So Ugly They’re Cute!



I am so in love with the super versatile “Ugly Sweater Weather” stamp set from Maymay Made It! Playing with it reminded me of my childhood playing with paper dolls and their clothes. It was so fun mixing and matching patterns and images to create anything I could dream up!

I stamped out the outline sweater stamp 3 times and was able to create 3 distinct sweater designs by combining this stamp with others. For the first sweater, I stamped out the deer head from the “Ugly Sweater Weather” stamp set and added even more “ugly” patterns from the stamp set to make the sweater super busy. I did take care to mask off the ribbed areas so that I didn’t over-stamp them with the snowflake and checkerboard patterns. Then I colored it up with the following Copic colors, adding a fun boucle texture to the background:

Red: R24, 27 and 29
Blue background: B000, 00, 02
Teal stripes: BG32 and 23
Deer head and antlers: E31 and W1

For the second sweater, I used the super cute penguin from the Joy Clair “Christmas Penguins”stamp set and stamped it onto the sweater as if it was peering into the body of the sweater from the lower right. I kept it simple and colored up all the holiday lights in the following rainbow of colors and the sweater in neutral grays:
R27, YR15, Y08, G08, B06, V17 and N1, 3, 5, 7 and 9

For the third sweater, I stamped out the itty bitty penguin from the Joy Clair “Christmas Penguins” stamp set over and over in a helter skelter random pattern. Again, I took care to do a little masking around the edges of the sweater and the cuffs and neck areas so that the penguins would not over-stamp the ribbing of the sweater or go off the edge of the sweater body and also simultaneously stamp over the arm areas. Again this Copic coloring was super simple; since the images were small, I could almost skip the shading on them and could focus on just coloring up the background for the nubby sweater texture: Hats: R27 and 29; Belt and belt buckle: N7 and YR16; Penguin beaks: YR15

After prepping all the sweaters, I fussy cut them out and inked the white cut edges with a Tsukineko Tuxedo Black Marker. Then it was a matter of using up scrap papers from my scrap box and adding some interesting, but not too distracting horizontal, top-folding card bases. I started with a background card front with rounded edges and added a strip of a different colored or patterned (and sometimes glittered) paper along the left side. To add some textural interest, I used the two embossing folders from the We R Memory Keepers Next Level Quilted Set (I thought the idea of quilting would go nicely with the sweater theme) for some of the plain papers as well.

For the inside sentiments, I used the “Don we now our ugly sweater” and the “Get Your Tacky On!” from the “Ugly Sweater Weather” stamp set for two of the cards. For the third card, I combined the “sweater weather” sentiment from the “Ugly Sweater Weather” stamp set with some of the text from a Hero Arts Merry Stamp & Cut set to make the inside sentiment say, “wishing you merry sweater weather”!