By the Chimney With Care

Please excuse me while I gush about a project.

For a very long time, I’ve been wanting to make Christmas stockings for the Hubster and myself. When we lived in Los Angeles, it was very easy to blow off that project, since we never actually celebrated Christmas in California.

And believe me. If you trolled my basement, you’d find at least four kits for Christmas stockings. There’s a book about knitted stockings with Cascade 220 and the yarn I blogged about in November of 2006 (yikes). But I really think that none of those projects were exactly what I was looking for, and that’s why I never actually sat down and made us stockings.

But then my Hurricane Knitting friend Melissa queued the Falling Snow Stocking. It was love at first sight! I enjoyed knitting them so much that I finished BOTH of them in seven days.


Yes, I love artisan glass and I do collect penguins. We had the nails in the fireplace from decades of hanging stockings exactly like this, so I used them!

I wanted to use Cascade 128 for this project, but I knew that I wanted the stockings to match, and the 128 didn’t have a green that I liked. A mental inventory of the stock at Bloomin had me coming up empty again. Hey, no store can carry everything!

Since I needed to take a trip out to Natural Stitches to give my friend Yvonne some finishing work, I shopped their selection and settled on Yvonne's suggestion of Lamb’s Pride Bulky. A single-ply yarn with mohair, I doubt it’s a yarn I’ll use again … I’m not much for yarns with a halo, and the fuzzy-ness of the mohair just isn’t my thing. But it blocked up perfectly for this project. (well, the red bled a little bit. Enough to pink some of the cream, but not enough to make me feel like the stocking was ruined)

Oh, and I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of hanging these stockings with yarn, and I knew I wanted to line the stockings.



I got some costume satin at JoAnn’s Fabrics, and bought some 5/8” ribbon out of the clearance bin, along with the cord I used to hang the stockings on the fireplace. I traced the stockings onto the satin and serged two layers together.



I pinned the linings in carefully and whipstitched the lining to the inside of the Latvian Plait (great tutorial for that knitting technique HERE, by the way) with a double layer of invisible thread. Let me tell you – hand-sewing with invisible thread sucks and I wouldn’t recommend it. But for this project? Yeah, it was worth it.



I solved the “how to hang these things” problem with the aforementioned ribbon, which was machine-sewn through the entire lining. I hand-sewed through the tab and complete project (tab-lining-knitting) across the entire “X”



Both stockings are hanging perfectly and should handle whatever loot they have to hold simply and easily. The cord I’m using also came from JoAnn’s and I’m quite happy with it. It looks kinda classy!

All in all, I’m really thrilled with this project and I’ll look forward to enjoying these stockings for many years to come

DPUTiger Family Christmas Stockings

Pattern: Falling Snow Stocking by Jennifer Hoel
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Bulky
Hubster’s Colors: M-10 Crème and M-197 Red Hot Passion
DPUTiger’s Colors: M-10 Crème and M-172 Deep Pine
Yardage: Around 1.25 skeins per color per stocking (150-ish yards)
Needles: US 10.5/6.5mm KA Switch 16”
Started Knitting (Hubster’s): 16 November 2009
Finished Knitting (Hubster’s): 18 November 2009
Started Knitting (Mine): 19 November 2009
Finished Knitting (Mine): 22 November 2009
Lined (Both): 13 December 2009
Mods: Added our names rather than doing snowflakes only. This is a really fantastic pattern and needed no adjustments other than personalization. Highly recommend!