New Project -- Old Cardigan to New and Cute!

I revamped an older cardigan that I had. My inspiration came from a post on Crafter.org.

Although there's a tutorial there, I wanted to try and do one for it myself. So here goes:

Old Cardigan -- I had already removed most of the buttons before I remembered to take a photo of it!

First off, I cut off the buttons and the sleeves.

Next step -- cutting the waistline. First, I knew I wanted it to have an empire waist. So I sort of took my scissors and eyeballed a miniscule seam allowance. I ended up stitching everything at 1/4" inch.

I snipped into it and headed to the table. Once there, I folded it in half lengthwise. I tucked one of the sleeves into the other to get it as flat as possible, and then I cut the whole thing. The most important thing here is to get it as flat as possible, with no folds underneath that will make your line go all screwy.

I kept the pieces of the sleeves and bottom half for later.

Then, I tried my new hacked sweater on my model, for fit. I knew I would want the top to fit snugly, and the bottom to fall nice and loosely. So I pulled some of the fullness out at the side seams, and pinned.

I could see after I pinned that I had pulled about one inch out.

So I simply took out the pin, turned the sweater inside out, and stitched, starting at the bottom with a one inch seam allowance, and tapering off to nothing at the armhole.

After that, I thought about trim. I decided that I would trim the hemlines with some ribbon I had.

This part is going to seem confusing, but it's really not.

Since the ribbon was half white on one side and half black on the other, I sewing the half white side to the wrong side of the hem on the bottom half of the sweater, and the bottom halves of the sleeves.

Remember, your hemline on this bottom half of the sweater is not the ribbed portion. The ribbed portion is the part you'll attach back to the top half of the sweater. Same with the sleeves.

I hope this part makes sense. Sewing this trim to the wrong side of the hem made it so that I could fold it up, and cover my seam by stitching down the black half of the ribbon. This way, all the raw edges were finished.

I also decided to put the trim up the front of the sweater as well. So I cut off the facings and buttonholes on the bottom portion of the sweater, and sewed the trim up the front edges also:

Then I attached the bottom half of the sweater to the top half --

Remember, you're attaching the ribbed portion of the bottom half of the sweater. You will need to stretch it a little to get it to fit.

Then I attached the sleeves. Same thing -- you pin them together, matching seamlines and then matching centers. Here's an easy way to match the centers --

In this photo, the sleeve of the sweater is the big part, and the cut-off sleeve with ribbing is the small part. Each one is folded and the seamlines are matched, right sides together. The small part is inside the large part.

Then you just match the two center points together and pin. Stretch the smaller sleeve part as you stitch them together.

I went back and topstitched all my ribbon down, stretching it on the bottom hem portions as I went. I did this with black thread. Then I added 3 hooks and eyes to the top at equal intervals, and covered those with big buttons. I experimented a bit with the trim, and buttons.

Here's the finished result: