The Christmas Jumper Returns

I think it was last year that the Christmas Jumper made its ironic début on the festive scene. When Little B had a Christmas Jumper day at school I couldn’t quite bring myself to purchase a supermarket solution. Now I am not a wool purist, but there are limits. I certainly didn’t have the time to knit a design and actually Little B was really very keen to create his own vision. Here is the story of last year.

We came to the excellent compromise of adding a felt appliqué design to a basic sweatshirt. Quick and easy to do and he could dictate the festive theme.

This year there were far more ideas brought to the creative table. Some of them were quite complex….We finally decided to use Bernard as our muse. Look at this cheeky boy!

I bought just a few pieces of felt and sketched the basic shape onto some double sided bonding interfacing.

I then ironed the design onto the felt and then was able to accurately cut out the shapes. Being able to iron the shapes onto the sweatshirt make sewing so much more accurate far less stressful. I used green buttons for Bernard’s eyes and sewed a few snowflake sequins onto his hat for added sparkle.

I had worked accurately to the design brief and when finished I presented the final design to Mr Little B and he looked with studied consideration. ‘It is good….very good, but….’, he gestured to the base of the cat shape, ‘this is a very large expanse of black….I think it could be broken up with a parcel, perhaps in red…..with a yellow ribbon…’  He walked away.

I stood there for a while. Staring. Annoyingly he was right. You may say, ‘For heavens sake woman, say no!’ You may even say, ‘Well you created the Monster, deal with it’. Yes, I agree, I have encouraged my son to create, to think about improving his ideas, to edit, to modify, to change. Hey it took me 10 minutes to make the modification and the final design was so much better. I can’t think of anything nicer to do just before Christmas, making something together with my son – something that makes us both laugh.