I Sewed a Sweater!

Here's a finished garment that I totally didn't blog about, can you believe it? I picked up some great Nanette Lepore ribbed sweater knit at the Haberman Fabrics booth at ASE (hey, it's available online!). I'd never sewn this kind of knit before, but I just did a little research and it was surprisingly easy. It helped that this particular knit is very stable--it doesn't stretch a ton and it didn't fray too much as I was working with it.

The pattern was the challenging part. I knew exactly what I wanted: a sort of "sweater girl" look with cute short sleeves. So I did something I've never done before: I draped the pattern, in the garment fabric! I draped the front and back separately, marking the seam lines with chalk. Then I basted them together on the seamlines to fit it. Once I was happy with the fit, I serged the seams. I borrowed the sleeve pattern from a knit dress pattern I have on hand, and measured carefully to be sure that it would fit properly (knit sleeves have no ease, so it had to be a precise fit).

I learned from my research that it's very important to stabilize any horizontal seams, so I basted some Stay Tape into the shoulder seam before serging it.

The neck binding worked really well in the fabric, since it's a rib. I just cut a piece of fabric a little smaller than the sweater neck and twice the width I wanted the binding. I serged the short ends together, folded it in half wrong sides together, and basted the raw edges together. Then it just gets serged into the neckline. Easy! The last step is to top stitch to get the binding to lay flat. The pro way to do this is to use a twin needle, and stitch with the neckline seam in the middle of the two needles. I just used a zigzag, though, because I was too lazy to set up my twin needle.

I did the hem on the bottom and the sleeves by turning it up and zigzagging. I tested this method first, and it worked well since the stitches really disappear in this knit.

I'm happy I now have a paper pattern for this, because I feel like I could use one in every color of the rainbow. Probably in a softer fabric--the ribbed wool is a little itchy to wear so close-fitting. It will be interesting to see how different types of knits work for this.

So there you have it. Isn't it so cool that you can sew a sweater?