Creeping Craft: Upcycling A Jacket.

I recently fell in love with a lilac bat cardigan (see below) but as I could only find versions of it on fast fashion websites and I don't won't to support that I decided to make my own version.

I'm a BIG believer in upcycling your clothes and I happened to have this lilac jacket (from Vinted) that was the perfect colour but that I very rarely wore as pastels aren't really my thing. I did wear it this year to a friend's wedding so I wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons and thought it might be the perfect base to use for this project. The jacket is made of a soft jersey fabric so it's lovely to wear and would be easy to sew onto which would really help.

How I made the jacket:

I looked at various options but the only one that seemed cost effective was too make the bats motifs out of felt. I have lots of felt scarps leftover from my work and it's also an easy material to make tricky shapes out of. Using felt does make the jacket harder to clean but it also means if I change my mind I can easily remove the bats in the future so I was happy to go with that.

I used my nails as inspiration as I had some very cute bat stickers on them when I did this project and it meant I could refer to them for the shapes.

I drew out the bat shapes with a white tailor's pencil first before cutting them out. Once I had them all cut out the next step was choosing the placement for them and making sure that when I put the jacket on you could actually still see the bats, something I didn't get right at first!

When I was finally happy with how the bats were pinned on I started to sew. I love hand sewing this kind of thing as I can watch a bit of tv and just get stuck in. It only took me about an hour to sew them onto the jacket and they were really securely in place.

I love how the finished jacket looks, it's not too Halloween, not that there's anything wrong with that but I wanted this to be a bit more wearable all year around. The lilac and black colour combo is also really easy to style with the other clothes in my wardrobe, something the jacket wasn't really before. I loved this idea so much I've also used it again recently, this time with jersey fabric bats, to mend a jumper that had a stain on it!

The Final Look:

Once the jacket was finished I wore it out on a charity shop/thrifting road trip with a good friend to some of our favourite places. I ended up with some great horror DVDs and trinket finds that day. I was really pleased with how the embroidery held up and the jacket was still very comfy, it didn't stiffen it at all. I'll definitely be wearing it more now so if you have a piece of clothing you find a little dull I fully recommend embroidering it!

Plus, if you love bats as much as I do you can find all my bat themed headpieces here.

Sarah 🦇