Festive fun...

Oh the weather outside is frightful...
So why not make some Christmas Decorations?

It may seem a bit early, but i wont have much time to make anything when i start my new project. So here are some simple Christmas decorations that you can make for a low cost...

Here I'm going to show you how to make a door stop shaped as a Christmas gift.

1. I went into a charity shop hoping to find some material that was festive colours like greens, reds or browns. I was hoping to maybe find something made of tweed or with a tartan pattern. There was about 5 tartan skirts. On of which was green, red and a bit of brown. So I bought it for £3!!. the skirt had about 16 pleats; it took me about 45 minutes to unpick them all but doing so gave me over 2 yards of material :D

2.Such lovely colours. I cut out a square piece (mine was 19cm by 19cm)

 using chalk i traced around the square 6 times in the cross shape. Like in primary school when you would construct cubes from paper. I cut this out leaving an inch border for the seams.

3. Where ever there is a corner of two squares meeting i cut into them to allow movement. do not cut all the way leave about 1/2 cm. Then construct it like making a cube. You may need to pin it together just to ensure that the lines match up and so it doesn't move when you begin to machine stitch.

4. I Machine stitched over every line i marked out even the ones that don't actually connect to anything else (if that makes sense). Sew every line EXCEPT one. Your piece should resemble a cube by now. If it doesn't don't panic too much as it will shortly.

 

 5. the one seam we left open is so we can turn the piece inside out to reveal lovely neat seams. I have used rice to fill mine with. It took about 3x300g bags of rice. I poured the rice into sandwich bags and tied them up so that the rice could still move about put if someone was to spill water (accidentally of course) the rice should not become damp. Alternatively, fill half with rice to make it heavy enough to hold a door open and the rest with cotton wool or wadding. You can now either close up the seam with a straight stitch or add a zip; which ever you prefer really. For decoration add a festive gold ribbon to make a bow. I didn't have enough of my nice ribbon for the photographs so this not so pretty piece will have to do.

 Tadaaa; it kinda looks a bit squished but i can assure you that its not, the photo didn't come out quite right. With any left over fabric why not make some mini ones and fill with cotton wool to hang on your Christmas tree....