Turtle Mat's Christmas Jumper Challenge

Turtle Mats Christmas Jumper Mat

To celebrate the new Christmas Jumper mat from Turtle Mats, they are running a bloggers competition to create a Christmas jumper on a budget of £5!  Now I do like a challenge and this one - jumpers, sewing, textiles... oh this is definitely a challenge for me!

Turtle Mats sent out the jumper and I had to source materials that made up to £5 to decorate it.  Now we all know that sewing and baking are not my friends - and the temptation to get a bit of tinsel and glue it all around the jumper was very great......

But I figured I'd challenge myself as we know I like to do this often and sometimes it can turn into epic fails..... other times I do surprise myself.  So I got out the needle and thread (ok, first challenge complete - find them!).

I saw this lovely snowflake jumper in Next a while ago, I would show you it but now I can't find it so I either made it up or it wasn't Next!  Anyway, that was why I chose a snowflake - and not any snowflake - Queen Elsa's snowflake - yes, I'm going all out to challenge myself on this one!!

The materials that can be used for up to £5 are as follows:

Jumper
Needle & Thread
Fabric Glue
Pom Poms £1.00 per colour
White Felt £0.59
Blue Felt £0.59
Glitter £1.58

After getting over the shock that I was actually going to sew something!  I found an Elsa snowflake online and printed it off as my template - and that took FOREVER to cut out!

Once cut out, I then pinned to my white felt and did it all again!

Queen Elsa's Snowflake

That was enough for that night, I'm not ashamed to say this jumper took me the best part of a week to do - I needed several tea breaks......

When I put my snowflake on my jumper it was a wee bit lost, so that's when I decided to add the blue felt and I used this as a backing / edging for the snowflake for a couple of reasons, one to make the snowflake bigger and two to give a base to glue this snowflake on to (yeah cutting that out twice, no way I was going to sew around it too!).

Backing felt for the snowflake

I sewed... yeah this is such a shocker for me!  But I did!  I sewed the blue snowflake onto the jumper directly - took all evening, bearing in mind I only have the evenings to craft... so that was that night done!  The next day to get over the shock of sewing I chose to cover my white snowflake with glitter, a couple of colours to try and match the printout I had of Frozen's snowflake.

My son loves glitter so we already had the silver colour!

Before glueing my glittery snowflake on to my blue felt, I added some pom poms to the jumper - these are fab!  I loved doing these (I know right!), I thought it was going to be a bit daunting but it wasn't and it's amazing how it changes a jumper!

Adding Pom Poms

Finally, with the pom-poms added I used the fabric glue and placed my shiny snowflake onto my jumper and thus creating my Christmas Jumper 2014 ;)

So there it is, my Christmas Jumper!  If the judges at Turtle Mats think it as spectacular as I do....... then I get to win the Christmas Jumper mat and a luxury Christmas hamper!   The competition closes on 11th December so I've managed to get my jumper design in just in time.

So what do you think? Have you ever attempted to create your own Christmas Jumper?  I'm not sure I could take the stress again....