Hello! I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a wonderful one. I had a great week relaxing, eating and spending lots of time with family and I ended up taking the week off of blogging! But now I’m back and super pumped about some fun things coming up.
It’s crazy how quickly the holiday season is approaching. I’m a pretty bad holiday blogger because I never do projects early enough to share them with you guys. But I did do a couple of holiday posts last year, back when I had like 2 followers, so I thought I’d bring them back. The first is a tree skirt that I made for my very first REAL Christmas tree.
Haha, pretty dinky tree, huh? We weren’t really sure if we were going to get a real tree last year, but Yuki was starting to understand holidays, so on a whim I bought this lil beauty at the supermarket. I wanted to make a skirt, but since it was my first try I didn’t want to buy a bunch of new fabric, so I just used what I had at home – some gray and white felt and white fleece. It’d woulda been nice if I’d had more festive color, but otherwise I’m really pleased with the way it came out!
I had this huge piece of dark gray craft felt that I bought for another project, but never used. I knew I wanted to use it up and it was the perfect size. It was a bit dark though, so I planned on accenting it with white snowflakes. I found this tutorial online for a cute snowflake stocking and used it to make my tree skirt snowflakes. Here’s how I did it:
First I cut my main fabric (the gray felt) into a large square, about the size I wanted the finished skirt to be. I folded it in half and then in half again, so it was a square. Then I cut the fabric in an arc, from one edge to the other (with the folded corner on the inside of the arc). If you want to be precise, you can measure from the corner to the edge (which is your radius) and measure and mark (with chalk or pins) the same distance around until you get to the other edge. Sorry, I didn’t photograph this part, I hope it makes sense. I also cut a quarter circle from the corner for the center of the skirt.
This is when the fabric was still folded in fourths, after cutting:
When you unfold it, it should look like this. I cut a straight line from the outer edge to the inner circle for an opening.
I wanted to make a scalloped border, so I took some white fleece and cut it into 2″ strips. I had to cut about 5 strips and sew them together to make it long enough to go around the outer edge of the circle.
I used a round cap to make the scalloped design and then cut it out.
I lined the straight edge of the scalloped border with the outside edge of the skirt and zig zag stitched them together all the way around. Then I considered top stitching the scallops down for some nice detail, but after realizing it would take too long and be really hard to make it look nice, I opted for some fabric glue 🙂
Now for the snowflakes! The post I mentioned earlier has some templates for snowflakes that I printed out. I traced them onto white felt.
I used my machine to sew along the lines.
The most time consuming part of this project was cutting out the snowflakes, but I just turned on a movie and cut away!
Finally I glued them on with some fabric glue and I was done!
The best part about this project was that I already had all the felt, fleece and glue, so I didn’t have to buy anything extra. Now we got our tree and skirt and all we need are some presents!
Have you started your holiday decorating?
Bree, momma blogger of 
Raquel sent me pictures of her son, Javier, representing Totoro all the way from Spain! Look at that lil belly!
And last in the Totoro parade, is this incredible costume that Sandie made. She used my hood and leaf as inspiration but created the rest of the costume on her own and don’t you just LOVE the soot ball bag and those shoe covers?! It’s also so awesome to see a slightly older kid as Totoro. So super cute.
you and mie 