A quick Christmas sweater

I bought some new clothes recently and I have a rule that new clothes have to fit into existing spaces. So if a drawer is full I have to get rid of some items to make room for new ones. I can't stand clothes clutter. All of the new clothes fit fine because I had recently done a purge but as I was putting things away (including a new red tunic) I found another red tunic that I had never worn! Ugh, I hate it when I do that. What a waste! I know I had not worn it because the pockets were still stitched together and also I because I don't love it. But it's a perfectly good sweater/tunic and I thought that maybe I could make a Christmas sweater out of it. It is red, after all.

I remembered a sweater that I saw at a show recently that had 3 simple tree on it. I wanted and easy project and that seemed perfect. First I had to find the fabric. I wanted a plaid or stripe so I pulled out those bins and found this set of 3 woven ikat fabrics. (I also found something else for another quick project that I'll share tomorrow.) These are perfect for the look I want...more homespun, less sparkle.

Had I planned this project properly I would have put some Mistyfuse on the back of the tree fabric before I cut it out, but I didn't do that. I just cut out the tree shapes, arranged them on the shirt and pinned them in place. Then I tried on the shirt to check/adjust placement.

Once it was time to stitch I realized that i needed some sort of stabilizer or I'd stretch the sweater during the stitching. Had I taken more than 5 seconds to think about that I would have used Sulky Solvy as my stabilizer because it's so easy to wash out. But I didn't and the closest thing to hand was tissue paper. I pinned a big hunk of tissue paper to the back side of the sweater front and pinned it in place. I did do one test seam on a scrap of sweater fabric and once I had the stitch length and width just right, I zig zagged away. Start to finish, the whole effort (including cleaning up the plaid fabrics strewn everywhere) took less than 2 hours. Now I have something to wear to the quilt club meeting next week.