Refashion: How to make a UD-shrug

[Annika Sanders] Hello I’m Annika Sanders from Junky Styling. This is 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 recycled designs using some knitwear, but very simple for all different levels of technical ability.

The first one I’m going to show you is demonstrating things differently. Literally turning a cardie on it’s head, and still using the existing fastenings so there’s no trouble with buttons and button holing, and turning it into a cute little shrug and taking the sleeves off.
So you can do this, you can apply this to any cardie. I’ve got a couple of different ones here that are actually quite vial 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 it’s head and the existing fastenings being used and also there’s an element for adjustment because you have buttons and button holes so you could button them to different, if you need, 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 cardie 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 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. And 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 zigzag 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. And through my wealth of experience and the lines on my sewing machine I can measure how deep the dart needs to be. With this particular design it isn’t so much about the sewing element, it’s more about seeing things differently and turning things on their heads and then affecting a design through it.

The beauty of knitwear is that 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 are just stitched. It’s very simple but effective. I’m literally going to pinch the fabric together and overstitch it just to create that drape running through the back of the neck. It gets a bit thick so hand stitching it is always quite a good option. If you want to get a nice affect…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 the two back seams running down the back…

Alright, back to the mannequin.
And we can see this taking a much better shape now. So we have one side over here…and the neck can be worn…high up 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 remark the button holes. Now you can reattach the sleeves, but because as I showed you before when you turn a cardigan upside-down then the sleeves are then in the wrong direction. We just turn them around but we also have to account for this dart that we’ve taken out…luckily knitwear stretches. But we would reinsert 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. So you can always just pipe this and seal it with an edge. And then rearrange the buttons and maybe use a feature button at the top and then it almost acts like a scarf stroke waistcoat.