DIY Ugly Christmas Sweater (Under $6 to Make)

I love any reason to have a good party, and the holidays are a perfect reason. This Christmas I hosted an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party, and I totally didn’t come a lot out-of-pocket to make it happen. Sure I totally could have went to the store and searched for the ~~perfect~~ ugliest Christmas sweater that I could find, but I am a bit of a cheapskate, like extremely. I can’t see myself buying a hideous sweater that I am only going to wear once. When I go hard I go hard. My creation must not only be ugly, but tacky too. So going out and about in this sweater during the holiday season is not something that I plan on doing.

Besides creating something cheap, I’m also strapped for time. I recently started a new job and getting acquainted with the new schedule has altered my typical down time that I use to create, bake and travel (which you’ve probably noticed as I have been MIA for the past couple weeks). It’s all good though, I’m figuring out how to make time for all the things that I need and want to do, so soon I will be consistent again. With all that being said, I created my son’s sweater and mine the morning of our party. It took a couple of hours, some thrift store finds, felt and some Dollar Tree decorations, but I feel totally pleased with my creations.

We have an amazing thrift store near our home. Everything on Thursdays are $2 and it goes down from there until it hits .25 on Wednesdays. And it’s everything! They close early on Wednesdays so I typically go Tuesdays when everything is .50. Since I was busy I decided to go Sunday and splurge on my sweaters for a whopping $1.25 each. I know, I know, I need to settle down with the spending, but sometimes you just have to put that money out. 😉

Here are my sweater and my son’s that I snagged from the thrift store, plus all the decorations.

Simple really. Felt, the Dollar Store decorations, the obvious sweaters and of course, a glue gun (not pictured). My son’s sweater was inspired from this one that I found online:

I thought it was a perfect amount of gruesome awesomeness. Of course I changed it up a bit, to make it my own. I just eyeballed the shape of the reindeer and drew it out on a piece of felt with a sharpie before cutting it out.

I decided since I was rushing this, that a red pom-pom was a perfect addition of Ol’Rudolph’s nose. As mentioned, I used only hot glue to adhere the felt and decorations to the sweaters. And then I went to town. There were pom-poms going all over the place, hot glue gun burns and this is what came of it all:

For puking reindeer I used:

1-Thrift store sweater

3- sheets of felt (tan, white and brown)

1-Sharpie marker for tracing and drawing on the eye

1-piece of green garland (Dollar Tree)

1- package of pom-poms (Dollar Tree)

1- package of bells (Dollar Tree)