How to Pick Fabric for a Handmade Christmas Stocking

Video Transcript

"Okay, so before we start our project, I want to talk a little bit about the type of fabric that we are going to use. Now the type that I have chosen, I have several different little pieces here and usually it is good if you want to pick about 6 or 7 and sometimes even 8 because when you go around and do your little quilt squares you want a lot of varieties so that you don’t end up having the same little patterns running in and out throughout your piece. What I have chosen here as you can see there are several different little pinks and purples because what I am going to do is we are making a holiday stocking for a brand newborn baby girl. Notice how some of these fabrics have more patterns than others. Like this was has little flowers on it and this one has more of a muted pattern. You don’t want too many pieces that have loud patterns on them because when they blend together it’s just too many loud pieces in one spot. So you want some like this one has more of a muted area and then there are just a couple in here maybe 3 or 4 that can really stand out throughout the piece. I need to talk a little bit about what I’ve chosen, here is regular cotton fabric and I’ve actually picked up quilters squares and the reason that I have done this is because a lot of the quilters squares tend to have smaller patterns and smaller fabrics and for the stockings that we are going to be doing, the smaller patterns are good. If you have things that you want to use in the stocking, make sure you have something that has a little bit of smaller pattern to it. You can see on here the flowers we will probably cut this one out later and maybe make a center piece or something like and give it a little extra touch. But overall you want to have something with a smaller little pattern that will show up quite nicely and like I said these are just cotton pieces of fabric. You want to use cotton because of the fact that the quilters squares are not going to shrink too much and you don’t want any sort of really stretchy fabric at all because that makes it too difficult to sew. "