How to Make a Jumper for a Young Girl

In the fall I think of give back to school and back to school means shopping of course. We wanna make sure that your little one is taken care of. And today we're gonna work on a basic jumper. So I have created this pattern. It's a very simple pattern. Same piece front and back. There is a PDF download of the pattern, but I have traced mine on to this muslin. So when you're doing this, you're gonna wanna make sure that the grain of the fabric is lined up. I've gotten mine already precut. You're gonna make sure that you have eight pieces. You're gonna have two pieces opposite front and back of your main fabric, which is gonna show on the outside. You're gonna have two pieces of your contrast fabric. I've used corduroy for both, but if you wish for it to be a little less stiff you can use a quilting white cotton, liner fabric, whatever you like. The benefits of having them both in the same fabric is that you'll be able to easily make this reversible. The only thing you have to do different is to put buttons on both sides. So there's my first four pieces and my second four pieces. I want to cut the pockets. Those don't have to be opposite because they are symmetrical. And then I'm gonna cut the bias binding for the top of the pockets. Now I'm gonna take a minute just to explain what I mean by bias binding. If you've not done this before, the grain of the fabric is gonna go parallel to the salvage edge, where it comes off of the bolt. 45 degrees from that is your bias. So you're basically going to go on the diagonal. And if you can see how the grain lines of this fabric run perpendicular to each other, you're going to ut your bias strips, which are gonna be two inch strips about eight inches long. You'll have a little leftover, it's okay. And they will look like this. The next thing we're gonna do is you wanna make sure that you pay attention to the pattern. When you transferring all of your markings from your original pattern on these pockets, the most important part are these notches. You've got three notches. You've got one on either side and one in the center. And let me show you how that is gonna work. So the notches, take each of the side notches and line them up about 1/2 inch from that center notch. You wanna pull the fabric up so it's continuing to make this rounded line on both sides. All right, okay. If you're a pinner this would be a good place to grab your pins. Sorry I thought I lost my thing. And pin each of these pleats. Just a little bit of trivia this is called a box pleat. And these are gonna make some fun pockets for the front of our jumper. So I'm gonna take it over to the machine and just run just a basic straight stitch about 1/4 inch or less if you can from the edge. This is just to hold that pleat in place. Okay and as you'll see here that holds our pleat in place and we'll be able to kind of make a rounded pocket like this. All right, so next thing we wanna do is grab that bias that you made, should be a long strip and we're gonna iron it. So iron it wrong sides together. You're gonna make like a hot dog. If you remember from elementary school the hamburger or hot dog folds. And just lining up together. If you're a quilter, this is exactly the same way as you would make a bias binding. If you're not a quilter now you know how. And then you're gonna open it back up and put those raw edges into the crease that you've just made. I might have to use a little bit of steam just to encourage it to stay. This corduroy that I'm using is a little stiff. Once you've folded both of those over you're going to drop your iron . You're gonna fold each of those edges onto each other and iron again. And when you are finished you will have this nice piece of bias. And the reason why we do this on the bias is that it's kind of stretchy this way. It's the stretchiest way that a woven fabric can be. So since we're going to put these on the top of the pockets we wanna be able to allow little hands to get in and not be hindered in putting their treasures inside. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take this pocket and put the binding on. Flip it over so that the wrong side of the pocket is facing towards you. And then you're gonna open up this binding you've just made and you're going to flip it over so that the edge of the binding is against the edge of the pocket. Go ahead and pin it in place. And then we're gonna go over to our machine and sew that. For this step I can just have a standard foot. I've got my needle in the center which will give me 1/4 inch seam allowance from the left edge of the foot. I'm putting that left edge of the foot inside the crease. And I'm just gonna do a straight stitch here. Okay, so I pull this off the machine. An extra pin. Once I pull it off the machine, I'm going to utilize that fold facing down toward the bottom of the pocket. So I'm folding this binding over and then I'm gonna take it over to my machine to sew. I have an edge stitch foot on my machine. You may have something similar. Sometimes they have a movable fin. But I'm gonna pull this off so that I can show you this fin that is in the center. I'm gonna line up the edge of the binding with this fin. Also on my sewing machine, I need to move my needle to the left in order for this to work. I want my stitch length to be a 3 1/2 because this is a top stitch. We don't need to worry about a backstitch here because it'll all get cut off anyways. And from here just go ahead and make sure that, that edge of the binding is hugging that fin. And then also through both layers of that binding and the top of the pocket. Now we have our finish bound pocket. The next step will be to cut the edges, the binding at the top. We don't need all that extra and then turn this under. So I'm gonna go over to my iron and do just that. Clip these extras that I don't need. And then if you need to use a seam gauge, we're turning this part of the pocket all the way around the edge, 1/4 inch in. All the way around. Now as you may know, turning 1/4 inch on a rounded object is a little bit tricky. The good thing is you're a seamstress, not a surgeon. And if you mess up, nobody dies. The other upshot here is also, see how I did mine a little bit crooked here. You can go back and fix it. Really if worst comes to worst you just put it on a very active toddler and then no one will know the difference. All right so now I've got my pocket. You're gonna wanna fluff it out a little bit. If you feel like some of the edges are a little angular, you can fix that with your iron. Till you have a nice rounded pocket to put on your dress. You're gonna repeat this step for both pockets. And our next step will be putting them on the dress. Now that you have your pocket pressed under you're going to put it on the front of your dress. Now in the pattern, there are some markings. And if you didn't transfer your markings when you cut your pattern and cut your pieces, now's a good time to do that. Grab your pattern and mark where the tops of the pockets should go. Always important that the pockets are not crooked. So you may wanna also take a ruler and match the top of the pockets so that the tops of the outside are matching and the tops of the bottom are also matching. They should be kind of at an angle towards each other. And when you're pinning these on also push in just a little bit. Just so that there's room for a little hand to go in there. So we're gonna go ahead and pin this onto the front of our dress. Again you're gonna kind of puff out the bottom of that pocket so that it makes it more rounded. Now if per chance you did the first one and you didn't puff it out very much you of course want to make the second one match it. So you may have to play around with it a little bit. Pin all the way around. This is probably the fussiest part of this entire pattern. So take your time. Make sure it's something that you're gonna like when you're done. And once you have it where are you think you want it to be you're gonna take it back over to the machine. I still have this edge stitch foot on my machine and I'm gonna use it here. That fin that we talked about earlier that's gonna butt up against the edge of the pocket. And you're still on a 3 1/2 millimeter seam length, sorry stitch length. And you're gonna just sew forward. Make sure to backstitch right at the top so the pockets, just so your pockets don't come off. And sew all the way around. Again you may need some adjustment as you go, you can kind of pull it out. This is where this is an art, not a science. Because we only turned it 1/8 you may have some issues with it flipping out, especially if you're using a stiffer fabric like I am like corduroy or twill. If you sew with a stiletto this is a good use for it here. Again make sure to do a strong back stitch when you hit the top of the pocket. You may wanna go over once or twice just to make sure that, that stays. All right and then we're ready for our next step. I'm gonna grab the liner piece and I'm gonna put the liner right sides together. Line these up. Now not everybody is perfect at cutting. That's totally okay. But if you have one that is a little bit bigger than the other, you're gonna wanna sew to the smaller of the two. So I've got these lined up. And you'll see how there's just a little bit of variation because my liner was cut at a different time than my exterior. Totally okay. So we're gonna go ahead and pin this. You wanna put your pins perpendicular to that edge, again so you can sew over them. And once you're done pinning we're gonna switch over back to our regular foot. Okay, so we're gonna go back to our machine. Switch back to your regular foot. You put your needle back into the center if you moved it. We're gonna use 1/4 inch seam allowance. And you're gonna line up with the smaller of the two if there is any discrepancy. Maybe you are a much better cutter than I. But go ahead and start with a backstitch. Again we're also gonna do this in a construction stitch. So it's gonna be a 2 1/2 millimeter stitch length. If you have trouble when you're going around these rounded corners, pick up your presser foot and just readjust. If put your needle down first when you go around it makes it easier to pivot and move the fabric. Now you've got your shoulder straps sewn. You're gonna come back and use your scissors. You can use a pinking shears if you like here if you have them and skip the notching. But what I'm gonna do is cut this seam allowance down just a little bit. And the purpose for what I'm doing is that when we flip this inside out we want to make sure that there's no bunching. So I'm gonna trim these seam allowances and then I'll also come back and clip just to make sure that I don't have any extra fabric pulling on the inside. The step that we just did, putting the front of the jumper and the inside liner of the front of the jumper together. It's gonna be exactly the same for the back of the jumper. This part gets a little bit tedious but you'll be glad later that you did it. All right so once I've trimmed that, now I trimmed it about somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 I wouldn't stress out about it. But then you're gonna take all the parts that are curved which on this seam is quite a few and you're gonna do these little tortilla chips. You're gonna do that all the way around. I prefer this way. Some people like to just put a little slit in there. Just the most important part about this is making sure that you did not hit that seam which is a little trickier than it seems sometimes. If you do happen to hit the seam, you can go back just run that line again. You clip those inside curves and the outside curves as well. The tighter the curve, the closer you wanna put your little notches. When I'm done here this is gonna look a little bit like alligator teeth. One more right here, okay. When we're clipping we're essentially releasing the fabric so that it doesn't bind inside. Okay once you think you've clipped enough you might wanna clean up a little bit because you'll end up with little triangles all over your project. But our next step is to flip it inside out. If your fingers are small enough go ahead and grab the straps and turn them inside out. You might wanna use a scissors or a chopstick or something to help kind of poke that out and make those perfectly round. If you're finding that perhaps it's bunching in places, go out and just flip it back inside out and add a few more notches. And then once you've got it completely out and you're happy that it's not puckering on any of these curves you're gonna grab your iron and just press that down. Making those nice and crisp so they're starting to look like straps. So this entire process that we've just done with this front piece, you're gonna just repeat that with the back. So now that you have your straps finished we're gonna take that front piece and the back piece that you've just done and we're gonna put them right sides together. Now you've got a lot of right sides going on here. So what I mean is the outside fabrics are going to face towards one another and we're gonna pin those together. They should line up at the bottom. And then we're gonna go all the way up to that armpit seam. And those should line up as well. You can kind of see what I'm talking about here. Those straps kind of just get pushed inside. We're gonna just kind of ignore them for the moment. And then once you've got the sides pinned you're gonna go ahead and take it back over to the machine. I'm gonna do 1/4 inch seam allowance on this as well. You can do a little bit more. It will change the fit of the garment, but if you feel like this might be a little too wide for your little person, go ahead and add 1/2 inch seam allowance instead. So we're gonna start at the bottom. Our pink sides are together. When you get up to that armpit seam you may wanna open up those seams so that you can reduce a little bit of the bulk in the armpit. Not critical. But If you do you may just have less to sew over when we get to our top stitching. Once you've got that first side seam done you're gonna just turn it over, do the same thing on the other side. Pin it in place so you make sure that all of these guys are lining up. I'm not using a lot of pins. You may choose to use more. These are some pretty straight lines. And especially since this fabric is not very stretchy, I don't need to use our many pins. Which also means I have less pins to pull out as I go. Again here at this armpit seam I'm pressing these open with my finger. You can do it with an iron. This just saves time. All right so once we have both sides seems done, it's starting to look like a dress. Pull the straps out and really from here all we've got to do is finish this bottom, top stitch the top and then put in our button holes. So I'm gonna start top stitching this. If you need to iron this, make sure that everything is lying down here. Go ahead and do that at this point. I think I'm doing okay. And I don't have much bulk in that armpit seam. So I'm gonna do 1/4 inch top stitch. You may choose to do smaller if you like. I'm gonna switch my stitch length to a 3 1/2 millimeter. And just follow those curves all the way around. If you find that this 1/4 inch top stitch is not looking the way that you want it to, you can pull out that edge stitch foot again and use that and just have about 1/8 inch top stitch. Holly can you put down a little of that bulk. Oh yep absolutely. Almost there. When you get back to the other side where you started you're gonna just overlap and then pull it off the machine. And then we're ready for our next step. The next step will be finishing the bottom edge. And if you've got a seam gauge this is a great time to use it. You can do about 3/4 inch turn. And you're gonna use your iron to turn under the inside layer first. So let me move this around. Okay we'll move that way. Some people prefer to do it the other way. I really don't care how you do it as long as you're having fun and you're happy with what you're doing. So I'm actually gonna switch to the outside 'cause it's the position I'm in right now that makes it a little bit easier. And what I do again, you may do this differently, but as I iron around, I kind of do almost like a dotted line. I'm gonna push those seams open on the sides. You are so inclined you can spend the extra time to push those open after you've done your side seams. And this is the part where you start to feel like we're almost there, but there's so much real estate going around this dress. And the fact that we're doing an inside and an outside layer just makes it seem like we're so close to the end but just so far. So when I talk about the dotted line, you're just gonna go back around. So what I'm doing is I'm skipping spots and I'm measuring. And then in between like this length here, kind of coming back and just filling in by eyeball makes it a little bit faster. I know that some of you are those sewers who will measure every single inch and that's totally okay too. I found in teaching that there are so many different approaches to sewing. Some people are very laid back and some people want to make sure nothing is even 1/16 of an inch off. All right so once we have the outside done, we're gonna just take the inner layer and fold it up to match. We're gonna start at the side seams. Again press those open at least down on the bottom there. I'll reduce a little bit of bulk. You're gonna wanna just pull this so that these line up together. Once you have them lined up you can take your pins, just lock them into place. And you're just gonna follow that seam all the way around. If you find in this process that one of the edges seems to be longer than the other, you're gonna just reduce the length that, that linear travel of the fabric by pushing it back in. So see how this guy is a little bit far. Let me just push that back in, press it into place. This way you save yourself from having to measure. Again if you do want to measure all the way around both layers, knock yourself out. The other side seam, same thing. We wanna make sure that these are, they're lining up together. We will pin there as well. And this step step takes forever. Almost there. All right, home stretch. If you get to this place and you do find that oh my goodness I have more of my inside then my outside, you're just gonna fold it under a little bit further and pull it down. The other thing you can do at this point is to just ease it in a little bit. See how I've got this bump right here, this means I've got to decrease my length overall of my pink fabric. Put that. There we go. All right, then we have our bottom seam. And we're ready to top stitch. So now I'm gonna just take it over back to the machine. And do the same thing that I did on the straps. We're gonna top stitch the seam at a 1/4. I'm gonna take my table off just so that I can get my hem around a little bit better. I usually just start a side seam just so I kind of know how far I've gotten. But you can start wherever you want. I'm still on that 3 1/2 millimeter stitch length for the top stitch. I'm just gonna go all the way around. We need to pull that fabric underneath just a little bit. Make sure it doesn't peek out. Might get some little strings along the way. I find that if you trim as you go there's a lot less cleanup work at the end. I'm just finishing up this bottom hem. Again just like we've done before on the top stitch you're gonna run back over where you started, do your best to line it up. I generally don't do a back stitch on a top stitch but since this is gonna be on a child's garment I just did a quick one stitch back stitch. Recut my threads. And we're ready for button closures. So my machine has an automatic button holer. I'm not sure what you're sewing on at home but I would refer to your owner's manual of your sewing machine if yours is any different. On mine we put on this foot. I'm gonna change my settings. So that I'm in a button holing mode. My button hole needs to be about 1 1/2 centimeters long. So what I'm gonna do, take the front pieces, line them up. I want my button hole to start right inside that curve. So do the best you can to get this lined up and let your machine do its magic. All right, once your machine has finished your button hole, you'll need to open it up. You can see how it looks on the back here. And we're just gonna open it up with a scissors. Some people prefer to use a seam ripper. And there you have it. Our next step is going to be putting the button on. So this is the fun part of the project. And you get to choose really fun trims. I've chosen these heart buttons to go on my jumper. And my machine has the ability to sew the buttons on itself. You may elect to do hand sewing. There's, that generally works better for having things stay on. But I'm gonna just show you. I've got a little button setting that I've selected on my machine and then my machine will do this stitch. And then it does a little bit of a lock. I usually will do it twice just to make sure that it stays. Because nothing like having a dress you wanna wear and not having the buttons on it. Okay, so we'll close these shoulders with our buttons and our new button holes. And then we have a dress. It's ready for fall or spring or whatever life throws at you.