Sewing : Two Become One - 8 September 2024

My friend is very keen on buying second-hand clothes online. Vinted and Depop are two of her favourite places. Personally I haven’t been that successful with the fit but it’s always exciting to go ‘shopping’ online when you know that you’ll probably be able to afford nice clothes.

Recently she brought over a couple of tops that she needed to be altered. She was disappointed when the cream top was too tight in the sleeves and disappointed that her flowery top was actually a cropped top. She knows that together we can plan and sew things to make them smaller, shorter or just better, and we both learn in the process.

The first top is really lovely and very clever as it gives the impression of being a layered piece but it’s all one : top and cardigan combined. There’s no back for the flowery side for instance : it looks like a sort of twinset:

Sadly it was too short and felt rather uncomfortable apparently so the idea was to put extra length at hem level cut off from this other top also bought second-hand. This means that only one top will survive this operation, but that’s better than none.

Both garments were made of jersey material and had a sort of ribbed effect which makes them very stretchy but rather difficult to sew properly on a normal sewing machine. Many people on Youtube recommend using a zig zag stitch to avoid problems of the stitching breaking and looking bad.

Here’s an advert showing you some of the recommended types of needles, presser feet and stitches that can be used with jersey material :

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The type of jersey fabric shown on the video is very smooth though, while the material I was trying to join was very textured because of the ribbing. The video is a bit old but I don’t know of any other type of method that can be used to sew jersey fabric using an ordinary machine.

I’m very lucky because I was able to use a cover stitch machine that can actually sew on the stretchy fabric and it looks really neat. Here’s a video showing you what I mean :

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What I did first was to mark 12cm from the bottom of that top as shown below and then mark a dotted line to cut it straight. I was only going to need 9.5cm but I needed the extra 3cm overlap to hide under the flowery section and the grey section and then sew so it didn’t show.

This was a relatively quick alteration. I pinned carefully all the way around the top I was trying to lengthen. As I cut off that cream top that was like a cardigan with ties there was a very neat edge. I put the two ends on one side of the top like a side slit.

_{View A and View B}

View A above shows you the finished side slit. This turned out to be a good idea because it allows the wider hip area to have more space as it opens. View B shows how much longer the ‘flowery top’ became. My friend finds it more comfortable and wearable, and is very happy with the final look :

I learnt a lot doing this alteration but I must confess that my special sewing machine was essential to make this process stress free. There were no broken seams at all and actually the alteration doesn't show. Perhaps you could question the length of the addition, however, it’s made the garment wearable.

Thank you for reading !