Jacket to Jumper - Part 2

Part Two is the hard bit. Those of you who have never sewn before might want to enlist some help with some of the pinning or measuring stages.+

In this step you're going to have to make several decisions about what the final dress will look like - this is why it is a good idea to have a picture or real world example to check. If you don't have a picture or example, it would be a good idea to draw something, just to keep your mind on the goal.

For this stage you will need:

Scissors, pins, a measuring tape, a ruler or yard stick, an iron and something to mark your cutting lines with - I use a bar of soap for this but chalk works, as does white pencil crayon. You can also get special fabric pencils at fabric stores, but I find for most projects a bar of soap works just as well.

At the end of my last post you had this:

Now we need to cut our raw materials into shape. (Step numbers continue from the last post)

Step Three: Turn the jacket over and line up the front panels as though your were going to do it up. Make sure that the jacket is smooth and that there are no wrinkles. If you have not taken the buttons off, do not actually do the jacket up. Done up it will be much harder to lay flat and you will wind up with wonky cutting lines.

Lay the yard-stick across the front, even with the underarms.

Special Note: You should make sure that the centre-back of the jacket is ever so slightly longer than the centre-front (about 2cm). If you leave the front and the back perfectly even, the back will actually be shorter than the front when you put the finished dress on. The jacket should naturally fall into this layout pretty easily and you should still be able to lay it out smoothly. Spend as much time as you need to get it flat and even.

Step Four: Using your yard-stick and the soap, draw a line across the front of the jacket.

From either side cut roughly three inches into the jacket along the line, making sure that you cut the back as well as the front.

Step Five: Open the jacket up and flip it over. Using your yard-stick, draw a line between the two cuts. Some people will want to just cut straight across the jacket after drawing the first line. Don't do this. 1.) You're going to find it hard to cut through that many layers of fabric. And 2.) It is so easy to pull the layers out of alignment. One second you're cutting a straight line, the next, you've cut a curve through the back. I speak from experience.

Step Six: Cut along the lines.

You can set the bottom half of the jacket aside for now. The next few steps are all about making the bodice.

This is the most complicated section of this project and the area that novice sewers might want some help with. If you can bribe someone into acting as a mannequin for you, it may make all the difference. Remember the number one rule - measure twice, cut once. Double, triple, quadruple check everything at this stage.

I've decided that I want it to be clear that my dress used to be a jacket. I'm going to keep the lapels and if possible, the breast pocket, however, I don't like the angle that the lapels sit at normally, so I'm going to re-align them.

Step Seven: Pin the two front pieces together at the bottom. Some overlap is okay but it doesn't have to be very much. Using the iron, press new lapels in.

While you have the iron out, it would be a good idea to press the back piece and pin the lining in place. You'll be working with the back next.

This is where it starts to get really tricky.

Step Eight: You need to measure the bodice. Because I don't intend to faff around putting a zip in this, I have to make sure that it will go on over my head. There are two ways you can do this - measure around the fullest part of your bust and then make sure that your two bodice pieces add up to that amount, hoping that the front is wide enough and the back narrow enough and trying to figure out how much extra you need to add for comfort and removal. Or you can do it my way and cheat.

Cheat Method:

Either on your own, or with help, measure around your back. You can do this by tucking one end of your measuring tape under your arm at bra-band level, holding the tape in place with your arm and bringing it around your back to the same spot on the other side. This will not only give you your back measurement, but it will include enough extra to make sure you can still get the dress off as well as your seam allowances.

Step Nine: Lay the back piece of the jacket out by itself. Divide your back measurement by two. My measurement was 51cm so my new number is 25.5. Find the centre back seam of the jacket and put your new number on this seam.*

Mark, with soap, the 0 and 51 cm points.

Step Ten: Lay the yard-stick along the top of the back piece and line it up with the lowest edge of the old shoulder seam.

Draw a soap line along this point. Now lay the yard-stick at right angles to this, lining it up with the marks you made at 0 and 51 cm (or whatever your measurements were.) Cut along these lines. You should now have a rectangle of fabric. This, with a few final cuts, will be the back of your dress.

Step Eleven a: Flip the back piece so that the lining is on top. Lay the front piece over it, lining up the centre back of the lining with the centre front (this is where the lapels cross). Pin at either edge in line with the front armhole. Make sure your pins are pointed in the same direction as the armhole.

Once both sides are pinned, unpin the centre front.

Step Eleven b: If you have a helper, put them on standby. The easiest thing to do at this point is make sure that you are wearing a tank or vest top, the kind with proper all-in-one-piece front and shoulder straps, not stitched on elastic spaghetti straps. Wrap the pinned bodice around you, pinning the front closed. (If you put the pins in the wrong way, you will be stabbing yourself about now.)

You can let the back flop over, but you should pin the front panels to your shirt so that it stays where you would want it to be if you were wearing it. You do not need to worry about pinning the shoulders together - you will be adding straps later so move the pieces around as much as you need to until it is sitting where you want it. The bottom edge of the bodice needs to be about two or three centimetres below your bra band, so keep this in mind when fitting. If you don't have a helper, use a mirror to get this part right.

Either you or your helper should now mark the underarm curve. Trace this along the line of your tank/vest top on one side. Unpin the bodice from your shirt and do a test over your head removal. If you can't get it off, play around with the pins at the centre-front and sides until you can. This is the last chance you have to get this right so it is worth spending some time on.

Step Twelve: Unpin the back from the front and lay it out on the floor again

Cut along the underarm line you drew

Lining up the cut off piece with the shoulder seam on the other side, trace another underarm line.

Cut this off as well. You should also trim the edges of the front off in line with the original underarm seam.

Step Thirteen: Lay the front over the back, with the lining sides together. You will probably need to fold the back a little in order to line up the edges.

Trace along the edges of the armholes using soap. Then separate the front and back again.

Trim off the excess.

Phew! That's it for Step Two of the Jacket to Dress makeover. You've got the bodice cut out and ready to go. The skirt you set aside. Next up the the final hurdle - putting it them together.

+If you have a sister who is about your size I can recommend making her stand with her arms at shoulder height for several hours. She will love you for it.

* If your jacket does not have a centre back seam, you need to fold the back piece in half and press it. The crease is your centre back.

Jacket to Jumper - Step 1

For makeover number one, I'm going to turn a second-hand suit jacket into a dress. I'm going to break the project into three separate posts.

This isn't a simple project, but I wouldn't class it as advanced either. Sort of middle-grade. If you've never sewn anything before, take it slow and always double check before you cut anything. The number one rule of sewing is the same as carpentry: measure twice, cut once.

With any makeover, it's a good idea to know what you want the end result to look like. Unless you've been sewing for years, or are really good with visualisation, find a picture or real world example that you can use to check your progress. I've already got an A-line dress that I love so I'm going to try and use it as a template.

This:

Into something like this:

IMPORTANT:

You should make sure before you do anything that the jacket is long enough. The original jacket I purchased for this project was a bit too short, so I went back out and spent another whopping £3.50 on a longer one. If I had tried it on in the shop, I wouldn't have needed to do this.

Compare:

Neither jacket is long enough as it is, but the three or four inches extra on the second one will make the difference between something I will be comfortable wearing and something that will have me tugging at the hem all the time. This is going to be a personal choice. I prefer longer. You will be able to add a few inches to the length in the reconstruction, but when in doubt, and if possible, get one that is longer than you are aiming for.

Okay, here we go.

For stage one you will need a seam ripper, a pair of scissors, a suit jacket and a glass of wine (optional). I estimate that this first stage will take about an hour, longer if you haven't used a seam ripper before.

The first step is to take your raw materials and break them down into their component parts.

Step One: Using the seam ripper, take the sleeves and the collar off the jacket. If the jacket has shoulder pads sewn in, take those out too. Remove any buttons. The collar of the jacket probably has a felt backing, make sure that you take this off the jacket along with the collar. It doesn't matter if you manage to do this all in one piece or not as long as all of the neck area is clear.

Set the sleeves, buttons and collar aside for now. You will be using them later.

Step Two: Using the seam ripper, open up the shoulder seams of the jacket and trim any excess lining to match the outer layer. You can throw these extra bits away.

Check to make sure that you have removed all of the felt padding in the shoulders. When you have opened the seams and trimmed all the excess you should have something that looks like this:

That's pretty much it for Stage One. You can leave the side seams and the rest of the lining intact. (Told you it wasn't going to be too difficult.)

One other note:

Men's suit jackets tend to have an inner-lining and, for lack of a better term, what I'll call the normal-lining ( I was going to call it the main-lining, but it sounded weird). Most jackets only have an inner-lining at the front. It's a loosely woven starched fabric that helps keep the jacket looking sharp. You can leave this in if you want. It isn't going to make your job any more difficult later and it will help give the finished dress more structure. If you don't want to leave it in, I would suggest very carefully cutting it out, staying as close to the seam between the outer fabric and the normal-lining as you can. It will be much more hassle to un-pick the stitching, pull out the inner-lining and then re-sew the lining onto the outer layer later.

In Stage Two we'll be measuring and cutting.

In Stage Three we'll be sewing everything together.