The next one is slightly more spectacular. Again, it’s about perspective and seeing things differently and something that conventionally is a rather drab polo neck can be turned on its side, sliced across from the shoulder seam to about half-way across the body and then this line here wants to be as straight as possible, so you would encapsulate the top of the sleeve in it. And we cut along here and without even an inch of sewing, we have a little side draping top. A little off the shoulder number. It’s really easy to do with anything from your wardrobe.
Now if you don’t really want to show your midriff or this isn’t enough of a winter garment for you, you can always combine it with another one.
Just to recap, the neckline – you have to imagine the polo neck as the sleeve. The neckline – you don’t need much of a shoulder element here because you’ve got the sleeve. So you could base it around the width of a shoulder seam on an existing garment. And this side – you want to cut it to drape, but be reserved in your cutting because you can always cut away more to fit you. You really need to base it around you and this bottom section here can be based around the width of a top. But do encapsulate the sleeve in that section because if you cut in a similar way to the top, then it would be very lopsided.
So I’m going to combine this with another jumper. So I’m going to slice across the other jumper. You might want to measure, but I’ve been doing this quite a long time so I do an awful lot by sight. Now you can see the bottom of this jumper is slightly wider so I’m going to take this jumper in along one side. I’m just going to mirror the seam that’s already there and go straight to the bottom. I’m going to slice this, over-lock it and then I’m going to attach it to the other jumper.
Again, it’s always best to use, if you’re sewing a purple garment, purple threads, but for speed and ease and because I’m going to do a couple of designs for you, I’m just going to stick to good old black.
I turn it back through the right way, position it so it’s seam to either side of the cut and then I’m going to come inside it and grab that seam on the inside to this seam here. So you’ve got the two right sides together, seams to seams. I’m just going to very quickly over-lock that around and turn it back through. With over-locking, the fabric that’s on top always stretches more. And with every different wool, with the size of the knit, the elasticity in it tends to vary, so you have to find your way.
There we go. Now you can see, it’s starting to take shape. It’s almost like a dress. If you want to trim the neck, that can be done quite easily using another section of the jumper and just folding it over. So I’ve just trimmed what ever is available left from the jumper, just trim it roughly to the size of this, if anything, a centimeter or two smaller. Now we need this to be a circle to go round the neck. So I’ll over-lock the two open edges together. Now if you fold that over, you have a finished edge to over-lock to the garment. You might just want to pin in place because this is tricky because we’re dealing with smaller bits of fabric. Again, the basis of this design is just seeing the raw materials differently, seeing a polo neck on its side as the top of a more substantial, interesting asymmetrical garment. It can even be lengthened into a dress. I’m just going to over-lock that round again. Now because I’ve cut the purple piece of fabric – the trim – slightly smaller, I’m going to do that Piece on top so it can stretch onto the raw edge that we’re binding. But raw edges are good and if you did this, executed this design from a sweatshirt you wouldn’t need to bind anything because sweatshirts don’t fray. Knitwear doesn’t fray, it ladders. You’d probably need to press that down a little bit, but – Voila! Certainly nicer than most of the average Christmas jumpers and if you’re ‘Legs 11’ you could wear it as a dress – I’m not.