Top Secret Christmas Tutorial: hint: it's a mustache theme

I’m live-blogging some of my Christmas crafting this year, so I’m going to have disclaimers: WARNING: if you spoil the surprise for a receiver of one of these gifts, bad Christmas karma WILL get you. Be sure of it. And if you are a gay male couple I know, play it safe and assume this post is about YOU and DON'T PEEK.

We’ve got a newlywed couple in our lives—two sweet guys who are painfully adorable and very in love. As a nice Christmas gift, we’re assembling a ‘date in the snow’ package. We got two ceramic travel coffee mugs with “MR” and a mustache on each of them, plus some coffee and some bath salts. The finishing touch were a pair of bathrobes. The gift will come with an explanation: this is for going out in the snow with your coffees, then coming home and having a hot bath and rolling up together in your robes. Awesome, right? But I wanted the robes to be matchy-matchy with the rest of the gift, so I decided to make them into mustache robes. You can do this (or another little embellisment) very easily.

YOU WILL NEED:

A fleecey robe (we got some inexpensive ones, in case I screwed this up)

Aleene’s ‘No Sew’ fabric glue or equivalent

Scissors

A template

Chalk

A piece of felt

WHAT YOU WILL DO:  

1. Print off a template. In this case, I had a mustache. You can also just draw one.

2. Place the template on your piece of felt. Use the chalk to draw OFF the template, so you create a sort of ‘sunburst’ effect.

3. Cut out the template. It’ll be easy to see: it’s the part that DOESN’T have chalk on it.

4. Follow the instructions on your fabric glue.

5. Adhere the felt shape to the fleecey robe (and you can wash the robe in advance to ensure best adhesion).

6. Let it dry, wrap it up, and make someone smile. 

This is super easy, and you don’t have to make the whole robe from scratch. It’s just as special this way. If you don’t want to do the whole gift package, put something in the pockets: candy, or a USB drive with movies, or a gift card. Or even look up an easy-to-sew hot water bottle cozy, and include the bottle and cozy with matching embellisment.

FOR THE ADVANCED CRAFTER: You can sew the embellishment into place instead of gluing it. I wasn’t at all sure I could sew neatly enough around the edge of the mustaches to really do a nice job; but you can also get temporary fabric glue, so you can glue the mustache in place while you fiddle about with stitches. When it’s washed, the temporary glue will vanish.