How To - Reindeer and Sleigh

How To – Reindeer and Sleigh

Part 1: Reindeer

Reindeer and Santa’s Sleigh are fun images of Christmas. Here we’ll construct the reindeer.

Christmas Traditions includes a project that consists of Santa’s nine reindeer, which you select in the dialog window:

You stitch the reindeer out in five components, each of which is its own stitch file. Of course, you can customize all the pieces into a single file if you have a large enough hoop.

The head can rotate to make the reindeer look up or down:

As you select each reindeer, you’ll see that they are all in slightly different poses and antler combinations. So each one is actually different.

Once you have the pieces embroidered, you’ll have to attach them. We recommend doing this while the reindeer are slightly damp (not wet!) and still pliable.

What you’ll need:
• A sewing machine
• Hot glue gun
• Pipe cleaners (or similar)
• Something to cut the pipe cleaner

Steps to assemble your reindeer:

1.) Stitch the body panels together. We recommend using a narrow triple zig-zag stitch. Start at the front, where the shoulders come together. As you get toward the rear end, you will notice that you are ‘easing’ the sides together, gathering the body up into a bowl shape. Keep sewing until your stitching catches the tail. This easing is what makes the nice 3 dimension rounded shape on the back of the reindeer.

2.) Glue or sew the head sides together. If you get a nice tight joint behind the nose, it stands out better. The head is created in two sides for a couple purposes:

a.) It gives the reindeer two ears.
b.) It add stability needed to hold the antlers.

3.) Slide the assembled head in between the body panels. Make sure to fit the head all the way into the body. The front of the neck should be flush with the front of the body. If you don’t get it set right, the scarf may not fit.

4.) Hot glue or stitch the head to the body, from the inside.

5.) Hot glue the antlers onto the head and button on the scarf.

6.) Hot glue some pipe cleaners onto the legs. This provides the stiffness needed to let your reindeer stand.

Part 2: Sleigh

Santa’s sleigh is a fun, but larger, design. it can be made with varying widths and styles.

Everyone knows that Santa’s reindeer are working animals – at least one night a year! And they would feel bad coming to your home without their sleigh. So here it is! The sleigh has options for the look of the side panels, and the sleighbed can vary its width for the purpose of accommodating various shelf spaces and functions.

Here is the control panel for the sleigh:

Here, you’ll see the design for the sleigh bed. The two extra buttons go toward the front, and act as a points to tie onto – perhaps hitching the reindeer with some ribbon.

To assemble your sleigh, stitch out a right side, a left side and a sleigh bed. Then button the sleigh bed into the sides. You will probably want to stiffen the sleigh and strengthen the side panels. Start by flattening everything out, once rinsed.

Normally we would prefer to use colorful or metallic pipe cleaners, but due to the COVID19 pandemic we were unable to obtain them.

Bend some wire or pipe cleaners to shape, and hot-glue in.

Sometimes you will need to push the ‘buttons’ through the buttonholes with tweezers or similar.

You can see we added a number of pipe cleaners for strength.