Appliqué Scraps Christmas Jumper

In an effort to use up my stash, I stitched up the Fibre Mood Clemence jumper using a black sweatshirt fabric I already owned, with black ribbing from the shop. I love this pattern - it's all about the sleeves!! There are no shoulder pads as the volume in the sleeve head is formed by a clever but simple construction. It looks complicated but is isn't - just two lines of stitching. It has a sort of 1980's vibe with a hint of Star Trek romulan thrown in. And I'm all here for that!! The sweatshirting I used is pretty thick but with a thinner, more fluid sweatshirting the sleeve head volume would be less pronounced. 

So on to the appliqué. Much as a black sweatshirt is fine, I felt it was lacking something, so I decided to embellish it with some appliqué to turn it into a Christmas jumper. Appliqué is fairly straight forward if you follow the below steps:

1) Stabilise your background fabric

2) Stabilise the fabric you will be applying

3) Stitch close to the edges of your applied fabric so that the edges stay down. 

For my jumper, the background is already a stable fabric with not much stretch so I didn't worry about adding any extra stability. However with thinner fabrics (such as cotton lawn) you may want to reinforce the fabric with spray starch to stop it shifting when you stitch.

I cut out my cracker and bang template in card first, to double check I was happy with the size and layout. Once happy I cut out the design from scraps of fabric that were left overs from other projects. (Yes, I keep all my scraps!!!) And then used iron on interfacing to stabilise them. This makes it MUCH easier to sew and less likely to distort under the machine.

On to the fun part, the sewing! Once you've pinned the fabric in place, edgestitch around the appliqué pieces, making sure that you stay close to the edge. I probably had a 2-3mm distance between my stitching and then edge.

For jersey fabrics (like my orange and yellow explosion) they will not fray due to the nature of the knit. But for woven fabrics, like cotton poplin/quilting cotton etc, the edges are prone to fraying although the interfacing will reduce this. So you may want to go back over the stitching with a tight zigzag stitch - keep one side of the zig going through the appliqué and background fabric, and the other zag just going through the background fabric so the edges are more protected. 

And voilá, your new Christmas jumper is ready to go!!

Happy sewing,

Tanya xx