oven. They loved watching the plastic curl and wiggle as it shrank down to a third of its original size. After all the planets were finished, the boy decided that we should tape them to the window, and he advised me on the correct order.
