Refashion: How to make a bat-back jumper/dress

[Annika Sanders] Third, final and most complicated. It’s actually really, really, really easy but incredibly effective.
Now grab two jumpers or steal them off your boyfriend like I’ve done here.
Turn them inside out and just do the same to each of them…which is slice them…from the bottom of the sleeve all the way to the bottom of the side edge. And just repeat this to both jumpers. Right there’s one completely opened out.
Now this is a cotton based jumper and the other one’s a beautiful lamb’s wool based jumper. It doesn’t really matter, it’s really the size rather than the density of the fabric which is important with this particular design. The only questionable thing with combining knitwear is how well the weaves and the fabrics will sit together. If you’re making anything like this always do it on something like this that you don’t care so much about first and make sure you can do it and you don’t have any problems with it and then cut up your nicest, best quality cashmere jumper.

Right now, we’ve opened them both up, I’m going to lay them on top so that the neck holes are both as central as possible. If one jumper is particularly wide compared to the others you can slice it down, it’s just length of the body which is probably the most important thing. If the lengths of the body are the same that’s fine, any width can be sliced off the side. Now again, this is a design that needs an over-locker to secure the edges, but before that I’m going to sew it into place. So that’s why I’ve been putting the pins this way so I can sew straight over them.

So, I’m going to sew this from the bottom edge to the edge of the sleeve, in each different, in the four different areas around the neck hole. I’m going to leave about a centimetre seam allowance but that is going to kind of differ as the edges aren’t exactly the same. I’m sewing in red so you can see the stitch before, and straight over the top of that pin. Ok take out those pins as you go …and snip off the spare threads. Alright, straight over the top of that pin, a bit of securing first. Again, this technique can be applied to t-shirts, sweat shirts, anything really. Again, it’s about seeing it differently.

If you don’t have an industrial machine or an over-locker it could be stitched with a zigzag on a domestic machine. Don’t think you’d want to hand-stitch this one. The great thing about just straight stitching it together, you might want to do an even wider stitch than this but you can always unpick, whereas with a zigzag or an over-locking stitch you can unpick it but it’s laborious and it ruins the surface of the garment.Make sure you’ve got all the pins out.

Now before we go anywhere near an over-locker or a zigzag we turn this whole thing the other way through…try not to confuse ourselves too much. Ok… and we’ve created a dress or an elongated jumper or a smock. Now you might want to go back inside and slim down these sleeves. You might want to ruche the neck like in the first design and you might want to slim the skirt section of it. But it’s again it’s not about demonstrating technical genius of sewing knitwear together, it’s actually about seeing things differently. So once things are opened up flat or turned on their heads or turned on their sides they become completely different garments and wearable in lots of different ways. I could wear the grey on the front or the stripes on the back and you could actually if you’re feeling really clever engage the arm hole and turn this into a bit more of a cape back, so you’re nice and warm on your back in winter. But my preferred way of wearing it is like that and then you’ve got a nice little feature hole in the back. So that’s me done.