How To Sew A Fabric Christmas Tree ~ DIY Christmas Decor ~ The Sewing Channel

We are sewing big this Christmas. I'm going to teach you how to sew these beautiful, show-stopping, gorgeous fabric Christmas trees. And it starts right now. Hi friends! Tracy here from the Sewing Channel. Welcome back! And if you're new here, Merry Christmas and welcome! If you clicked on this video, you probably not only love sewing, but love decorating for Christmas as well. Well, I do too. Today's tutorial was inspired by the 1980s. I drafted my own pattern and I came up with this beautiful 22-inch stuffed fabric Christmas tree. These trees are so stinkin' cute. You'll want to make them in all different fabrics. Product links that I use in today's video are down in the description box as well, along with the free patterns. Please watch the entire video. I give you major tips and tricks to troubleshoot this Christmas tree. And if you skip ahead, you might miss something very important. Enough talking already! It's Christmas! Let's get busy! The link for this pattern is in the description box. There'll be four pages. First things first, the 2-inch mark. Match your 2-inch ruler up with my 2 inches on my paper here and we're good to go. If it's less than 2 inches or more than 2 inches, you need to adjust your printer setting. I'm no drafting expert for sure, but I really did try. On page 1, the small tree and the medium tree. All tree patterns will be cut on the fold of the fabric going along the grain line. Page 2 has the top part of the tree for the large tree and the extra large tree, and it also has the bottom of the size large. Page 3 has the middle part of the extra large tree on it. Page 4 is the very bottom of the extra large tree. If you look back at page number 1, you couldn't see it, but there was a little half circle type pattern piece. That actually gets cut out and connected to the spot there on page 4 for the extra large tree. I'm just showing you what they look like when they're all cut out right there on the fold line and how we're going to connect those other pieces. Here's the top of the large and the extra large tree. What you're going to do is just butt those pieces right up next to each other just like that and tape them together. Now that top part is also a part of the extra large tree, so you may need to print that one out twice. If you go ahead and connect all three pieces for the extra large tree, and don't forget that little half circle piece, there you have it. Go ahead and tape it all together. So this is my gift to all of my subscribers and anybody who watches my video, these four beautiful Christmas tree patterns just for you. Merry Christmas. Now take your four cut trees and we're going to pair them up right sides together so that we have two sets of trees that we're working with. Find the middle bottom of the tree and about two inches or so on both sides, go ahead and mark it with two straight pins. Those pins will help remind us not to sew in those two spots. Remember though, the bigger the tree is, the farther from that middle you will have to pin. Then go ahead and pin the rest of the tree just like you see me do there. Because we're sewing at an angle, we're actually sewing on the bias, so we have to pay particular attention to the way we're going to sew this tree. First on the right hand side, you're going to start at the very tip top of the tree, and then you're going to sew down just where you see me pointing. You're going to go all the way down to the bottom and around that bottom curve, and after you've hit that bottom curve and you're at the very bottom, you're going to go in about an inch or so and then stop sewing and reinforce. After you've reinforced that right side, clip your threads and then flip your tree over because now we're going to sew from the tip down on the other side all the way to the bottom and then we're going to reinforce again after we've come around that curved area about an inch or so, you're going to reinforce and clip your threads. After both sides are sewn all the way down, now that middle bottom, we're going to sew about two to three inches straight across right between those two pins. You see, when we go to stuff our tree, we need to be able to get our hands up both sides of the tree. I'm demonstrating there with my hands, but you just have to be able to make that opening big enough for your hand, depending on the size of your hand. If we didn't sew starting at the narrow part of our tree and going down wider, our fabric would stretch terribly and things just would not match up in the end. That's why we sew down one side, flip it, and then sew from narrow to wide. I hope that makes sense. If you've ever had trouble with your fabric stretching before, that's probably what was happening. You were probably sewing in the wrong direction. So you should always go from narrow to wide when you're working with any kind of angle bias seam. When I come around the corner here on the very bottom, you'll see I do lift up a lot on my presser foot, and that just helps me get a nice curve around. Now you see, I stopped there, right there, I reinforced at the bottom, and now I'm going to go ahead and just sew that middle area about 3 inches or so, 2 to 3 inches. On that 3 inch area, remember to reinforce when you start and when you stop, because our hands are going to be pushing stuffing up in those side areas. Now it's time to flip our tree over and start at the very tip top and sew all the way down. I love Christmas music. This is what we should have so far. You should have two openings for our hand to push the stuffing up in our tree. Next you're going to take the sharpest pair of scissors that you own, and in between the branches you are going to snip right up to the threads without cutting the threads, just like you see me do right there. You see, this step is very important because if we don't cut this area in between our branches, when we go to turn it right side out, it's going to be puckered something terribly. Then go ahead and just snip the tips right off of the end of the branches. This will ensure a nice pointy tree branch when we turn it right side out. Now it's time to turn it right side out. Go ahead and put your hand in one of those holes and just flip it right through. Use one of those little pointy tools, I have a little white pointy tool here, but be sure not to press real hard or you'll poke right through. Just make sure that everything is nice and crisp, pushed out, and then we're going to take a hot iron and we're going to give it a good press on both sides. When you get down to the bottom, this is how we're going to iron it. You're going to fold about a quarter inch seam allowance in on those openings that you have. This will help us when we go to sew that shut later. You just want to press that nice and flat, just like you see me do here on both sides. You should be doing this with both pieces as you go. You should have two Christmas tree pieces right now. This is what we have so far. We have two trees and both of them each have two separate openings in the bottom. Grab your polyfill, we're going to do just a bit of prep work. It's not much of a struggle later, we're going to go ahead and just on each of the tips of our tree branches, we're going to shove just a little tiny bit of our polyfill into those points. This will help us because I found after doing one tree the first time that it's so narrow in there once we sew them together that it's hard to get your fingers up there to get it where you want it to go. The only point though that you do not want to pre-stuff is right there on the top. Don't stuff there, not yet anyways. Once you have all of the tips pre-stuffed, then you're going to lay them nicely, one on top of the other. You just want to make sure that everything is lined up from front to back, all the points, fuss with it a little bit, make sure that everything is nice and straight, and then you're going to go ahead and pop some pins. I first started with a pin in the top, and then as I went down I would put my pin in front of the stuffing area so that way it kind of laid flat sort of in the middle where I'm going to sew next. Once everything is lined up and pinned, you can go ahead and pick out a ribbon if you so choose. Cut it to whatever length that you prefer, and then we're going to go ahead and slide it in between the two pieces of the top because that's going to be the top of the tree. We're going to go ahead and pop a pin right in there, and then as we sew down the center we'll grab that ribbon along with it. It'll make more sense later. Next you're going to take your ruler and a pencil or any marking utensil really, and you're going to make a line right down the center of that tree. Head on over to the sewing machine and sew from the tip top straight down the middle to the very bottom. Are you enjoying my fabric Christmas tree tutorial? If so, be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe today. Take the pins out, and this is what you should have so far. Grab your polyfill, lots of it, and let's stuff each of the four sleeves. These trees take a lot of stuffing, I ain't even kidding ya. You can sort of change the look of this tree just by the way that you stuff it. You can overstuff it to where it's just really firm. I myself prefer medium stuffed, almost just under medium. I like it just to be squeezable, but you can do it however you like. You will realize when you're in the middle of stuffing this tree why I had you stuff the tips first. You'll be thankful. Now on to some hand sewing. Here I have a curved needle, but you can definitely use a straight one, and I used some embroidery floss. I just took one strand off of that. Now I did that because it's a little bit stronger and it's a lot easier to sew with than thread. It doesn't get caught up. To help me hold that seam together where we ironed there in the bottom, I used some heavy duty, I don't know, rubber coated clips. They don't hurt my material and they're really, really strong. I think I got them at the dollar store. When I clip it right there on one end, it just helps hold things together so I can get the other end sewn up. Here I'm showing you on top of my table how I hand sew it, but how I really did it was I sat down and put that tree between my legs and sewed till my heart was content. After you're done hand sewing and you knot everything off, you're going to go ahead and just squeeze your stuffing all over, make sure everything is distributed just right, and then you're going to tie your bow and get that how you would like it. Oh my word, this tree is too cute. This video was so much fun to make. Please leave me some comments down below. Let me know what you think of this tree. Tell me if you made it. Encourage me. Until next time on the Sewing Channel, Merry Christmas!