Pull Out Your Ugly Holiday Sweaters!

Back again with new stitching dies for the November Papertrey Ink Release. These new dies are super fun for the holidays. Hope you love them as much as I do. 

Back when I put together the Design-A-Softie Stitch Kit, I had one more dress-up option for your softies in the form of a sweater. We decided to save it until the holidays instead of releasing it with the kit. It's been killing me to see how it would look and work for the last ten months. Finally got the chance!

But...wait....I bet you are wondering where the softie is on this blog post. I've got a few done and they are wearing their cute little sweaters, but the weather did not cooperate with photos yesterday. So I'm saving those for a little later. I'll be debuting them with the video tutorial I'm going to put together in a few days. But in the meantime, I had an alternative use for the Softie Sweater Die...Christmas ornaments. With ugly sweaters being such a thing, it was a natural step to take. And probably even more exciting and cute for me than the softies! LOL! This way you can use the Softie Sweater Die even if you don't have the Softies. 

This trio of holiday sweater ornaments were made for a family we spend a lot of time with as a gift this holiday. Three different colors (Pure Poppy, Hibiscus Burst, and Tropical Teal) for three different kids. Flip them over and....

...they are personalized with the new Small Stitched Alphabet that is also coming out this month. This alphabet is the same size as the letters in the Stitched Holiday Words. Only you can spell out anything you want on your projects. I even included popular "extra" letters for helping you spell out more words in a single pass of the die cut machine.  In addition to the names, I added the year with the Stitched Years from last year. 

I'm really all about personalized ornaments as gifts. They are just something extremely meaningful that you can give. My mother still has personalized ornaments with our names on them from my childhood that still get put on the tree every year. She's changed everything else about it, but those ornaments remain. It makes me smile to see the little salt dough snowman holding a balloon with my name on it from 1983 every year. I'm hoping I give those wonderful long-term memories to the people I give ornaments to...that thought alone makes me very happy. 

And on the strictly practical side, you get a lot of bang for your buck. The felt and beads cost me around $3.25 an ornament on this trio. That's a very meaningful gift for a family of five for under $10. Got to love it

 

Also available this month to make hanging these ornaments easy, is the Softie Hanger Die. This is the first die I've designed (or seen for that matter) that's sole purpose is to be used to build up layers of cardstock for something more substantial. The pieces are cut six times and glued together to make a "chipboard-like" hanger. Think of it as the papercrafter's version of a 3-D printer, building things up one layer at a time. It fits nicely in the sweater and can then be used to hang the sweater ornament off the tree. It's a must have if you are planning on making sweater ornaments this year. 

I'll be putting together a quick video tutorial here too. Look for that later in the week. 

My sweater ornaments are decorated with one of the Beaded Motif Dies from the Beaded Holiday Stitch Kit. All three of the motifs included in the kit are a perfect fit to the Softie Sweater Die. And all three Seasonal Stitches Dies I introduced yesterday will fit as well. Lots of options. The beads and sequins look amazing on these felt sweaters, don't they?

Here's the original blog post about the Beaded Holiday Stitch Kit. It's still available with the amazing Beaded Motif Dies that are designed to work with beads and sequins. A gorgeous selection of beads and sequins comes with the kit and is plentiful enough to make several projects. At some point, however, you'll want to replenish and even choose your own colors. I was able to use some fun colors of beads I had picked up here and there on these sweaters. If you want to go get some of your own, you'll need 8 mm sequins, 8/O Beads, and 6 mm bugle beads. All are easy to find at any of your big box craft stores. 

More tomorrow! Thanks for joining me today. Anybody else have the urge to go find a snugly sweaters and put it on is it just me?