Christmas is coming ..... Santa sacks at the ready!

How bad at blogging have I been these last couple of weeks?! My only excuse is extreme busyness as I’m trying to do so many tasks at once. Not only am I making, sorting, ironing and labelling stock for the last Craft Fair of the season ….

….. I’m organising the old people’s lunch club Christmas party, as part of the Stanborough Chorus I’m singing at several concerts, in addition to making a chocolate birthday cake for excited soon-to-be-four-years-old twins whilst trying to keep up with my normal day-to-day activities!! (work, dogs, home, family, etc etc etc)

As part of getting ready for Candlelit Dartmouth I’ve been photographing my stock as a reference in case I decide to use some of them as projects in my forthcoming book. I couldn’t wait to share the Santa sacks though and just had to tell you about them now!! I chose fresh Nordic-inspired colours for my sacks as they went well with the crisp white cotton – blue and red is traditional, but I thought that the pink and lime green worked well together too.

You can see a selection of the sacks above. I used vintage cotton sheeting as the base, but a repurposed pillowcase would be just the right size – simply add fabric and braid as shown – stitch a channel for a drawstring at the top and applique or heat-press an image onto the centre of the sack.

Here’s a closeup of one of the sacks – I made the drawstring channel by cutting a 3″ strip of fabric to fit around the base plus a bit extra to turn under at the side seam. I turned under 1/2″ top and bottom then machine stitched along the edges to attach to the base leaving the side opening unstitched. Threaded through some 1″ cotton tape and hey presto! You can just see the tape peeping out at the top right of the picture. Trimming the sack was the fun part – I tried to make sacks that both boys and girls would love.

I altered my Santa a little to make space for the name of the lucky recipient to be written in using fabric marker. I applied him directly to the sack using transfer paper and my trusty heat press. If you are making sacks and don’t want to use this method then an applique Santa or other Christmas image would work just as well. If you click on the image above you’ll see the full-size version – please feel free to download it for your own personal use if you want to use my Santa on any of your Christmas goodies.

Will post again next week and let you know how the fair went.

Christmas is coming ….. Santa sacks at the ready!

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