I signed up for a Christmas Celebration Row of the Month club at Shabby Fabrics. Each of six months has the pattern and fabrics for one themed row: 1) Stars, 2) Stockings, 3) Trees, 4) Gifts, 5) Wreaths, and 6) Ornaments. I always swear that I will not get behind when I sign up for these monthly projects and usually I do succeed. This time I had received the first three months and had not started. At a mini two-day retreat at a friend's home, I decided it was the perfect project to attack since there would be no interruptions... except of course eating, talking, and mutual project ogling. Even so, on the first day I did assemble one row. I started with Row 2, the stockings, first. Why? Maybe because Row 1 was stars which can be somewhat mundane and the Row 2 stockings just seemed a bit different and had fewer diagonal cuts.
The original design for the stocking row had the stockings alternate in which direction they faced. To me, instead of stockings, I could not unsee the letters J U U U U ᒐ. Stockings hung on a mantle all face the same direction normally, so I wanted to change the layout to mimic that tradition.
I did some cutting and pasting of the image in PowerPoint to see how stockings all in one direction would appear. I decided I preferred that look. When I decided to face all my stockings the same way, the change involved a bit of recalculating the spacers. Ten 5"stockings joined in the same direction with nine ¼" seams sum to 45½" (10 x 5"- 4 x ½" per seam) falling short of the required row dimension of 50½" so I needed to figure out where to add the vertical divider spacers and how wide to make them to make up that 5" shortage. Until I made that decision, I proceeded with making individual stocking blocks rather than stocking pair blocks.
The original design had four places where the stocking would be toe-to-toe. With all my stockings facing the same way, I would have heel-to-toe situations, nine places if I added no spacers. Those tiny triangles to round the toes sure made pressing the seam allowances a challenge. The amount of bulk at that joint took a lot of steam and hard pounding to lie flat.
The seam pressing in general took some thought. Along the banded area in the calf of the stocking was not an issue, but at the cuff and foot areas, I had to really put on my thinking cap. I alternated directions at the cuff and at the sole and was not consistent among the blocks. Where a stocking was in the line-up determined the optimal pressing direction.
Rather than adding to either side to make up the 5" I lacked, I wanted to distribute the spacers so the stockings were in two or three groupings. The possible combinations for ten were 3-2-2-3 or 2-3-3-2 or 2-3-2-3 or 3-4-3. I chose the 3-4-3, grouping so there would be no central vertical bar. Where blue are the 5"wide stockings, red are the vertical spacers, and the black "|"s represent each ½" seam allowance, the grouping of 3 - 4 - 3 would look like:
The fabrics are the from the Emmitt and Ivy line by Sweetwater for Moda. They are mini-prints whose scale is just perfect for these blocks that measure approximately 5" x 10". The print scale is not too teeny-tiny; the theme images of snowmen and sprigs of leaves show clearly, yet are not so big they get chopped up into oblivion.
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