Atlas Pillow Stockings… with a surprise inside!

When you have a family as large as I do, you have to get creative when it comes to stocking stuffers. On Christmas Eve, we have about 30 for a sit down dinner and gift exchange – and to make the party more festive, we put up stockings along the mantle (although the mantle is sometimes not long enough!). Store bought stockings can sometimes be more than you want to spend, so why not use paper? You can actually make these out of any type of paper – grocery bags, leftover wrapping paper, butcher paper, construction paper.

We loved the idea of using a map as our “fabric” because families from all over travel to see one another, and its a cool way to showcase all of the different places our families live. We simply took a Road Atlas, we chose Southern California for obvious reasons, and cut out two stocking shapes and placed on top of one another. Using a sewing machine, we sewed all edges together except for the top. Next, we filled the stocking with a surprise (see below), which can be just about anything as long as its not too heavy. Once the stocking was filled, we sewed the remaining edge and added a cute ribbon for some holiday pizzazz. We hole-punched the top center and strung our stocking up with ribbon. This took no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Tip: use maps from where each person was born, lives, or dreams to go one day!