Beautiful model Loki demonstrates the Gift Wrapped Dress

It’s just a basic toddler’s dress pattern with the skirt box pleated along the plaid pattern and gold fabric appliqué to give the effect of being gift wrapped. The bow was added last with some sturdy embroidery thread after being reinforced with Stitch Witchery to withstand the almost certain firm tugging it will receive from tiny little fingers.

This was the first completely handmade dress I’ve sewn, and it was a blast to make. I couldn’t resist the shiny green and red plaid fabric at the store, and it works well for a holiday dress.

Hm. Now she needs something for New Year’s . . .

Beautiful model Ripley demonstrates the joy of Christmas morning

And so was born the Naughty or Nice stocking. I found some perfect fabric at the craft shop: red on one side, green on the other, and quilted. Gold fabric about the consistency of linen was used for the lettering and the loop. You could use pretty much any type of fabric for a stocking, but it will be important to remember that unless you are making a small stocking or will use it for decorative purposes only, unreinforced calico will not get the job done. Quilted fabrics, vinyl, fake fur, and other strong fabrics are best. Do not use stretchy or thin material unless you plan to layer it with something that has some heft to it. When choosing your fabric, do not pick something with a large scale pattern; this will make the stocking illegible. Choose plain colors or a subtle, small gauge pattern without too many colors in it.

You will need:

• 1/2 yard of red fabric, with additional 1/2 yard layers for lining or interfacing if needed
• 1/2 yard of green fabric, with additional 1/2 yard layers for lining or interfacing if needed
• 1/2 yard of gold or white fabric for lettering
• An iron
• fusible interfacing, if the lettering fabric is delicate
• Anything else you want to use to decorate the stocking, such as spangles, beads, or rickrack
• A man’s tube sock
• Tailor’s chalk
• Red, green and gold or white thread

Cutting Out

Lay the tube sock in the middle of your right side up red fabric with the toe pointing to the right. Cut a stocking shape about two feet tall, using the tube sock as a guide and tracing three or four inches away from it with chalk. Keep in mind you are going to lose an inch of girth when this is sewn together. When you are satisfied with the shape, cut it out. Use this as a guide to cut out any other layers, such as interfacing or lining. Make sure you cut two layers of interfacing or lining.

Lay out the green fabric right side up. Place the red stocking shape WRONG SIDE UP (this is important) on the green fabric. Cut out a green stocking shape.

Measure the top width of the stocking shape. Cut out two additional rectangles, one in red, one in green, that are seven inches tall and as wide as the top of the stocking. These will form the top trim of the stocking.

Nice

Cut out four 4 inch squares. If your gold or white lettering fabric is thin and the red or green underneath will show through, you may want to double-layer your letters or use interfacing. Use the following as a guide to cutting out the shapes. The slits will allow you to tuck the raw edges under and press the letters:

When all the letters are cut out, tuck up to 1/4 inch on each edge and press well. The letters should be nice and flat. Pin the tucked edges down to help them stay in place until you are ready to sew them to the red part of the stocking. If you are using fusible interfacing to reinforce the letters, cut it to the size of the letters after the raw edges have been pressed under and press on.

Arrange the letters on the red stocking shape so that they go vertically from the top corner of the stocking down to the toe.

Pin them in place well. Using either embroidery thread by hand or a machine on zig-zag stitch, sew along the edges of each letter, securely stitching it to the red fabric, like this:

Naughty

Now it’s time to cut out your naughty letters. OO these letters are naughty. Cut out seven three inch squares. Double layer if the fabric will show the color underneath. Using the following chart, cut out the layers with slits for tucking under:

Press and and pin the letters as before on the red side of the stocking.

Assembly

If you have a reinforcing layer such as fabric or interfacing to support the red and green sides of the stocking, baste or press them to the wrong sides now. Sew the layers of lining together, flip it right side out, and set aside.

Place the red and green sides of the stocking right side together. Pin and sew together with a 1/2 inch margin, leaving the top opening unstitched. Repeat the stitching you just did, because if you’re the kind of person who’s going to the trouble of making a stocking for someone, you’re probably going to pack that sucker full of goodies. You’ll want to reinforce all seams with double stitching. Flip the stocking right side out.

Take some gold or white fabric, quadruple layer it, and make a rectangle six inches long and two inches wide. Sew the raw edges together with a 1/2 inch seam and flip it right side out. This strip will form the loop by which the stocking will hang.

Take the two rectangular pieces of red and green stocking trim. Place them right side together. Sew one short edge together with a 1/2 inch seam. On the other short edge, pin the raw edges of the gold or white loop halfway up the raw edge of the right side of the red fabric. Pin the right side of the green strip on top of this and sew it all together with a 1/2 inch seam. Flip the trim right side out and have a look. You should now have a tube with a loop poking out of one side. Flip it back inside out, slip it over the stocking and pin it, right sides together, to the top of the stocking. Sew twice with a 1/2 inch seam. Flip the trim right side out with the last raw edge pointing upward.

If you are lining the stocking, sew the lining to the raw edge of the stocking lining, right sides together. You’ll have to finish it by hand so that you can flip the fabric so that it will stuff down inside the boot. Fold the stocking trim in half and pin it in place. Do two last rows of stitching 1/2 inch above where the trim connects to the top of the stocking, using matching or contrasting thread as you prefer. This will hold the top trim in place and keep the lining from coming loose.

You’re done! Now it’s time to fill that sucker fulla goodies. Ripley’s already checking it out.

Sorry, girl. It’s not for you.

Now sit back, have a nice glass of eggnog, and enjoy the holiday season by torturing your child with threats of coal by flipping the stocking over to the “Naughty” side every time your offspring pisses you off.

I loved playing with Barbies, but I usually chucked out the clothes they came with — goodbye, slutty miniskirts and oh-so-boring dresses — and would make them capes and superhero costumes out of masking tape, duct tape, scraps of fabric, construction paper, glitter glue and whatever else I could find lying around. Sometimes Barbie went to the beauty salon and came back looking like Joan Jett. Sometimes, when I was very lucky, I could get my hands on a Sharpie and then Barbie would go to the tattoo parlor. Sometimes Barbies got to trade heads. One year for my birthday I got a red Barbie Corvette. That was the year Barbie kicked Ken to the curb and cruised around the house fighting crime with She-Ra. (By the way, that Corvette was awesome at knocking over Cobra Commander and Skeletor. Barbie and She-Ra could take the stairs like Thelma and Louise while I shouted BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL so loud the neighbors sent their congratulations that my parents had a child with such healthy lungs.)

There’s plenty of debate over whether or not Barbie is a useful toy for girls. There’s the constant gender stereotyping (pink pink PINK!) and the fact that the default Barbie is always blonde and blue eyed can be problematic for the majority of girls who don’t look that way. But I had a lot of fun with my Barbies. They were to me what I wanted them to be. I didn’t feel constrained by what came wrapped up in the plastic box. More often than not I cut up the clothes and remade them in my own image.

It’s nice to see Mattel branching out from its early days of making dolls that look like mute, passive mannequins to making doctors, dentists, Olympic athletes, and now scientists. It tells girls they can be anything they choose to be, and that’s a message I want my niece to believe in. And it sure beats the hell of out those stupid (and mercifully out-of-production) Bratz dolls.

Now that I think of it, I could have really used somebody with leet hacker skillz on my crimefighting team. It totally would have helped that time Hordak took over my parents’ house using a mind control ray to turn all the household electronics evil.

Now we just nead some prezzies under that thar tree . . .

This Christmas season I’ve started to see a lot of ads for “Green Christmas” practices. Christmas trees have garnered a lot of attention, and it’s surprising to see how well untrue ideas can be effectively marketed as greener so that sellers can make money and buyers can feel good about themselves. Potted Christmas trees are all the rage. But here’s the question: what do you do with it after the season? Unless your apartment has room for a Douglas Fir, it’s the same thing as just buying a cut tree and letting that one die too.

It’s not just the sales folks. A hippie I know sent out an e-mail telling everyone that cutting down trees for the holiday season was an assault on the environment, leading to deforestation and thus increasing the amount of carbon in the air. /headdesk. Come on. Really? Really?

A little known fact is that a Christmas tree farm is one of the most effective methods out there for getting carbon out of our air. Young, vigorous, growing trees soak up the carbon. As trees move past their prime, they actually start to release it back into the environment. Christmas tree farms do nothing but churn young, healthy trees through the land. And after the season is over, it’s easy to recycle the tree as mulch. There’s hard science backing this up, which is why it’s important to judiciously log in our forests. Clear-cutting is obviously destructive and harmful, but a well-groomed forest with just enough old growth and plenty of young trees will fix carbon and help us avoid fires, which belch carbon into the air.

So don’t feel guilty about buying that cut tree. You’re doing the earth a favor. And there are plenty of other ways that you can green your Christmas. Don’t buy wrapping paper. Try to think of ways to reuse existing materials for more creative gift presentation. My favorite type wrapping — the Sunday comics page — is now unfortunately extinct to me, but I still manage to find other fun things to use. Scraps of cloth can be sewn into reusable gift bags. Sturdy boxes can be reused again and again. As a challenge to myself, I’m going to attempt to make sure that at least half of what I give as gifts this Christmas are used or refashioned items, and nothing that I use for gift wrap will be new. I won’t tell anyone explicitly what I’m doing, because the only thing worse than a hippie is a preachy hippie. If somebody guesses or asks, bonus points for them. But I figure the best way to tell someone I care about them is to give them a gift without harming them or their children in the long run, and it’s not difficult. In fact, I’m happy about the creativity it’s forcing me to use.