With Christmas upon us the most popular theme party of this time seems to be the ugly Christmas sweater party. Now It used to be that you would go to your local thrift shop and find the ugliest sweater that you could and that would be the end of it, unfortunately due to the popularity of this theme sometimes ugly sweaters are actually hard to come by. In face a recent search online, and a visit to my local Wal-Mart has shown that companies are actually starting to create ugly Christmas sweaters on purpose. I guess some people just don't like to get things second hand.
This Christmas season my roommate and I decided to make our own ugly Christmas sweaters rather than buy them. Now this seems like an easy task but as we soon found out there are a lot of variations that we could go with. After some research we decided to go with a puking Rudolph. Part of the reason, at least for me, was that we were going to wear said sweaters to a Christmas party weekend celebration thrown by an organization of boys so I figured they would find the puking Rudolph completely acceptable and possibly even hilarious.
First step was deciding what kind of sweater we actually wanted to use and procuring one. We decided to do a light brown/off white color as our base or sweater color. This would make it neutral so that when we attached other things to it they would stand out more and wouldn't clash with the color of the sweater. We also decided to forgo the traditional sweater/sweatshirt and to use a long sleeve shirt instead. This was a comfort decision because the place where the party was happening would be very hot and neither of us felt like sweating the whole time and being uncomfortable.
Now to gather supplies. While searching for shirts we could not find one in the color we liked for the price that we were willing to pay. Neither of us wanted to spend a lot of money on this project so instead of buyings a shirt in the color we wanted we opted to buy a white long sleeve mens shirt and dye it. The dying process actually turned out to be pretty fun and easy. Instead of buying a brownish colored dye we decided to use tea bags, it also happened that we had a lot of cheap tea bags lying around the apartment so this option turned out to be the cheaper one as well. I remembered when I was little using tea bags to dye paper to make it look older but had never thought to use them to dye fabric. My roommate found a how to online and after boiling about 8 tea bags in a couple cups of water we let the shirts soak in this tea water. Now the longer you let the shirts soak the darker the color you get so ours only soaked for about 45 minutes to an hour. You than dry the shirts on high heat to set in the tea stain, which is effectively how this is colored. Some parts of it were a little uneven since we were dying two shirts in one bucket but it didn't look bad.
The next part is the fun one, gathering all the parts that you want to glue onto the shirt. We started at dollar tree and then went to hobby lobby. Our main source was the ornaments that are made for the mini desk and table trees. These seemed to be the perfect size to put on a shirt. We bought an assortment of items including pom poms, Santa hats, candy canes, bows, bells, ornaments and glitter stickers. We used brown felt to make the shape of Rudolph and a red pom pom for his nose. Than it was a simple matter of gluing the items in a haphazard pattern. I started with Rudolph at the top and used a V shaped pattern that started narrow at the top and got wider as it went down. You simply place everything randomly on the shirt until you get that look you desire. The last step is to glue everything down and let the glue dry. I used a hot glue gun and my roommate used tack/craft glue. They both worked the only main difference was the glue gun took maybe a minute or less to dry while the craft glue had to be dried overnight.
Now you are ready to have the ugliest Christmas sweater at the party! Because really what could top Rudolph puking Christmas?
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