If you are asking when to start Christmas sewing, the answer is now, in October. Christmas Day is Friday 25 December, about ten weeks away. But a fabric advent calendar has to be hanging on the wall by the evening of Monday 30 November, and that is only six weeks. Plan to the wrong date and you lose a third of your time.
That is the whole trick, and almost nobody does it. Everyone counts down to 25 December, because that is the date on the tin. Then they discover in the last week of November that the advent calendar they meant to make is now pointless, the craft fair they booked is on the 6th and the stock does not exist, and the parcel for the cousin in Aberdeen needed posting before the last recommended date, not on it.
So work backwards from the date each item is actually needed. Below is a ten-week working schedule, week by week, with the metreage and the cost of every make. Buy the Christmas fabrics this month, because prints sell through and the good ones do not come back. If you are unsure of quantities for anything not listed here, the guide to how much fabric you need has the general rules.
The backwards plan: what must be finished when
There are five real deadlines in a UK sewing Christmas, and only one of them is 25 December. Write these on the wall before you cut anything.
| What | Needed by | Weeks from now | Why that date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fabric advent calendar | Mon 30 Nov 2026 | 6 | It has to be filled and hanging the night before the 1st. Finished a week early means finished by 23 November. |
| Craft fair stock | Your first fair date | Often 6-7 | Most UK Christmas fairs run from the last weekend of November. Stock must exist before, not during. |
| Posted gifts | Royal Mail's last recommended dates | 8-9 | These are published in November each year. Check them, and finish two days before, not on the day. |
| Handed-over gifts | Fri 18 Dec 2026 | 9 | The last Friday before Christmas is when most people actually see each other. Work parties, school ends. |
| Table linen and decorations | Wed 23 Dec 2026 | 10 | The only category that genuinely can wait, because it is used in your own house. |
Look at the gap. Between the advent calendar deadline and Christmas Day there are three and a half weeks. Between now and the advent calendar deadline there are six. If you spread everything evenly across the ten weeks to Christmas Day you will be short by a month on the one item with the earliest deadline.
The one rule. Every make gets a finish date, and the finish date is the day before it is needed minus one week. The extra week is not padding. It is for the evening the machine eats a bobbin, the week the children are ill, and the cushion cover you cut upside down on a directional print.
October: the long jobs
October is for the things that take more than one sitting. Nothing here is difficult, but each one has enough steps that starting it in December is how people end up sewing at midnight on Christmas Eve.
Week 1 (this week): buy, wash, and cut the advent calendar
Order fabric first. Christmas prints have a short selling season and a fixed print run, so the range you see now is broadly the range there is. Buy the whole festive list in one order and you pay one delivery charge instead of four.
For a 60cm x 90cm hanging advent calendar with 24 pockets you need roughly 2.4m of quilting cotton: 1m for the background panel, about 1m in total for the pockets (four fat quarters is the easy way to get four coordinated prints), and 0.4m for binding, hanging tabs and the sleeve for a dowel. At £1/m that is £2.40; at £3/m, £7.20. Add a 70cm length of dowel and a couple of metres of ribbon from the haberdashery drawer.
Cut the pockets 14cm x 20cm, fold the top 4cm down twice and press, and you have 24 pockets, each finishing about 12cm wide and 11cm deep, which takes a chocolate, a folded note or a small toy. Lay all 24 out on the background before you sew a single one; the arrangement is the part that takes the thought, and it is much cheaper to move a cut rectangle than to unpick a sewn one.
Week 2 (26 October - 1 November): sew the advent calendar
Two evenings of topstitching pockets down in rows. Do it in rows, not columns, so you can chain the whole row under the needle without repositioning. Bind the edges, add the dowel sleeve, hang it, and put it away. That is your earliest deadline dealt with a month ahead of time, which is the single biggest reduction in December stress available to you.
Weeks 3-4 (2-15 November): stockings, anything quilted, and one big cut
Stockings are slower than they look because they are lined, cuffed and hung. A single adult-size stocking, about 45cm long, takes 0.5m of outer fabric and 0.5m of lining. A set of four is 4m in total: £4 at £1/m, £12 at £3/m. Cut all eight outer pieces and all eight lining pieces in one session with a paper template, then sew them as a batch.
Anything quilted goes here too: a lap quilt, quilted placemats, a quilted table runner. Quilting is not hard, but a 100cm x 150cm lap quilt is three distinct days of work - piece, baste and quilt, bind - and it will not compress into a weekend. Top from ten fat quarters, 1.7m backing, 1.7m wadding. At £1/m the cotton element is around £4.50 with the wadding on top.
Prewash in October, not December. Cotton shrinks 3-5% on the first wash and red Christmas prints are the worst offenders for running dye. Wash and press everything the week it arrives. Doing it in October costs you one load. Doing it after you have made a gift costs you the gift.
November: gifts, in batches
November is production. The mistake is making gifts one at a time - cut a tote, sew a tote, press a tote, start again. Cutting is the slow part and it does not get faster with practice, so do all of it at once.
Weeks 5-6 (16-29 November): sew the gifts in batches
Spend one full session, two or three hours, cutting every gift on your list. Stack the pieces per item in a labelled freezer bag. From then on every sewing session starts with a bag and a machine already threaded, which is the difference between finishing a pouch in twenty minutes and not starting it at all.
Then sew in like-with-like batches: all the zip pouches in one evening, all the totes in another. Six lined totes made one at a time is about six hours. Six made as a batch - all outers, all linings, all top seams - is closer to three and a half.
Week 7 (30 November - 6 December): posted gifts and fair stock
This is the week that carries the most work, so keep it clear. If you are selling, your stock has to be boxed and priced before your first fair - most UK Christmas fairs start on the last weekend of November, so for those, the stock has to be finished inside week 6.
The hard stop: 30 November
The advent calendar goes up on the 30th, filled, with nothing left to sew. Everything posted long-distance should be finished in the week after it, even though the Royal Mail posting date is later, because a finished parcel sitting by the door is a solved problem and a half-made one is not.
December: table linen, wrapping, and slack
By around 6 December every gift should be done. What is left is the pleasant part, and it is all straight seams.
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Table runner, 40cm x 180cm finished. 0.6m top and 0.6m backing at 140cm wide, cut two pieces 44cm x 184cm. £1.20 at £1/m. One evening.
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Napkins, set of six, 42cm finished. 0.9m of 140cm cotton, cut six 46cm squares, double-turned hem. 90p at £1/m. Ninety minutes.
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Reusable fabric gift bags, set of six. 1m of cotton, cut twelve pieces 26cm x 34cm, drawstring channel at the top. £1 at £1/m, and they come back every year, which is the neatest bit of making your sewing more sustainable going.
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Bunting, 3m. 0.5m of cotton, 24 triangles cut 20cm x 22cm, 3.5m of bias tape. 50p at £1/m.
The last fortnight before Christmas - 10 to 23 December - is deliberately empty. That is the slack. It absorbs the zip that goes in backwards, the late gift for the person who turns up unannounced, and the school nativity costume you find out about on the 12th. If nothing goes wrong, you get two free weeks in December, which almost nobody gets.
Twelve gift makes with metreage and cost
Every figure below is a worked example at indicative rates, based on 140cm-wide cotton unless stated. Prices vary by range, so treat the £1/m column as the arithmetic rather than a quote. Times assume you are batching at least four of the item.
| Make | Fabric | Key cut sizes | Time each | Fabric cost at £1/m |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zip pouch, 20cm | 0.2m outer + 0.2m lining | 4 pieces 23cm x 16cm | 20 min | 40p |
| Drawstring gift bags, set of 3 | 0.5m | 6 pieces 26cm x 34cm | 40 min the set | 50p |
| Scrunchies, set of 5 | 0.3m | 5 strips 60cm x 11cm | 35 min the set | 30p |
| Bunting, 3m | 0.5m + 3.5m bias tape | 24 triangles 20cm x 22cm | 1 hr | 50p |
| Quilted coasters, set of 4 | 2 fat quarters + scrap wadding | 8 squares 12cm x 12cm | 50 min the set | ~50p |
| Cushion cover, 45cm envelope | 0.6m | 1 front 47cm x 47cm, 2 backs 47cm x 32cm | 30 min | 60p |
| Oven gloves, double | 0.5m cotton + 0.5m insulated wadding | 2 pieces 85cm x 18cm | 45 min | 50p + wadding |
| Adult apron | 1m | Body 70cm x 90cm, ties 3 strips 8cm x 90cm | 50 min | £1.00 |
| Lined tote bag | 0.7m outer + 0.7m lining | 4 pieces 42cm x 40cm, straps 2 x 60cm x 10cm | 35 min batched | £1.40 |
| Wash bag, wipe-clean lining | 0.5m outer + 0.5m lining | 4 pieces 26cm x 36cm, 25cm zip | 40 min | £1.00 |
| Table runner, 40cm x 180cm | 0.6m top + 0.6m backing | 2 pieces 44cm x 184cm | 1 hr | £1.20 |
| Fleece throw, 130cm x 160cm | 1.7m of 150cm fleece | 1 piece, edges turned or blanket-stitched | 1 hr | £1.70 at £1/m; £5.10 at £3/m |
Add the notions and the picture is still cheap. Twelve of those makes, one of each, comes to roughly 8.5m of fabric: £8.50 at £1/m, £25.50 at £3/m, before zips, cord and thread. That is a full handmade Christmas for the price of two shop-bought gifts, and it is the reason the maths is worth doing in October rather than panic-buying in December.
The batching multiplier. Cutting six totes takes about 50 minutes. Cutting one takes about 20. Sewing is roughly linear; cutting is not. That is why this plan puts one big cutting session in mid-November and nothing but machine time after it.
Buying fabric early: what sells out, and how bundles help
Christmas prints behave differently from ordinary cotton. They are printed for one season, they are not reprinted mid-season, and the popular ones - traditional red-and-green holly, Scandinavian folk prints, anything metallic - are usually gone by early November. Plain-coloured cottons and fleece stay available all year, so if you have to stage your buying, buy the prints in October and the plains whenever.
Two other things sell through early: fat quarter bundles in festive colourways, and cotton in the deep reds and forest greens that everybody wants at once. If your plan needs a matched set of prints - advent pockets, patchwork stockings, coasters - a bundle solves the coordination problem as well as the availability one. There is a longer case for that in the piece on why fabric bundles make sense, and a fat quarter bundle covers the coordination problem in one go.
One order, one list
Total your metreage before you shop. From the plan above, a fairly typical first order looks like this:
- Advent calendar: 1.4m cotton + 4 fat quarters
- Four stockings: 2m outer + 2m lining
- Six gift bags and three drawstring sets: 1.5m
- Two totes, two wash bags, four pouches: 3.6m
- Table runner and six napkins: 2.1m
- One fleece throw: 1.7m
That is about 14.3m plus a bundle. At £1/m, £14.30. At £3/m, £42.90. Order 10% over on anything with a directional or large-scale print, because a repeating holly motif that has to run the same way on every pocket will eat the margin you thought you had.
One last thing, and it is the reason the plan starts this week rather than next month. October is the last point in the year when Christmas sewing is still a hobby. After the middle of November it is a job with a deadline. Same fabric, same seams, completely different evening.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start Christmas sewing?
October. Starting in mid-October still gives you six weeks to the advent calendar deadline of 30 November and about ten to Christmas Day. Cut the long jobs - advent calendar, stockings, anything quilted - in October, batch the gifts through November, and keep December for table linen and repairs.
What can I sew for Christmas gifts?
Lined totes, zip pouches, drawstring gift bags, oven gloves, aprons, cushion covers, wash bags, scrunchies, table runners and fleece throws all sew fast and need no fitting. Most use under a metre. At £1 per metre a zip pouch costs about 40p in fabric and a tote about £1.40.
How much fabric do I need for a fabric advent calendar?
About 2.4m of quilting cotton for a 60cm x 90cm hanging: 1m for the background, roughly 1m across four fat quarters for 24 pockets, and 0.4m for binding and hanging tabs. At £1 per metre that is £2.40; at £3 per metre, £7.20, plus a dowel and ribbon.
What are the easiest Christmas things to sew?
Drawstring gift bags, bunting, scrunchies and envelope cushion covers. All four are straight seams, no fitting, no fastenings beyond a cord or a bit of elastic. A set of three drawstring bags uses 0.5m and takes about 40 minutes once you batch the cutting.
