‘Tis the count­down to Christ­mas, I thought I’d share a most sin­cere idea for the most prac­ti­cal gift. Who does­n’t need an extra pair of socks? Great alter­na­tive to choco­late cov­ered marsh­mal­low San­tas when you need to get an under $5 secret San­ta gift. 

The pom pom on top is actu­al­ly a fun fes­tive hair tie! I’ll show you how I made that as well.

I got a pack of 5 reused yarn socks from MUJI, they’re soft and love­ly (not to men­tion that it’s such a nice relax­ing expe­ri­enc­ing when brows­ing around at the MUJI store) and cost around $20 CAD, which rounds out to about $4 a pair. 

This is super sim­ple and involves things that you prob­a­bly have stashed away at home if you’re a crafter:

• A new pair of socks in cup­cake colour
• An elas­tic band
• Light card stock or scrap­book­ing paper (I bought a sheet of gold metal­lic paper from Michaels for 99 cents)
• Cup­cake wrap­per tem­plate (there are tons of print­able tem­plates out there, I can’t seem to find the one I used >_<, but this one seems just as great)
• Scis­sors
• Scotch tape
• Mug of tea (essen­tial!)

Here we have our pair of socks, and the elas­tic band.

With the socks stacked togeth­er, fold them in half length­wise. The heels will stick out but that’s ok.

Start­ing from the cuff end, roll up the socks.

Secure the sock roll with elas­tic band.

Have a sip of tea. Trans­fer cup­cake wrap­per pat­tern onto the back of card stock / scrap­book­ing paper, and cut out the pattern.

Wrap the wrap­per around the sock roll, and secure with a piece of tape.

Repeat with all the pairs of socks you’ve got and set them aside.

Now we make the pom pom hair tie :D 

I used: 

• A fork
• Small amount of red worsted weight yarn 
• Small amount of spark­ly sil­ver yarn (for a fes­tive touch)
• Scis­sors
• Hair elas­tics
• Fab­ric glue (great to have, but not essential)

Using a fork to make small pom poms isn’t my orig­i­nal idea. There are a few tuto­ri­als out there, like this one from Eskim­i­mi Makes.

Basi­cal­ly, you would wind the yarn around the prongs of the fork (as you can see I used two dif­fer­ent yarns, and I cut off a length of the sil­ver yarn for wind­ing, rather than wind­ing direct­ly from the skein, to make things easier)…

… after you’re done wind­ing, cut yarn. Then cut a length of red yarn about 6 inch­es long, and tie the yarn around the mid­dle by thread­ing one yarn end through the base of the 2nd and 3rd prongs of the fork, and the oth­er yarn end between the 2nd and 3rd prongs at the tip.

Trim the pom pom but leave the tying yarn long.

Using the tying yarn, tie the pom pom to the hair elas­tic with dou­ble knot. Apply a dab of fab­ric glue (if you have it) to the knot to extra secure it.

Here we have our cup­cake top­pings! I also bought these adorable straw­ber­ry bells from Etsy sell­er Mim­iLo­lo, I attached them to cell phone charm hang­ers (not sure if they’re called that, but you know what I mean), thought they’d make great zip­per pull or fes­tive back­pack orna­ments! :D

If you know that the gift recip­i­ent won’t like hair ties or zip­per pulls, a sim­ple Toot­sie Pop might make the best alter­na­tive topping.

I pulled the hair elas­tic / cell phone charm hang­er through the mid­dle of the sock rolls using a cro­chet hook.

Ta-da! The most sin­cere socks of them all! Linus would be proud. (see It’s the Great Pump­kin, Char­lie Brown)

I put some of them in recy­cled pack­ag­ing from gift soaps.

And I made a flat-bot­tom gift bag with wrap­ping paper fol­low­ing this tuto­r­i­al. I then fold­ed the top down, punched two holes at the top through all lay­ers, thread­ed a fan­cy string through and tied a bow.

Have a sweet week, everyone!