Today work is having an Ugly Sweater Contest. I almost never wear
sweaters anymore (jeans and polo shirts at the office, yay!), but I
wanted to get in on the action. I browsed a few Rosses to see if they
had any cheap ugly sweaters that I could modify, but I couldn't find one
would work for less than $12. I won't spend $12 on a nice looking
sweater these days, much less for a sweater I am specifically going to
make look ugly. So I went shopping in my garage. In the bags and bags of
clothes slated for donation back in May that still haven't made it to a
donation center.
I found an old, bright pink sweater
from Old Navy that I had completely forgotten about that would be
perfect. I also dragged out a skirt with an interesting pattern on it
and a bunch of my little bits of fabric in such patterns as giant purple
roses on black background, red gingham, leaves and acorns, yellow
linen, and a pillow case with ugly red flowers on it. I searched around
online for a holiday-related outline pattern before settling on the
cutest little reindeer kicking up its heels.
Using my
laptop screen as a lightbox, I traced all the parts on to the fusible
interfacing, needing to kinda make bits up to extend beneath one
another, redraw some lines so there was proper overlap, and figure out
in which order the pieces needed to be layered.
I got
all the pieces cut out for one side, then flipped the image horizontally
and made the pieces for the other side. The most fun was picking the
patterns that would appear on each piece. It didn't work out perfectly
by any means, and there was a lot of, "Oh, I wish I had put it THERE
instead!" after I cut them out, but I am super pleased overall. I mean,
it's supposed to be an ugly sweater. It ain't supposed to be fancy!
After
I got both the reindeer finished, I decided it needed something more.
Again browsing through google images for inspiration, I saw a pretty
simple snowflake outline. Easy to trace, but holy hell the cutting out! I
only have two categories of scissors (that I could find last night):
super expensive fabric only if you use this on paper I will CUT YOUR
FINGERS OFF and piece of crap that has approximately half an inch of
useable sharp blade or is only 3" long and might as well be toddler
safety scissors for all that they'll cut anything at all.
So the snowflake was a little frustrating.
But
I got it done. I would love to post the final result, and I will add it
as an edit later, but I'm afraid I cannot right now. I did not end up
winning the contest, and in fact was admonished more than once for,
"That's not an ugly sweater!" which makes no sense at all. Apparently
women have horrible taste in designs, because they thought it was cute
and that I had bought it. I'm contemplating selling it on Etsy now...
Edit: And here's the result. I wrote all of the above on Wednesday or Thursday, but I got pretty busy over the weekend.
