Refashion: How to make a side way jumper top

[Annika Sanders] Now the next one is slightly more spectacular. Again it’s about perspective and seeing things differently. And something that conventionally is a rather drab polar 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 you wants to be as straight as possible so you would encapsulate the top of the sleeve in it. And then we cut along here and without even an inch of sewing we have a little side draping top…an 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…so you have to imagine the polar-neck is 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 cut, 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 sleeve in that section because if you cut 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 and seams to seams. And I’m just going to very quickly over-lock that round and turn it back through.

When you’re over-locking, whichever fabric’s on the 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. And 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. Right, so I’ve just trimmed whatever’s available left from the jumper. Just trim it roughly to the size of this, if anything a centimetre or so smaller. Now we need this to be a circle to go around 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 want to just pin it in place because this is tricky cause we’re dealing with smaller bits of fabric. Again the basis of this design is just seeing the raw materials differently, seeing a polar neck on its side as the top of a more substantial, interesting, asymmetrical garment that can even be lengthened into a dress. Now I’m just going to over-lock that round again. And 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, if you executed this design from a sweatshirt you wouldn’t need to bind anything because sweatshirts don’t fray. I mean knitwear doesn’t really fray it more sort of ladders.

Probably need to press that down a little bit…But voila, certainly nicer than most, the average Christmas jumper. And if you’re legs eleven you could wear it as a dress…I’m not.