Hello.
I’m Annika Sanders from Junky Styling. This the Junky shop. I’m about
to take you into the Junky studio and show you a glimpse of my world.
Follow me.
Today I’m going to show you some re-cycled designs using some
knitwear, but very simple for all different levels of technical
ability. The first one I’m going to show you is – demonstrate seeing
things differently. Literally turning a cardi on its head and still
using the existing fastenings so there’s no trouble with buttons and
buttonholing and turning it into a cute little shrug and taking the
sleeves off. So you can do this, you can apply this to any cardi. I’ve
got a couple of different ones here that are actually quite vile in
their state as cardigans, but when turned on their head – and this can
be applied to anything, it can be applied to jackets and shirts. When
turned on its head and the existing fastenings being used and also
there’s an element for adjustment because you have buttons and
buttonholes so you could button them differently if you need to – if
you’re more blessed than this particular mannequin in the chest
department. And we can apply some ruches here. So you get the gist just
on a mannequin how that could look. The sleeves, obviously, are in the
wrong direction – so you don’t want a cardi with the arms up like that,
so you slice them off.
The best way to cut anything up is turn it inside out. If I’m going
to disregard these sleeves then it’s best for me to cut the sleeve side
and leave the edge still attached to the garment. Luckily this is the
kind of garment that can be unpicked. OK. Right. Sleeves off. Take this
back to the mannequin. Now you can see that there’s quite a lot of
excess material here which you could get away with if you can’t sew or
you can put nice little tucks or darts in there and ruche up the
shoulder and neck. Then the key to the garment is changing where the
buttons lie. So I’m going to quickly stitch in those darts and those
ruches. A good way to mark where you’re going to put your darts for a
bust would be by turning the garment inside out and pinching it where
you need it and pinning it or marking it with wax. You can do this on
one side and then mirror it onto the other. Now with knitwear, the best
way to sew it is using an over-locking machine, but if you just have a
domestic sewing machine at home, a zig-zag stitch will do. But just for
the purposes of this demonstration, I’m going to straight stitch it. As
I said before, you can do it on one side and then mirror it to the
other. You can tell, I like to do things very quickly and by sight. I’m
going to mirror it across to the other side of the garment. A good tip
- if you put pins this way through a garment, you can sew straight over
them if you’re sewing over them at a right angle rather than if you
mark in a straight line, you have to take them out as you sew, which
isn’t so good or you break needles. So I’m just marking the start and
finish of the dart on the other side. Through my wealth of experience
and the lines on my sewing machine, I can measure how deep the dart
needs to be. This particular design isn’t so much about the sewing
element, it’s more about seeing things differently and turning things
on their heads and then effecting a design through it. The beauty of
knitwear is it can be manipulated and draped and look good, even if you
can’t sew. I’m just going to quickly add the ruches in the side of the
neck and when I put it on the mannequin, you’ll see why. But you could
hand stitch this bit in, both elements that I’ve just stitched. It’s
very simple but just effective. So I’m literally going to pinch the
fabric together and over stitch it, just to create that drape running
through the back of the neck. Its gets a bit thick, so hand stitching
it is always quite a good option. If you want to get a nice effect –
like that, that’s what you need to do. I’m just going to do that on the
other seam which, when held the right way up are the two back seams
running down the back.
Right, now back to the mannequin. We can see this taking a much
better shape now. So we’ll have one side over here and the neck can be
worn - you can see these ruches across the back of the neck. I’m just
going to pin this in place here to show where you’ll re-mark the
buttonholes. You can re-attach the sleeves, but because, as I showed
you before, when you turn a cardigan upside down the sleeves are then
in the wrong direction, we just turn them round, but we also have to
account for this dart that we’ve taken out. Luckily, knitwear
stretches, but we would re-insert this here and then you have your long
sleeves on it.
I prefer, with my one, to have the sleeves off and I’ve just put an
edge of a sweatshirt around here to seal the trim. You can always just
pipe this and seal it with an edge and then re-arrange the buttons and
maybe use a feature button at the top and it almost acts like a scarf
or waistcoat.
