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1 Ignore those dire "Dry Clean Only" warnings and wash the sweaters in boiling hot water, then tumble dry on high heat. If your two sweaters aren't in the same color family -- like, if it would be a bad, bad thing for the colors to bleed into each other -- you might want to handwash separately in cold water, wring out as much of the water as you can, toss the sweaters in the spin cycle, then throw them together to finish drying in the dryer. When you're all done, the sweaters should be shrunken and the weave should have tightened up. If you want a tighter weave, you can repeat the process, but for my stockings, I lazed out and just did the one washing.

2 For each sweater, turn it inside out and place on a flat surface. Smooth out any wrinkles. Using the hemmed bottom of the sweater for the top of the stocking, draw a big stocking on the sweater -- you might have to bear down hard and go over the lines a few times, as the puffiness of sweaters makes them difficult to draw on. Bear in mind that this stocking outline should be slightly bigger than you intend your finished stocking to be, as you'll need to make an allowance for the seams. If you can't draw to save your life, you can also use this handy-dandy pdf pattern; if you don't have a printer that can accommodate tabloid size paper, select the tile option to print it out across several sheets, then tape the whole shebang together.

3 Pin together the front and back of the sweater along the outlines that you've just drawn. Cut out the outlined stockings with a pair of sharp scissors. You should now have four stocking-shaped pieces of sweater, pinned together to form two stockings.

4 Snip off the toes of each stocking and swap them so that stocking A now has stocking B's toes, and vice versa. For each stocking half, pin together the pieces as follows:

scamper on kids!

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