Sewaholic Stanley Trees and a Sit and Sew Christmas

Merry Christmas! It’s my favorite time of year – especially now that I’m finished all of that stressful holiday shopping and am enjoying a relaxing 4-day weekend away from work!

Every year, my Sit and Sew group gets together for Christmas. It’s a rare occasion for the husbands and kids to get together all in one place, too! This year, the party was held at Casa de RED and it was a blast! DD made chicken and sausage gumbo and wassail and I made some Sewaholic Stanley Trees for the ladies. The gumbo was tastier than the trees, BTW…

Here they are under our gloriously eclectic tree!

The Stanley Tree is a free PDF pattern that came out November 2015 from Sewaholic Patterns. It come in two sizes and I made the smaller size.

It’s a really simple pattern and I would say it takes no time to sew up, but stuffing 6 pieces per tree and hand sewing the bottoms closed took a bit of time for my sloth sewing pace. Probably the main issue I had while sewing was trying to sew through 6 layers of quilting cotton to attach all the pieces together. My poor Odin couldn’t handle it, even when I changed the needle to a denim one. So I hand-cranked most of that. I swear I can probably crush walnuts with my right hand now. Next time, I’ll use Frigga as she’s all metal and can probably handle that thick madness.

Psssst, check out my “about” page to see who the heck I’m talking about!

I love how both of the varieties came out and still have enough to make one more of each for myself and DD. He will be so happy because he said the trees remind him of something his grandma would have made and he wanted to keep all of these for himself. 🙂

The snowy Christmas scene fabric was gifted to me from my brother and sister-in-law, mentioned in my post here.

And I scored this fabric for free when Dana brought some of her friend’s stash to give away at a Sit and Sew earlier this year.

I felt like the trees needed a little something extra, so I tied and hot-glued red ribbons at the top. I think it helps make it a little more festive. 🙂

The trees were a hit and I scored some awesome stuff myself! In years before, we would do a Secret Santa deal and picked one name for gifts. This year, it was suggested to do an ornament swap, White Elephant style. Everyone who wanted to participate brought an ornament and we picked numbers. The first person chose a random gift bag and revealed the ornament inside. The next person can choose to either steal their ornament or choose a new one. And so on…

I admit I was a meanie and stole this awesome vintage sewing machine ornament!

Would you blame me?

I’m so happy to have had another year of sewing with some of my favorite people (Sit and Sew made 5 years in the summer!). We sure are a great group and I look forward to many more years of sewing, learning, and laughing together!

-RED