How to Customize Store Bought Christmas Stockings on a Budget

After years of searching for the perfect Christmas stockings for my mantle I finally found them last year… or at least the closest thing I’ve found. A set of stockings with beautiful lace, sequin tops and gray polka dotted bottoms.

Of course, the main difference I was looking for was a blush faux fur bottom instead of the gray polka dotted fabric. Unfortunately the etsy shop (Stitched by Sisters UK) wasn’t able to find faux fur to make these babies exactly what I wanted. So I resigned myself to the task of sewing these stockings from scratch.

I figured faux fur would be easy to find so I set out to locate a bit of blush lace with a large drop scale pattern… and everything I found was a bit pricey. Just take a look at this lace that’s $30 for 20 centimeters. So I started to think outside the box and found a children’s dress with a similar lace overlay.

I bought the biggest dress they had (girls size 6) for $18.80 and then the gates of heaven opened and this year’s Target collection included ready made, beautiful blush faux fur stockings for $15 each! Which means instead of sewing these babies from scratch we’ll be able to add a simple lace overlay to our Store Bought Stockings for custom stockings that only cost about 19.75 each.

Score!

Let’s get started on this quick and easy transformation!

Supplies

How to Add Lace to Store Bought Stockings

Step 1: Cut Your Lace

Alright y’all, if you’ve bought ready to use lace you can skip this step completely… but if you’ve bought a little dress to use as lace you’ll need to separate the lace from the dress.

We don’t want to sew an entire dress onto our stockings!

Luckily this is a fairly easy (if tedious) step. Simply take a pair of fabric scissors and carefully cut up the seam of the dress until you are directly under the second tier of lace. We’ll use the entire bottom tier of lace for our stockings so the easiest solution is to carefully cut all the way around the skirt following the scallops in the second tier of lace.

This will take a few minutes but it is a little girls dress… so not too many minutes! Once you’re finished cutting all the way around you can set the dress aside… we are finished with it.

At this point you can use the remaining dress as a dress or keep it for fabric in a future project!

Once you have your lace cut it should look roughly like this… a beautiful lace with a scalloped edge and a field of polka dots on a sheer illusion netting.

Topped with a few beautiful peeks… from where we cut off the top tier of lace! We won’t need a jagged edge for our little project so once the entire piece of lace was cut free of our dress I simply cut the top edge of our lace straight across.

Easy peezy lemon squeezy!

Step 2: Pin the Lace to Your Stocking

Now that our lace is loose (and not attached to a dress!) it’s time to attach it to our stocking. With the bottom tier of lace I was able to add cuff’s to all four of my stockings (yay!) so start by folding your lace over until you have four equal sections.

Make sure that the length you’re left with will go around your stocking with enough lace for a small seam at the back of the stocking. The easiest way to do this is to smoothly wrap the lace around your stocking.

Once you’re confident that you have enough lace go ahead and cut the length for your first stocking. Keep in mind that we want to be careful but if we mess up some of our lace we can cut the second tier of lace off our little dress… so we won’t be completely up a creek without a paddle!

Once I cut the first length of lace for our first stocking I repeated the process with our other 3 stockings and had just enough lace with all 4. Perfect!

Step 3: Pin the Lace to your Stocking

Ready to pin everything in place? Start by folding over your lace so that you have a smooth edge (you don’t need to fold it far, about a centimeter of a seam along the top will do) and then start to pin the lace to the top of your stocking.

You want the top seam on your stocking to line up with the top seam of your stocking (so that your stitches can go into the stocking seam that already exists). Go ahead and pin the top all the way across, then pin the bottom of the cuff to keep things straight, and finally pin the seam so that you can sew the two pieces together.

Pinning the bottom of the cuff will help you to be able to fold over a slight seam at the end of the lace and create an actual seam down the side of the stocking.

Looking good!

Step 4: Sew the Lace in Place!

Ready for the fun part? Let’s start sewing!!

This is a simple project and we are not going to start complicating it now… a need and thread is all you need to get started. Simply work your way around the stocking on the top edge. Make sure you take tiny stitches directly into the top seam of the stocking… this will secure the lace without leaving any trace that you added something extra to the stocking.

It will be like the lace was always suppose to be there!

If you’re having a hard time sewing into the seam or “stitching into the ditch” as my Mom calls it you can roll the stocking a bit so that the seam is flat and work along the flat surface.

Whatever floats your boat!

Just make sure that once you go all the way around the top of the stocking you also sew the seam of the lace. For this seam you don’t have to attach the lace to the stocking, simply sew straight down the pins and secure the seam with tiny stitches.

Perfect!

Now repeat that process as many times as you need (in this case I wanted four stockings so I had to sew lace cuffs four times!) and you’re good to go. Let’s hang these babies!