Easy Christmas Decorations To Sew in Under an Hour

November 19, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Easy Christmas Decorations To Sew in Under an Hour

Welcome to the Easy Christmas Decorations To Sew in Under an Hour blog hop!

It’s a lovely idea to make things for Christmas, but it can be difficult to find the time when everything’s so busy.

I used to have this perfect idea of how I wanted Christmas to be at my house with lots of things I’d made, and then feel annoyed with myself that I’d not managed to do even half the things I’d wanted to!

One solution to this is to start early. I even did this one year (it was the year of the dinosaur hats when I still only had 3 boys!), but I don’t like making Christmas things when Christmas is still some way off. Also I like autumn and I want to enjoy it as a season in its own right.

So the other option is to choose things that are quick to make and not too complicated.

If this is you too, you’ve come to the right place!

Here are 8 ideas for things you can make for Christmas that are both quick and easy. I’ve included the links below and I encourage you to pop over to these talented ladies’ blogs to have a look.

All the links will open in a new tab, so you don’t have to worry about getting lost in the internet jungle!

Embroidery Hoop Christmas Decoration

This one’s mine :).

It’s made from tulle and scraps of cotton fabric, and a 30 cm embroidery hoop. I wanted to make something that I could put up straight away and leave up for the rest of winter.

There are downloadable templates (in exchange for an email address) and you can find the instructions here.

Embroidered Snowflake Felt Ornaments

quick and easy christmas decorations to sew in under an hour

These lovely felt ornaments by Lisa from Cucicucicoo are made from scraps of felted jumpers and embroidered with white thread. There’s a link in the post to the embroidery pattern.

If you don’t have any jumpers that have suffered a mishap in the wash, or any that you have felted on purpose, you could always use ordinary felt instead.

The tutorial for the embroidered snowflake ornaments is here.

Fabric Christmas Tree Ornament

This tutorial from Domenica from Easy Sewing For Beginners shows how to make Christmas tree decorations from scraps of Christmas fabric.

She uses ricrac to decorate them, and there’s one with a star button at the top! Obviously you could something else if you don’t have ricrac. As you won’t need very much, it’s a good way to use up little bits of ribbon.

The post is here.

Christmas Pudding Decoration

If you’re not British and you don’t know what a Christmas pudding is, you’re missing out! It’s a delicious, very rich fruit pudding that usually needs to be steamed for several hours if you make it yourself in the traditional way, or warmed up in the microwave if you buy one from Marks and Spencer.

These decorations are made using scraps of fabric and a little embroidery hoop. Vicky suggests putting them on a card as a little extra thing for somebody to hang on their own tree.

There are templates for the applique, and the post can be found here.

DIY Christmas Coasters

These coasters by Damjana from Apple Green Cottage are made in an ingenious way.

You know how annoying it is trying to get all the edges neat when you’ve had to leave one open so that you could turn it the right way out?

These coasters are made in such a way that you don’t have to do this!

Damjana’s coasters are made from fabric that are Christmas colours but are not specifically Christmas prints, so they can be used at other times too.

You can find the tutorial here.

Fabric Ribbon Candy Ornaments

Staci from Crafty Staci has made these fabric ribbon ornaments. I’ve seen something similar before made from ribbon, but these are made in a different way using 2 strips of fabric in contrasting prints.

Staci has used lovely fabric in candy cane colours, but you could use whatever you have or what you would like to use to fit in with your Christmas colour scheme.

The tutorial is here.

Mini Gift Bag

It’s an uncomfortable truth about Christmas that it generates an awful lot of waste.

One way to cut down on stuff that ends up in landfill is to make beautiful handmade decorations like the ones in this blog hop! They’ll last and you won’t want to throw them away just because you’re bored of them.

Another way to reduce waste at Christmas is to wrap presents in something that can be reused.

Julie from Sum of Their Stories has written this tutorial for making little gift bags from Christmas fabric. She even suggests mixing Christmas prints with plain fabric to make them go further.

The instructions for making the bags are here.

Felt Christmas Tree Ornament

This Christmas tree decoration from Lulu and Celeste is a nice little project if you want something that can be sewn by hand.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a project that you can pick up and work on when you have a few minutes, then put it down and come back to it later. This is that kind of project!

There’s a downloadable template for the tree. The post is here.

I hope you feel inspired to make some easy Christmas decorations. Happy making!

Christmas Embroidery Project With a Free Pattern!

September 28, 2018 · 5 Comments

Christmas Embroidery Project

Although I love Christmas and making things for Christmas, over the last few years I’ve given up on the idea of making masses of stuff specifically for Christmas.

It’s just too busy! And it has a habit of sneaking up on me. I know the date never changes, but by the time the Season of Birthdays is over (my boys’ birthdays are all in the autumn, in the space of 2 months!), we’re halfway through November. By the time I’ve got my act together, it’s December, there’s Nativity plays, shopping, present wrapping, baking and everybody’s tired!

Having a little Christmas embroidery project is a nice thing. It’s something you can pick up when you have a few minutes. You can work on it in the evenings without people complaining that they can’t hear the telly over the sewing machine! And if it’s a little thing, it’s going to be achievable and you’ll feel pleased when you’ve finished it. With a longer project, if you don’t finish it by Christmas it’s just going to end up in the UFO pile and you’ll feel annoyed with yourself (I do!).

So I’ve got a little Christmas embroidery project for you!

You can download the pattern here.

And here are the instructions!

Christmas Embroidery Project Instructions

1. Transfer the design to your fabric. There are a number of ways of doing this. The easiest way is to use dressmakers’ carbon paper (affiliate link). You could also use a light box (you can make one yourself using your phone and a plastic box), or you could try printing directly onto the fabric using your printer. If you do this, it’s best to tape the fabric to a piece of card first.

2. Embroider the letters. Start off by sewing them all in backstitch. To get the calligraphy effect, identify the bits of the letters that would be downstrokes if you’d written them. Add an extra line of backstitch to those bits.

3. Now sew the tree. Work each line in backstitch. Then go back and add the leaves.

4. It’s up to you how you’d like to do the star! I sewed around the edge in backstitch then added some French knots to the centre. You might like to try leaf stitch or satin stitch.

To finish it off, wash it in warm water and washing up liquid. Rinse it, then let it dry flat. Iron it on the reverse. Then decide what you’d like to do with it. You could put it in a frame or you might prefer to display it in an embroidery hoop.

Christmas Embroidery Hoop

September 22, 2018 · 4 Comments

Christmas Embroidery Hoop

Last month I was invited to contribute to a series of posts on All Free Sewing for National Sewing Month.

One of the suggestions was sewing for Christmas and, as it had been a long time since I’d made anything Christmassy, I decided to hatch some Christmas themed embroidery.

I’ve recently jumped on the handlettering band wagon. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a lot of fun! It doesn’t matter if you’re not arty or if your handwriting is normally not very nice. Mine’s dreadful and I did not do well in my Art GCSE.

I was given this book as a birthday present, and I’d recommend it if you want to give handlettering a try (this is an affiliate link)! There are step by step instructions and space in the book to try them out. Even if your handwriting normally looks like a spider rolled in ink then ran across the page, with a little bit of practice you’ll be handlettering everything beautifully. The lady who wrote the book also has a blog here, which I discovered before the book.

Anyway, fuelling my love for my new hobby, I had an idea for making a little Christmas embroidery hoop with the word joy embroidered inside a garland.

I was very pleased with the results! Actually I was so happy with how it turned out I made 2 more with the words love and peace.

The Christmas embroidery hoop was easy to do and it came together quite quickly. Most of the embroidery is worked in back stitch The leaves are lazy daisies and the berries are seed beads. If you didn’t have any beads, you could sew French knots instead.

The back of the hoop is finished with a piece of felt.

You can find the tutorial here. There’s a free pattern for the embroidery if you want it, but the tutorial includes instructions for drawing the designs yourself if you prefer.

They’re small enough to hang on your Christmas tree, but you could hang them wherever you like! I’ve got plans to hang mine in the window of the front room.

If you want to make one but you don’t want to faff about finding the stuff to make it, or if you know somebody who would like one, I have some kits for sale on Etsy.

If you like free embroidery projects, I have another Christmas one here!

Sewing To Hide an Eyesore

November 10, 2017 · 4 Comments

Sewing To Hide an Eyesore

You’ve probably seen that meme that says something like, “A clean house is a sign of a broken sewing machine”.

My house is usually a bit of a mess, and my sewing machine works just fine, so perhaps there’s some truth in this! But I don’t believe that it’s all down to having a fully functioning sewing machine. It’s also due to the fact that there are 6 messy people living in quite a small house.

In an effort to get the mess under control, we have had several deliveries from Ikea and I am usually in the middle of a sort out.

One of the recent deliveries included a new shoe rack. 6 people means a lot of shoes, especially in my husband’s case. He seems to have 4 times as many as everybody else, me included!

The old shoe rack had 2 shelves and I was wedging the shoes into it, only to lose them under the piano.

The new one has 4 shelves, so a lot more room, but unfortunately it’s an eyesore.

When hubby put it together and put all the shoes on it, I wanted to cry. It was like we lived at a bowling alley with all the shoes in the shelves. I posted a picture in Instagram if you want to see how bad it was!

Anyway, I don’t like to feel defeated, and this kind of problem is usually solved by a little bit of ingenuity.

So I had a think and a poke around and now the hideous eyesore of shoes looks like this.

Much better!

I used a shelf I found upstairs, bought ages ago but never used, some stick on velcro and a couple of metres of pretty fabric.

This strategy will work for all kinds situations, so if you need to hide an eyesore, this may well work for you!

How to Hide an Eyesore

You Will Need

Fabric (something heavier is best, but you could always line it or use interfacing), a shelf, stick on velcro, paint (optional).

Making the Curtain

1. If you need to paint your shelf, do that first. I used some Annie Sloan chalk paint that I had left over from something else. It dries very quickly and doesn’t smell bad, but it will need waxing.

2. Cut your fabric to the right size. It will need to be wide enough to go around the shelf, plus seam allowance and a bit extra for pleats if you want them, and long enough to cover your eyesore.

You might need to sew several sections together. My fabric became the right size easily when I cut in half then sewed both halves together.

3. Hem the top, bottom and sides.

4. I added some pleats at the corners. You could miss out this stage if you don’t want pleats or don’t have time or enough fabric.

Line up the centre seam with the centre of the long edge of the shelf. Mark where the corners are with pins.

Line the sides up with the centre seam. Using where you’ve already pinned as a guide, pin where the front corners are.

Find the centre of the short edge of the shelf and match it up on the fabric with the midway point at the side between the corners. Using pins, mark the corners. Repeat for the other side.

This fabric between where you marked the corners is the extra you have to make the pleats.

Fold the fabric so that the corner pins are together and the right sides of the fabric are together. Squish the extra fabric flat. Sew the pleat in place. Repeat for the other pleats.

5. Take one piece of the velcro and stick it to the top edge of the curtain. It probably won’t stay stuck down, especially if you wash it, so sew the velcro to the fabric.

6. Stick the other half of the velcro to the edge of the shelf.

7. You’ll need to think about how you’re going to use your shelf. I thought about getting blocks of wood or square brackets and attaching them to the top of the shoe rack, but in the end I didn’t so the shelf is balanced on my trainers!

How to Make a Top From a Scarf

August 30, 2016 · 10 Comments

How to Make a Top From a Scarf

This is a guest post by my mum, who is going to show you how to make a top from a scarf.

My mum has been sewing for a very long time. Her mum taught her, just as she taught me.

The soundtrack to my childhood would feature the hum of the sewing machine! She made countless little dresses for my sisters and I. I remember a little green party dress with pintucks on the front, school photos of my sisters and I wearing dresses that were similar but not the same! I remember trips to the department store to choose fabric and patterns that my mum would whip up into outfits. She would even make coats for us and knit or crochet matching hats.

This is a tutorial showing how to make a floaty kind of top from a scarf. This is a nice thing to make if you like pretty scarves but you don’t really wear them!

How to Make a Top From a Scarf

You Will Need

1 scarf (the one used here was 180 cm x 110 cm), bias binding, usual sewing supplies.

Making the Top

On a recent trip to Italy, I was impressed by the brightly coloured fabrics and floaty styles characterised by the fashion of the area. While there I bought a large scarf (180 x 110 cm) to make a top in this style.

1. Fold your scarf in half widthways, then in half lengthways. Cut from about 20 cm down to the opposite corner. The line that you want to cut is marked in purple on the diagram below.

3. Cut off the folded corner, 5cm off the long side of fold and 15cm off the short side to make the neck hole (this is marked in pink on the diagram).

4. Bind the neck hole with bias binding or stretchy fabric.

5. Finish the lower edge with a Rouleau hem. This is easiest to do with a rolled hem foot. They have them on Amazon here (affiliate link).

6. Catch the sides at the bottom of the straight part of the edges (see diagram above) to make armholes.

Linking up here.

Easy Christmas Decorations To Sew in Under an Hour

Embroidery Hoop Christmas Decoration

Embroidered Snowflake Felt Ornaments

Fabric Christmas Tree Ornament

Christmas Pudding Decoration

DIY Christmas Coasters

Fabric Ribbon Candy Ornaments

Mini Gift Bag

Felt Christmas Tree Ornament

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Christmas Embroidery Project

Christmas Embroidery Project Instructions

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Christmas Embroidery Hoop

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Sewing To Hide an Eyesore

How to Hide an Eyesore

You Will Need

Making the Curtain

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How to Make a Top From a Scarf

How to Make a Top From a Scarf

You Will Need

Making the Top

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