Family Tree... Skirt

A while back, my mother-in-law asked me to make a personalized Christmas tree skirt for her tree. One Christmas when my husband and his sister were kids, they bought a felt Christmas tree skirt at a craft store and painted each family member's name on it with glitter glue or puffy paint or something like that. Over the years, this tree skirt was either damaged or disappeared in all of the holiday decor. So my mother-in-law had a great idea... an updated version of her beloved family tree skirt.

I had never made a Christmas tree skirt and I wasn't sure where to begin. But then I remembered trusty google and found this fabulous video tutorial for making a tree skirt. It's really not that hard!

A couple of things I learned... the video doesn't specify what width of fabric to buy. Make sure you buy 54" home dec fabric or else it won't be big enough. The first fabric I wanted to use was an apparel fabric that was only 49" wide... not wide enough. I also learned that it's much easier to use a very small piping / cording or to select the type of trim that you glue to the top of the skirt. I started out trying to sew a super thick corded cable inside my seam... disaster.

I used my embroidery machine to embroider my in-laws names, kids and spouses, grandchildren and a very special aunt. There are 12 first names on there. I wish the text was a bit bigger but my options were limited.

I plan to sew this label to the lining of the tree skirt.

After embroidering 12 names, my machine was ready for a rest. So I opted to use printable fabric (can be found here) and designed this label in Microsoft Word. The text is not crooked as it looks in the picture. That was just the way the fabric was laying when I took the photo.

It was hard to capture this tree skirt in pictures but hopefully you get the idea. I'll be taking this with me to North Carolina to present to my mother-in-law this weekend. Hope she likes it as much as Maddy does!  :-)