I have always wanted my own nativity set to display around the holidays. I could have easily bought one, but for some reason I always wanted to make my own. Now I know this panel was designed with kids in mind, but when I saw it, I knew I had to have it! Stacy Iest Hsu just released a new nativity panel called Joyful Joyful and it’s adorable!

I will admit I have never done something like this before. I was super nervous to dive in, but I promised myself when I bought it that I wouldn’t let it sit in my sewing room for a year like other things have. It was a compromise with myself to justify the money I was spending on it. Then I panicked when I read the instructions on how to make this. What did I get myself into?! Stabilizer? Foam? VELCRO?! All the things I have never used before. So I started with making the nativity characters first since it was the only part of this project I felt I knew how to do.

Making the characters were super easy! First you need to cut them out on the dotted line.

I did all of the characters at the same time to create an assembly line!

Then you sew the front to the back, right sides together, leaving a little hole at the bottom. Once sewn together, it’s time to turn them inside out! I used a Clover Point 2 Point Turner. They work great for those hard to reach points!

It’s finally time for the fun part; stuffing! You can stuff them with anything you desire, I decided to use some Silky Poly-fil I found on Amazon.

Once you stuff the characters, it’s time to sew the bottom together. Don’t forget to pin!

You can hand sew, or if you’re pressed for time, you can machine sew the bottom and all around the character!

After doing these steps many times over, you have yourself all the nativity characters!

I spent one night sewing together all the characters in this project. In the next post, I will go over how to sew together the nativity barn! That’s where all the fun stuff comes into play; like using the stabilizer, velcro, and I may have had a mini panic attack at one point when I thought I ruined it. Don’t worry! Everything worked out in the end… you’ll just have to read about it in the next post! See you all then and happy sewing!

– Leslee