Rob: Hey! What's up everyone? Welcome to ThreadBanger. I'm Rob, that's Corinne and it's time for your weekly dose of D.I.Y.
Corinne: This time around, we're hooking up with futuristic Brooklyn-based designer Rebecca Turbow.
Rebecca Turbow: Hi! I'm Rebecca Turbow and we're here today in my Brooklyn studio. You may remember me from ThreadBanger in about 2007, when I was wearing all green and my hair was a lot shorter. Since you saw me last, I've continued with my clothing line, Safe by Rebecca Turbow. I have done about three collections. In last October I switched from my well known turquoise and white to gray and white. So, I've been doing Safe by Rebecca Turbow for about 5years.
I have some new business partners actually. I have -- this past summer which has helped a lot and it has allowed me to grow as a business and to make real collections that I can sell to stores and I'm going to be in a showroom hopefully with next collection.
And today I'm going to show how to take an old garment and make it into something totally new and fresh. And I'm going to use an old sweatshirt that has been worn a million times and washed and make into a dress.
The things that you're going to need for this project are starting with an old sweatshirt, a rib, but you could also use any kind of really stretchy jersey, some fusible interfacing, a ruler something to make circles out of, which you can even use a CD, scissors, or rotary cutter, some kind of chalk or marking tool.
First step, you're going to cut the sleeves off, I'm just going to take the my ruler and draw a line, it doesn't have to be perfect, it's just the nature of a project like this. And I folded this sweatshirt in half to make it faster and to get each side even. Then I cut the waistband off and also the neck, right next to the sleeve. We're going to cut out the rib for the waistband, the neckline and the arms.
Take your ruler and measure it right on the fabric. You want it to be about 2inches shorter on both the side and you can pull out your waist band material and just make sure that's it going to fit and then you also want to count your half-an-inch seam allowance, all around.
This piece for the waist you're going to measure and cut it on the fold. We're going to fold it, so it's actually going to be about that size when it's finished. You're going to do the same thing with the sleeves and then the same with the neckline.
Okay. So, you're going to come over to your sewing machine, I usually just use my serger but you can also use the stretch stitch on your regular sewing machine. So, we're going to sew the waistband which is on your fold here and this is going to be your back seam. We're just going sew it together and you can pin this if you need to.
Mine even came out a little bit uneven but it's going to look like that and we're going to take it over the iron, but before we do that, we're going to do the neckline and the cuffs.
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So, you're going to bring your pieces, over to the ironing board and we have our waistband, our neckband and our armbands and you're just going to slightly iron down the seams. Keep flipping it around and Ironing it and so you want to try to also line up your back seams here.
The reason for the notch is, it's going to make it easier to pin it, because our waistband is smaller, so it's going to gather this in a little bit. So, we will line up the center front with the center notch, the center back with the back notch. I just made in them, the two side notches with two side seams.
I'm just going to flip it around and it's going to go over the bottom of the sweatshirt and I'm going to line up the two back notches. Here's my back notch, the back seam and I'm going to pin it and this is the same process that we're going to use for the neckline and for the sleeves.
I'm just going to serge it around, this is the waistband and then I'm going to do the same thing to the neck and the arms. And I'm just going to take the pins out as I go. So, you want to be really careful not to catch any of your pins under your needle or your waistband, if you have any of these, you can just cut them and then we're going to do the rest and then we'll take it to the ironing board again.
So, you're almost done. I'm going to add one more little embellishment and one other things that I like doing lately is these cut out circles and I have an example for you, the dress from my spring'08 I believe, where I did these little cut outs.
So, you're going to need some kind of a round shape or one of these which I love, these are amazing. And your marking chalk or tailor's chalk. I'll show you an example, so you're going to mark them off, maybe I'll do one a little bit smaller. You also have to make sure that they are a fairly good distance apart because of what we're going to do next.
So, this is where your fusible interfacing is going to come in and I've already cut these circle shaped out. What I did was I just used CD for one of them and then I used the largest shape on here for that one. And then I cut out a center, which is a little smaller and you're going to sew as closes as you can to the edge. But you still need to make sure that these are far enough apart. And I'll also show you in more detail. So, when you sew they are not too close together.
So, I'll just cut out the center of this one, which I've marked. Now, you're going to cut the circles out of your sweatshirt which should be the same size as the holes we've cut out of the fusible interfacing.
You're going to line up the fusible interfacing and you want to make sure that the glue side of your interfacing is facing up. So, the way you can tell this is if you look really closely, the side that has the fusible is slightly sparky and the other side is smooth and what we're going to be doing is pinning them and sewing them around here.
We want to try keep it as perfect a circle as possible. We're actually going to trim down our seam allowance even more and we're going to do this, so when we flip this around inside, our edges are really smooth and what's happening now, is the sticky part, the part that's going to be fused to the garment is now facing the garment on the other side.
I'm going to start ironing it down. So, what it's going to do is stick to other side. There we have it, the circle cut out just, in about an hour, it's pretty cute.
So, I think this dress is pretty cute, I might wear it out, since I'm in a hurry. But thanks for coming by. My websites again are rebeccaturbow.com and safeclothes.net for online shop. It was nice to see you all.
Rob: Hey! That's all folks. Make sure you tune in next week for our very special Valentine's day show.
Corinne: If you have anything you're making for your loved one, we want to see it. Upload your videos, pictures and projects to threadbanger.com
Rob: We'll see you guys next time.
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