Tag Archives: Scrap busting

Scrap Busting Knitted Jumper

This jumper has been about 18 months in the making! I’m a slow knitter, what can I say?! I started it in the Summer of 2021 when I was doing a lot of knitting, and still living with my sister. I then moved to Oxford and did join a knitting group locally but I still make very slow progress.

This was the last thing I was going to make to use up most of the yarn I already had before I was allowed to buy any more yarn (though, ahem, that didn’t end up quite working). I made a jumper, a cardigan and some baby cardigans too to use up what I already had.

I’d ended up with quite a lot of odd balls of wool which were all in a blue/green/grey colour palette – and lots of navy blue, so I thought the striped jumper pattern from Learn to Knit Love to Knit would be a good way to some of it up – it doesn’t actually use as much wool as the pattern said, but I guess you can’t generally get less than 50g in a ball so that’s the amount you need of each colour. The green jumper, which was the same pattern as my black sparkley jumper, is also from the same book.

The jumper is knitted flat, in pieces, with the same stripe pattern on the front and back – so you get matching stripes on the side seams!

I’m not totally in love with the neckline if I’m honest – it’s ended up not really round, with corners. It’s also a little wider than I would like ideally – but maybe it will settle down with some washing?

I did actually block all the pieces before I sewed them together as they were rolling up something chronic – and I wanted to make sure the stripes were as straight as possible on the front and back so I could line them up as much as possible. But there were so many ends to weave in, wah!

Here’s a close up of the colours – I do really like that it’s quite bright. I was looking for some more bright knitwear as it had been an area that had been quite dull – though I also bought a couple of jumpers from Uniqlo a couple of months ago – I have hardly bought any clothes recently (apart from a couple of t-shirts last Summer) but I realised I don’t HAVE to make everything – and especially with knitting because I’m so slow to get things finished, it would take literal years to get some stuff I want to wear.

I am currently working on a mustard yellow jumper too – which is knitted top down, in one piece – so I’m excited to not have to sew it together at the end! Though I did have to frog it because I did it wrong, so I thought it was going to be my fastest knit ever – but not so much. Also it will probably have to wait until next Autumn/Winter to get worn, by the time I finish it. I seem to be always out of season with my knitting and my sewing actually – anyone else, or is it just me?

Patchwork Denim Whale Jacket

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Long time no update! But I have a few old makes to share and lots of plans for new makes so hopefully I’ll be around a bit more this year than last year!

A while ago, at the beginning of the pandemic when I was furloughed, I sewed a bunch of pairs of jeans (have a look at my archive page for deets). This means I ended up with lots of denim scraps. I decided I wanted to make a patchwork denim jacket from these scraps. I was mostly inspired by Raph on the Sewing Bee when they did the reduce, reuse, recycle week and he made a patchwork denim dress with a whale on it.

The jacket went through a couple of iterations – at one point I was going to try to make a picture from the denim, but my skills are not good enough for ‘painting’ with fabric! But then like a lot of the world I watched the first series (and there has since been a second) of Young Royals on Netflix and became a little obsessed with this jacket that Edvin wore a good few times. And it was like destiny! I did buy a pair of white jeans from a charity shop to help break up the blues.

I decided to use the Friday Pattern Company’s Ilford Jacket pattern (which I made once before for my brother in law) and I made the chunks of patchwork according to the size of each pattern piece, so I didn’t waste as much fabric by making one massive sheet of patchwork! The below is the back. I cut random pieces and just tried to assemble them in a way which meant no 2 pieces of the same colour were next to each other. I did have 2 quite dark blue denims but they look a tiny bit different.

I actually finished this jacket at the end of 2021 and never got around to photographing it. Oops. Anyhoo. This is how it turned out. And I LOVE IT!

I did the patch pockets and chose fabrics based on what would contrast in each section they belonged in.

I did both sleeve plackets in white, but the cuffs in different colours, again based on which colour would contrast best on each sleeve. I did the basic construction and then cut out the cuffs and pockets. I also underlined the whole things because there were SO MANY SEAMS on the inside!

At this point you may be thinking ‘where is the whale I was promised?’. Weeellll…..

I didn’t necessarily intend to copy the whale from Raph’s dress but I’ve always loved whales, ever since I did a project on them since I was in the Brownies! I especially love blue whales. Because they’re the biggest! So my whale is based on a blue whale. Seems fitting colour-wise too!

As you can hopefully tell, I also cut the collar in 2 different colours and added seam allowance so that it would be super contrasty and I actually really like it as a design feature.

This was a stash only make, which seemed in keeping with the idea to use up my scraps. The buttons were in my stash – I feel like I took them off a rtw garment at some point but I don’t now remember when or from what. The fabric I used for the underlining was the leftover fabric I used to line my By Hand London Victoria coat hack.

I have worn this jacket a good few times (when it’s not quite as freezing as it is this week in Britain, brr!). I even got a compliment when I went to the Shakespeare Birthplace museum in Stratford Upon Avon – one of the tour guides told me she loved my style and my jacket specifically. I love getting random compliments from people – I want to try to do that more myself, because who doesn’t want to be told something nice?!

I don’t know if you can really see (I forgot to take a close up photo, sorry) but the whale has a little eye. I used a tiny bit of the black denim and zig-zag stitched all around the edge. It might be my favourite detail. And now I’m just going to spam you with loads of photos. Sorry not sorry.