Easy ideas for making a Christmas jumper at home
The festive season is fast approaching and with it comes advent calendars, sparkling decorations, late-night shopping and the good old December wardrobe staple – the Christmas jumper.
Everyone loves a Christmas jumper but buying a new one each year can get costly, especially if you're kitting out the whole family, luckily we've got a crafty solution!
There's no need to spend out loads on a brand new Christmas jumper each year, it's easy (and fun!) to make your own. If you're a knitter, check out our Christmas jumper knitting pattern.
But if you want a quick and easy Christmas jumper, you can easily create a custom design using bits and pieces you already have in your craft stash. Upcycling an old plain jumper into a Christmas jumper is the perfect way to get in some festive crafting while also being a budget-friendly craft project.
If you're designing DIY Christmas jumpers for the whole family you could stick to one particular theme or even make a design that goes across a few jumpers which would make for a brilliant photo.
You could let the kids loose creating their own designs for Christmas Jumper Day at school (which falls on Thursday 7th December this year) and just help them with the fiddly bits such as sticking items on.
We've compiled a list of some of the best and easiest ways to customise a Christmas jumper using items you're likely to have lying around in your craft stash.
Yarn
Left over yarn and wool are super handy for decorating a DIY Christmas jumper in a few different ways
Place some pompoms
Pompoms are so easy to make and can be used for all sorts of fun designs. Make pompoms in a variety of colours and attach them to a green jumper with fabric glue in a random pattern to look like baubles on a Christmas tree.
Write with wool
A fun festive slogan never goes amiss on a Christmas jumper!
Write your phrase out onto your jumper with a washable fabric pen or fabric chalk, dot some fabric glue in regular intervals along your line and then apply your yarn to recreate the lines of the letters. Once the glue has dried you can go along and make small whip stitches with a needle and thread to make sure the wool is held securely.
Phrases like 'Let It Snow', 'Merry Christmas' or 'Season's Greetings' work well and can be embelished with mini pompoms or sequins to really make them stand out.
Embroidery Floss
If you're not a fan of bright spangly designs on Christmas jumpers, embroidery is just the thing to create something a bit more understated.
A simple running stitch is all you need to know to create most patterns. You could add lots of little snowflakes all over a jumper or even recreate a traditional Nordic-style pattern. Draw your design idea out with fabric pen or chalk first and then use an embroidery hoop to help stabilise the fabric before you get to stitching.
Creating a mini repeating Christmas tree design is simple and fun to try. Make a long stitch with brown thread as a trunk and then use shorter stiches in green thread coming out from the trunk at an angle, starting at the top and working down to create fir tree branches. Go back in with some coloured thread to make little french knot baubles to decorate the branches.
HTV
If you're a crafter who loves their Cricut machine, you can make a fab DIY Christmas jumper in next to no time with iron on vinyl.
Pre-made Christmas designs
There are lots of premade SVG file designs for Christmas jumpers available online. Keep things simple by using just one colour or get creative layering different colours of iron on for a glitzy design.
Get HTV scrap happy
Creating an abstract pattern of Christmas motifs is a great way to use up heat-transfer vinyl (HTV) scraps.
Find a selection of simple festive style shapes and add them to your design mat in varying sizes. Add your scrap HTV pieces to your cutting mat and use the snap mat tool on the DesignSpace app to position your designs in the best place to cut.
Once your HTV decals have been cut, place them across your sweater in a random pattern, cover them with a Teflon sheet and press with your heat press until they are fixed in place.
It can help to seperate your HTV scraps out into colours before choosing a design.
If you've got lots of red and green scraps in varying shades you could make holly leaf and berry designs. If you've got lots of silvers and gold HTV star shapes are a great option. And if you've got a collection of all sorts of colours, cut some into little squares and rectangles and then another lot into bow shapes – you can press the squares and rectangles on to your jumper first and then add layer the bow shapes on top to make lots of multi coloured present shapes!
Fabric Paint
Fabric paint gives you endless possibilities for creating designs on a Christmas jumper. You can choose to freehand a design, use a stencil template or even go old school and create some potato print designs.
Whichever method you choose, make sure to place a piece of scrap cardboard in between the layers of the sweater before painting so that the paint doesn't soak or bleed through.
Handprints and finger painting
If you're making Christmas jumpers with the kids, hand print designs are some of the funnest and easiest ways to make something really unique. Gold or yellow hand prints can be used as reindeer antlers – paint a brown oval first then add your handprints to the top as the antlers, then add some red for the nose and some black to draw on the eyes.
Green handprints make excellent holly leaves with red thumb prints beind added as berries. But if you want to go all out with colour, try adding different colours fingerprints to your jumper and then use black paint (or even better, black puffy paint) to draw a line connecting all the finger prints up to make them a string of multicoloured Christmas lights!
Felt
Felt is a great material for adding some extra texture and jazzing up an old jumper into a new festive version.
You can hand cut felt to make large designs or you could use something like the Cricut Maker to cut smaller and more intricate shapes. These can then be attached to your jumper with fabric glue and once the glue is dry, secured with a small running stitch around the edge.
A great hand cut felt design are baubles – you can stick to just circle shapes or add in a few fancier ones (search online for bauble shapes if you need some inspo). These shapes can then be decorated with sequins, scraps of ribbon, glitter glue or puffy paints and then added on to your jumper.
If you've got a bundle of fabric scraps that need using up why not turn them into appliqué patches to make a Christmas jumper?
Green fabric can be turned into holly leaves, yellow fabric into stars, and white into snowflakes or snowmen. If you've got patterned fabric you can cut square and rectangle shapes, stitch them to your jumper and then use ribbon to make bows and glue them to the tops to make presents – there are so many fun options!
To use scrap fabric as appliqué patches you need to iron a piece of bondaweb to the back (to give it some stability and stop the edges from fraying) and then cut out your design shape. Place that shape onto your jumper, press again with an iron to fuse it to the jumper fabric and then hand stitch it into place to make it nice and secure.
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