Personalized Stockings

Our poor Christmas stockings. For years, I've been promising my mother I would find some way to attach our family's names to our stockings. Something better than the paper tags I made about six years ago...

I promise the looked better at the time of the original installation.

So the last couple of years, I've been toying with the idea of embroidering our names onto the stockings. But how to do that on the extremely fuzzy tops of the stockings without having fuzz poking through all of my stitches?

My first thought was to stitch our names onto some ribbon and wrap the ribbon around the top of the stockings. The bad blogger in me didn't take pictures of the disaster before I threw it away. You can use your imagination. Just imagine lots of embroidery floss holding together the tattered threads of some white ribbon.

It really did feel about that bad.

So I took some left over cloth I had from another project and began stitching on tried and true Aida.

Font from: http://www.freepatternsonline.com/xscharts/page/abc13.htm

Much better. And I really liked the font and colors I picked out. Perfect.

But they turned out so small. They definitely wouldn't as replacements for my paper tags. So then I thought maybe I could turn them into tags attached to the loops they hang from.

I added some evenly spaced stitches to pull back the uneven edges...but I think I left too little room between names to make the best borders. I label this one as a work in progress...but it's still a giant step in the right direction away from torn construction paper and shredded ribbons. Updates soon!

Any Christmas improvements you've been meaning to do?