I am the cardigan queen. I swear I have a cardi in every colour and plenty of patterns from floral to polka dot! I love a good cardi, however most of mine are sweetly cropped and built for wearing with swishy skirts. All of which is good because I wear a swishy skirt most days. But then there are those days when I am hanging at home or going to the dog park or chilling at my mums and I just want to be comfy and warm. In that scenario, I got nothin’. If you are a regular reader you may have seen some of my other super casual sewing efforts (this jogger refashion and my #tired sweatshirt) but there had to be a cardi! It had to be long, just in case I broke my own cardinal rule and dared to wear leggings as pants. I know you are starting to worry about me but I haven’t gone mad, apart from Me Made May, very few shall see me in this state!
I found this sad, shapeless, amorphous, grey cardi when I went on this op shop tour and thought I could improve it. First came some shaping. It was a bit baggy in the arm, especially as the arm joined the body and it had no shape to the waist at all. I put it on inside out and I had the amazingly helpful Mummy Ask pin it into a more attractive shape. I used the lightning bolt stitch (a narrow zig zag) to sew along the pinned line, from sleeve cuff to hem. Once I’d tried it on to assess fit, I trimmed away the excess. Tailoring done!
My cardi was a much better shape but it was still a fairly boring, grey cardi. So I had a think about what I could do to jazz it up. Heat transfer vinyl, cut with our Silhouette machine was the obvious answer. I wanted to keep a casual vibe but still be, you know, me. So I explained my ideas to Mr Ask and he came up with this ‘Sewing All-Stars’ design. I loved it! So we cut it out of some gold heat transfer vinyl (more info in this post) and weeded out the excess vinyl. We used some sticky tape to hold the transfer in place until it was flat on the ironing board, removed the tape and ironed it on for 6 secs (which works great for the vinyl we use). Et voila!
I really love how this cardi came together! I particularly love the heat transfer. I cannot believe how lucky I am to have a graphic designer husband that is so willing to spend his Saturday’s breathing life into my heat transfer vinyl visions! But you are lucky too because he is happy to give away this file for FREE to you! You can download it, in .dxf format here. I love how this worked on my cardi but I think it would be pretty swizzy on a tee too. If you make something with this file, I’d love to see it, so tag me in on your pics!
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