Christmas Tree Softie

Because I would like to be a seasonal house, I am working on making decorations for all the seasons. I have to jump ahead and do all of the seasons and holidays because I won't have that much time (or any time) once Teeny comes. I sort of skipped Thanksgiving for now because my fall decorations work for Thanksgiving too. So I moved on to Christmas.

I found this Christmas tree softie tutorial and got really excited. I thought they were adorable and looked relatively easy to make. Rather than make my patchwork random colors the way they did, I made mine alternating red and green. I was also really happy that they made both a big one and a little one so it would follow the theme with my pumpkins.

I picked out all my fabrics and cut them to size, which took much longer than I thought it would but mostly because it always takes me a while to pick the perfect fabrics for a project. I followed their suggested method to make the patchwork. I was really scared of it because I didn't have much experience with the fusible interfacing but it worked out fine. I actually used fusible web and attached a thing fabric to the back (both sides of it were sticky) to make it stiffer. This was PLENTY stiff. I was kind of surprised you needed it so stiff if you were going to stuff it anyway but I knew better than to stray from the directions.

When I made the patchwork, I did back stitch but it turned out it didn't matter because you cut off the bottom anyway. Because of this, when you turn it right side out or back to inside out, you rip out stitches because the tree is SO stiff and because you had no way of knowing where to back stitch ahead of time. This frustrated me greatly! On my big tree, it was okay because the quarter inch seam allowance for sewing on the felt bottom covered it (although getting that bottom on was no easy feat either...). The little tree was basically ruined. I had the option to resew it by hand but it hardly seemed worth it because the tree turned out so small. After the bottom was sewn on the little one, I realized that this one wasn't going to make it. It didn't have a pretty side to display. All sides had something wrong with them. Mine turned out looking like a traffic cone because the bottom was sort of squared off. Also, because you use the leftover scraps of your first big square, the squares are much too big for the little trees and only two rows (if that) get displayed. This was beyond repair so I decided to be done with it.

Here is my big tree.

To hand sew it closed was also a big deal because of how stiff the fabric was. Even my sewing machine with my walking foot was starting to struggle.

I will not be making this again. They were really cute but there has to be easier way to do it because this was just ridiculous!