I didn’t want to share this till after our shirts made their debut on Thanksgiving, but now I can! I spent Thanksgiving with JP’s nephew and his family, and one of their family traditions is an “Ugly Thanksgiving Sweater/Shirt Contest” (they live in Alabama, so there are lots of years a sweater isn’t really necessary on Thanksgiving). Well, I couldn’t pass that up, although I can’t say ours were exactly ugly (see below). But as we move into Ugly Christmas Sweater season, I wanted to share how I did these.
JP does love pie, so it was easy to think of what to do for him! I went with “Happy Turkey Day”.
(No, I don’t know what’s with that position or why someone took a picture of me like that!)
In both cases, I started with white t-shirts. I bought his in a crafts store where I found them near the fabric painting markers and paints (I picked up a 5-pack of fabric markers and some red fabric paint as well). I strongly recommend using those ones, because I used a t-shirt I had on hand which was some kind of cotton blend, and it seemed harder to write on, even though the shirt itself feels smoother to the touch.
When I got everything home, I typed up and printed out what I wanted to write for each of us in a nice big font. Here they are:
(I was hoping the use of Comic Sans on my shirt might push it into the “Ugly” category, ha ha).
I then put each printouts under the appropriate shirt and simply traced over the lettering on each, using the fabric markers, except for the heart on the I Love Pie shirt, which I did using “puffy” fabric paint and a medium paintbrush. Here is JP’s “I Love Pie” shirt with the paper under it:
I don’t know what I’m going to do about holiday sweaters (stay tuned!), but if you’d like a super-easy way to make a holiday shirt, you can’t beat tracing and fabric markers!
Have you ever made an Ugly Christmas Sweater (or shirt)?