As I wrote about previously, this holiday season I decided to make a tree skirt, based on a Fair-Isle-Meets-Midcentury design. It is finished!!
I am beyond pleased with it. The colors, shapes, sparkle, and texture are all just what I’d held in my head when I started thinking about this. And I wanted to share the whole journey of its creation.
Felt applique Holiday projects are like The Perfect Craft for me, personally. The colors are bright! The material is easy to work with; depending on scale, you can either hand-stitch or machine stitch, or a combination thereof. You can even JUST GLUE IT and it will be fine! You don’t have to finish the edges. And when it’s for a holiday, there’s A Deadline, so you have to put all the parts together quickly. But every day you work on it, there’s good, visible progress. It hits all the right buttons for making a thing I’m proud of.
Let’s revisit the original sketch:
On the left is Erik’s sketch. On the right is my attempt to bring that to a scaled pattern. The scale didn’t hold; the three zones became more evenly spaced. But the sketch is still recognizable in the finished object. I played with a 6 pointed snowflake design, but a fair isle sweater more often has the 8 pattern design, and it was easier to work with a 45 degree angle than a 60. You can see Erik’s early design of what the big stars would look like — he had a clear vision of Atomic Age starbursts, and I appreciated that.
I used a string and chalk to map out the circles. I used felt scraps to decide on a VERY rough scale and try out some assumptions.
I cut a few dozen white parallelograms. I liked the look better if they were slightly off equilateral, but for ease of manufacturing, I decided to go with symmetrical rhombuses. Erik, because he is a Professional Geologist, looked up the “average slope of mountains”, and Erik and I cut our mountains to that shape. (For the curious, the “average mountain” has a 30 degree slope.)
One of the ongoing struggles and questions about the skirt was scale. Obviously I got locked in on the “vertical” (from center to edge) scale locked in pretty quickly, but what was a “wedge”? How many stars? Snowflakes? Mountains? For the size of the stars, I realized only 4 would fit, so I played with the idea of mini stars, and that felt like it worked well.
So, on to the doing of it! I stitched the stars on by hand. I played with the idea of doing something cute, but quickly decided a simple running stitch fit my current fucks-to-give budget. This is progress after the first evening of stitching on the couch, buried in blankets.
A few more sessions, and I finished up the inner ring; all the stars and jewels. Every stage I finished, I’d lay it all out on the dining room table to imagine the completed skirt. I kept futzing with the radial scale. At first I was going to have 8 snowflakes. No, 12. Here I mapped out 14. (16 ended up being the final number)
Last weekend was a major push. On Saturday, I meticulously pinned all the snowflake pieces, and started sewing. I did this by machine, because I am not a crazy person. (I seriously considered glue). Erik again stepped in to help where I got frustrated, and marked the correct position for each of the snowflake centers, so I didn’t have to think about it.
Erik cut the snowcaps for the mountains. We also introduced, at some point, the concept of “friend mountains”. We cut out a few mountains of a different slope, and tucked them in to the mountain range, to add a bit of organic variation against the regimented geometry.
And so I stitched on all the mountains with the same silver thread as the snowflakes. I literally ran out of silver thread as I finished zig-zag stitching the innermost edge. I also machine-stitched the snow, which probably would have benefitted from being done by hand, but also I appreciate the speed of machine. I have yards and yards of silver sequin trim, so I used that for the “middle edge”.
Large pom trim was one of the early pieces of my vision, and I ordered some off Etsy (Sugar Pink Boutique). It was scheduled to arrive Monday, but the Holiday Elves smiled on me and it arrived today! A quick run ’round the outermost circumference, and I was officially DONE!! Just in time to decorate the tree tomorrow.
Some glamour shots of details:
Notebook 