Families worldwide that celebrate the Christmas holiday buy the immensely popular Christmas stockings regularly. The stockings come in many different sizes, colors, and designs meant for hanging up and having gifts put into them. Because they are typically used to hold other items, they should be made sturdy enough to hang and hold those items, yet be decorative too.

If you own and are handy with a sewing machine, this should be a fun and easy way to make extra money during the holiday season. You will also need to be able to embroider a persons name or initials on each stocking too. Many sewing machines have this feature added to them now.

If you can offer these items from a web site before the celebration, you should be able to sell quite a few. This is a great idea to offer at holiday boutiques, malls, and fairs too. Try to offer new and exciting designs, but the very traditional designs too. If you are a creative and craft-loving sewer, this should be a fun 'business idea'.

To get plenty of ideas for the stockings, it is a good idea to research the traditional designs and then try to add new modern designs to those, for people to choose from when they place orders with you. Then construct as many as possible to show as samples of what people are able to order from you. Include several different font choices for their names also, that they can order for their names.

These are items that are often purchased as gifts, so it will be important that you ship them quickly after your customers order them from you. You will probably want to ship them priority mail. This could be easy since they shouldn't weigh very much, but you should pass the shipping charges on to the customers. If people purchase them as gifts, make sure that you give them the option to have them wrapped if they choose wrapping, and the option to have the packing invoice shipped separately to the buyers.

You can also advertise your special items in your local newspapers; try to include sample pictures and prices, if you can. You could even offer sewing classes and instruct others how to make these stockings themselves. You should be able to charge about $20 for a 2-hour class that they should be able to finish at least one stocking in and go home with a few simple patterns to use at home.

If you want a business that might keep you busy all year long, you could be creative and design stockings for other things during the year. Since they are designed to hold things, you could have fun designing stockings to hold fun items that are commonly kept year round or design them to go along with other popular holidays during the year. You can create bunny stockings to keep eggs or candy, or you can create a tuxedo like stocking to put champagne in for New Years festivities...the list goes on and on, there are so many ideas that you could design!