'Twas the Month before Christmas

"Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there."

Happy Friday all! I know Christmas is still a ways away, but we are beginning our series of Christmas blogs today to help you prepare for your Christmas ahead. We’ve broken down The Night Before Christmas into 8 weeks and are doing tutorials inspired by each stanza. Each week we’ll display our featured stanza at the start of the blog and of course we’ll let you know which words or elements from it that inspired us that week.

This week we are showing you how to decorate a stocking and how to make candy cane felt mice. The stocking and the mice stood out to us so we came up with some Christmas decorations inspired by these two things. Enjoy!

Candy Cane Mice:

Nicole is in charge of showing you how to do the mice. She has made them before; I’ll be her little helper, haha.

First you're going to need felt in 2 colours (one for the mouse's body, one for his ears), and this template for tracing.

Trace around the two shapes and cut them out.

Next comes the mouse's face. I used two black beads, and sewed them on for the eyes. Gluing on googly eyes is also a fun idea!

Then I used some black thread, passed it back and forth through the felt nose, trimmed the ends for the whiskers, and glued on a small red pompom for his nose.

Next, pull the ears through the ear slits.

Lastly, slide the candy cane through the other slits and under the ears.

Voila! You now have a mouse with a candy cane tail.

Decorating a Stocking: 

I’ve taken the lead on this one. I really like the snowflakes and the non-traditional icy blue Christmas colourings, so I have (along with Nicole) come up with a snowflake stocking. Here’s how to do it.

First off we bought a somewhat plain Christmas stocking.

Then we covered up the red and green accent near the top with a thick stripe of dark blue felt. Then over top of the felt we glued a sheer icy blue ribbon.

I used the same spool of ribbon and I traced it to create the felt circles that our snowflakes will be put on top of. It measures 3 inches and I traced and cut out three circles. We found a simple snowflake online and then made it a bit larger and printed and cut it out. Then I traced the snowflake on top of light blue felt and cut out three of those as well.

Next we glued the snowflakes onto the circles and then glued them onto the stocking. 

Finally we added the jingle bells (we glued them but you can sew them on) and the blue felt “hook” at the top to match the rest of the stocking. Just a heads up, if you are gluing in a felt piece like we did, do not hang it up because it won’t be strong enough to hold up your stocking filled with presents!

Here’s the finished product...

*Remember to take off all your little bits of glue!