Ok, let’s continue our refashioning discussion, shall we? After diligently following my instructions in Part 1 (or perhaps leaving your laundry in the hands of a certain someone who shrunk your favorite sweater…) you should have some delicious felt to work with. Check to be sure that all of the little knit stitches have disappeared into dense material that will be ravel-free when you go at it with scissors.
The possibilities are endless. You can basically use your sweater felt as fabric to cut and sew into anything: slippers, scarves, blankets, pillows, etc. Keep your seam allowances small. There’s no need to overlock raw edges. Experiment with butting edges together and using a zig-zag stitch. You can also seam pieces together by overlapping edges. Try some decorative embroidery stitches, like a whip stitch or blanket stitch as an edging.
Here are a few links for embroidery how-to’s with photo details and sketched diagrams. Also inspirational links for recycled wool blankets, accessories, and more!
Another approach is to construct a new garment using details or features from the original sweater. The dinosaur sweaters from Part 1 of this post were my first attempt at this.
Each sweater used a combination of 3 sweaters. For the T-Rex, I used a striped sweater for the main body, sleeves and waist ribbing from another, neck ribbing and applique fabric from a third. Whenever possible, keep ribbings or hems intact when laying out your pattern pieces. For example, I cut the new sleeves by lining up my pattern piece on the original cuff. From a design standpoint, combining several sweaters works nicely when colors/patterns are repeated somewhere else in the garment.
The dinosaurs were applied using Stitch Witchery to fuse the shape in place. I used embroidery floss to blanket stitch around the raw edges and to add some other prehistoric details. Ferocious!
Cool links to other crafty folk that refashion all types of second hand garments:
Armour Sans Anguish
Antifactory
Preloved
Snowflake 66
Wardrobe Refashion