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Holiday DIY: Christmas Pudding


I love Victorian Christmas culture, including the traditional Christmas pudding cannon ball so when I saw several examples of Christmas pudding doorstops I knew that I wanted one. I began searching for where you could buy one of these darling little holiday home additions but they seemed to only exist as pictures on Pinterest that didn’t have useful links so I decided I just had to make my own.



In theory I can sew. As I’ve said before, I grew up standing at my grandmother’s side watching her create amazing things and I took a sewing class in high school. Both of these things should mean that I could come up with a workable plan and pattern to create my own Christmas pudding. The main thing that works against me in all of my sewing projects is my impatience. My grandmother and Mrs. Ingram would both be appalled at how haphazardly I tend to tackle projects. I haven’t sewn with a true pattern in years and I’m not sure I could still read one but I decided to give this a go with a basic ball pattern I found online. (I wasn’t even sure how big of a ball this would make.)


Here you can see my abysmal piecing together.


I knew the biggest challenge I would have is the top and bottom of my pudding because I could exactly remember how to cleanly line up the very center meeting point of all my pieces and I wasn’t stressed enough to watch a how-to video so per usual, I just winged it. Truthfully, I knew I would be covering the top with “cream” and no one would see the bottom.


My managing supervisor.He's.very judgy.


The ball construction was actually far easier than I expected with my only mistake being to not leave my hole large enough to stuff my “weights”, aka pinto beans, in easily. Once again, I decided I could just make the “cream” a little longer to cover my appalling hand sewing.


I also wanted it to have a somewhat patchworky, vintage feel so I sewed a little leaf and stem without much of a plan which is obvious from the look of both. I also tried to sew the cream out of white cotton originally. I thought I could double it, turn it and press it flat for the right effect. As you can see from the picture, no amount of pressing was going to make this not look like a critter that has been run over by a snowmobile.




My plan B was to use felt rather than try to make a stronger attempt at the roadkill pelt. The felt actually worked perfectly with just a small rough drawing and then just stitching it on by hand. Finally, I used these little red pom poms to add my holly berries and cover all my indiscriminate sewing. I kind of wish they were a bit darker so it didn’t look so cartoony but you’ve just got to work with what Hobby Lobby provides. Overall, I am incredibly pleased with the outcome and I may even try to perfect my techniques and make some more for the future. It was a quick project that required very little material and would be cute done with old scraps from my grandmother’s collection.



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