Sewing with jersey, my first experience: a hoodie! Undercover Hood by Papercut Patterns

It’s been a while since I decided to try to sew knit fabric. I also asked Silvia of Sewing Princess some suggestions (thank you Silvia 🙂 ). She suggested me not to start with a too light-weight knit fabric, just not to get discouraged at the very first try. Given that I needed a new hoodie, instead of buying it I’ve followed her advice and I tried to do a test with a medium-weight jersey.

The pattern is Undercover Hood by Papercut Patterns. I sewed the version A (the hoodie version) up.

I used a beautiful cotton jersey (maybe Milano stitch jersey, but I’m not sure) bought on Supercut.it last spring. It’s a double face fabric, very nice on both sides. I took advantage of this feature using the grey side for the front, the back, the sleeves, the front pocket, the hood and the claret side for the sleeve cuffs, the hem cuff and the hood’s lining. In this way I tried to create a contrast to make the hoodie a little bit more particular.

For the first time I used a 4-thread overlock stitch, sewing most of the seams with my overlocking machine directly. And…wow! Everything was fast and simple. Furthermore the inside finishing is very beautiful and professional, it could seem a hoodie bought in a shop.

It’s been my first time even with twin needle. I used it for the front pocket. I followed this tutorial (in Italian) and some advices I was given at the shop in Milan in which I bought the needle:

• Move the twin needle position to the center (stitch width n. 5 on my Elna Explore 340, on other machines it could be different…read the manual of your machine for right instructions) to avoid it hitting the foot and breaking. Instead I used the usual 2,5 stitch length.
• Choose the stitch pattern n. 1 (the classic straight stitch)
• Do some thread tension tests to avoid the “hump” between the two parallel seams. The shopkeeper told me to choose between 2,5 and 3. After some tests I chose 2,5.

I made a little mistake on the sides of the front pocket. I sewed with the twin needle too far from the lateral edges of the pocket so I had to add a third seam in order to have the pocket well clung to the front of the hoodie. Let’s think of it as a creative 3-thread stitch!

After having a fitting with the hoodie basted, I made some little modifications to the pattern to have the hoodie a little more fitted: I cut 2 mm off both the sides from the cuff to the hem, 1 cm off each side of the sleeve cuffs and 2 cm off each side of the hem cuff.

I haven’t inserted a drawstring because I haven’t found one with the right colour yet. I’ll add it in the future.

I’m very proud of my first experiment with jersey, 4-thread overlock stitch and twin needle! I think that new experiments will come out soon. And I love my brand new hoodie! It’s the best hoodie I have in my wardrobe for sure.