The story before us
Before these stockings were made at The Sunday Studio, they lived another life
in the hands of designer and maker Diane Sudhoff of South House Designs.
What began as a creative career became a Christmas tradition for thousands of
families
(and eventually found a new home with us).
After years designing textile products for wholesale showrooms, catalogs and retailers, Diane opened South House Boutique on Etsy. She described it as a creative playground: a place to experiment with fabrics, techniques and ideas outside the demands of traditional retail.
Read Diane's South House story →
Diane later pointed to 2010 as the moment the stockings became a real part of the business. Better Homes & Gardens also came calling during these early years, bringing national attention to her designs.
That same year, she decided the stockings should do some good beyond the mantel and began donating a portion of sales to fight hunger.
The giving program shifted its focus locally to Harvesters. In 2012, Diane recorded 491 stockings sold and a donation she reported as helping provide more than 6,000 meals.
Giving wasn't added after the business became successful. It grew right alongside the stockings themselves.
The 2013 collection shows the idea behind these stockings in full bloom. Diane encouraged customers to mix across groups, forget rigid matching rules and build a mantel where every stocking had personality but still belonged.
She later recorded 1,323 stockings sold that season. Her Lime & Coconut work also became part of a Better Homes & Gardens Christmas Ideas feature.
Diane ended December 30 with 999 stockings ordered. Then a returning customer came back for one more, landing the season on exactly 1,000.
It's a tiny story that says a lot about this business: people didn't just buy stockings once. They came back when their families changed.
At its peak, this was not a tiny handful of holiday orders. Diane recorded more than a thousand stockings in a single season, while continuing to dream, source, sew and photograph new groups year after year.
By summer 2021, she was already photographing roughly ten groups for Christmas — proof that the life of a stocking starts long before December.
By the later collections, Diane had a clear language for the philosophy she'd been practicing for years: stockings should suit the home and the people who live there. They can be different from one another and still clearly belong together.
What carries forward
Across years of collections, a few ideas kept showing up. They're the parts of the South House legacy The Sunday Studio is intentionally carrying forward.
2025 · A new chapter
Diane passed the stocking and tree-skirt side of South House Designs to The Sunday Studio, along with patterns, fabrics and years of saved remnants.
That matters because these stockings were always meant to grow with a family. When someone comes back years later after a wedding, a new baby or another person joins the Christmas morning chaos, we can often make something that genuinely belongs beside the stockings already on the mantel.
Diane put it simply:
Same designs, same fabrics, same tradition. Just a new creative at the helm.
Today
I'm adding new fabrics, collections and ideas of my own, while protecting the things that made these stockings worth carrying forward in the first place: thoughtful design, handmade construction, room for families to grow and the belief that where something comes from still matters.
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