Are you ready for the ever approaching holiday season? Prepared for that upcoming ugly Christmas Sweater party? This easy tutorial will surely show you how easy it to make that sweater you've been putting off, and of course, you'll be doing it in style.

Step 1: Gather Materials

What you will need:

reference images(provided)

hot glue

hot glue gun

roughly 110 bells

1 small sheet soft red felt for heart

1 small sheet soft gold felt

1/4 yard of soft red felt on the bolt

white sweater

1 12x18 in sheet of firm red felt

1 12x18 in sheet of firm green felt

red thread

needle

A piece of large paper to make a pattern

xacto knife

pencil

pen

Step 2: Make Your Pattern...

Figure out how long you'd like the image of the tree to be on your sweater. I found that I needed mine to be about 15 inches long. I then used an hmdi cord and hooked my laptop up to my tv. I blew up the image of the tree on the sweater to the size I needed it on the program "paint". Its a program everyone has. A screenshot is provided of how to use paint to do that. :) Use any measuring device to measure on the tv how big the image is. Fine tune it to the size you need it by using to be on paint until you get it right.

Once you're happy with the size, use your large paper to trace out your pattern. Make a pattern of the tree design as well as the ho ho ho's. Those will have to be a little bigger than what you sized the tree to. So, after you've traced the tree design, size up the Ho's by 20% and use that as your pattern.

Step 3: Cut, Cut, Cut

Next, you will need to know which felt is for each piece. You will use the firm red felt for the base tree and firm green for the tree over top of that. The soft red is for the heart and the soft gold is for the letters and star. The remaining soft red felt is for the arm stripes.

Cut out your pattern and lay those pieces over your felt, pinning them into place as you do so. Then mark around your pattern with a pen. Unpin the pattern from the felt to reveal the traced pattern. Then cut out your felt. Repeat this for all of the pieces.

Note: Your red tree cut may be too big and you might have to glue two pieces of felt together at the edge(see picture shown)

Stripes

For your stripes, you will need to figure out how wide you need to make them. I cut a strip of paper that was 2.25 in wide and used that as a pattern. There are 12 stripes(6 red and 6 white) on each arm. Obviously we are only applying red stripes. The last one at the top of the arm is half the size of a regular stripe. Start with a strip of paper that is 2.25 in wide and lay it across the sleeve, all the way up the arm. If the stripe is too wide, cut a little bit of the width off until the piece is the correct size for there to be 12 stripes. I hope that made sense. XD

Once you have the correct stripe size, cut strips of your remaining soft red felt into strips for the stripes on your sleeves.

Step 4: Glue, Glue,Glue

HO HO HO

A good place to start with gluing is with your "Ho'Ho'Ho's". Start wherever you would like around the bottom making sure that you place them a half inch from the bottom edge.

Make sure you glue down all of the edges. :D

Tree

Glue your star down first onto the red background of your tree. then glue down the green tree onto the red background, gluing it in sections, making sure you glue all of the edges.

You can then place your pattern over top of your green tree to figure out where you need to glue the heart and the words. Start with gluing down all of the letters.

Next you can move onto the heart. If you want you can just glue on the heart. But if you'd like to do something a little fancier, you can make a cushion heart. Do this by only gluing down the very edge of the heart, leaving an area open to stuff it with stuffing(you can use felt to stuff the heart if you don't have an stuffing). Then close the edge with more hot glue. :D

Then you can glue the tree down to the sweater. Do this in sections. Start with a little bit of the star on the tree, press it down onto the sweater, then keep applying glue to small sections, making sure to glue down all of the edges.

Stripes

Begin by laying down the first stripe at the end of your sleeve. Start each stripe at the inside seam of your sleeve. See image.

If you start at the back of your sleeve, with a little extra slack glued to the front of the sleeve, this will create the best seam on each stripe. You will most likely need to cut the end of the stripe on an angle when your are getting to the end of each stripe at the side seam.

Step 5: Add Some Bells and Whistles

Now you will need to mark out where your bells will go.

If you lay your sleeve down flat with the inside seam of the sleeve at one edge, you can mark with pins down the other fold at the top of the sleeve. This is where your first row of bells will go. Then mark the bottom row of bells on the front of the sleeve, just like in the picture. After you have that one marked, pin a third row right in the center of those 2 rows. The last row is on the back of the sleeve. Flip over the sleeve and pin a final row down the center of the sleeve. The bells will be placed on both sides of each red stripe for each row. Sewing them in will take some time but will be totally worth it. Get out your string and watch a few movies. This may take a minute.