Upcycled Sweater: Chicken Style

I have a roommate and her birthday was a few days ago. Since we watch Project Runway together, we realized that getting an old sweater and screen printing a mountain of cats on it can be considered creative genius. Well, I like making things, she likes chickens, and long story short this came into existence:

CAM00231 — Yup, that’s me. I like taking pictures with or of the things I make. Was trying pretty hard to look nonchalant and cool.

I used a $15 black sweater from Buffalo Exchange, a lot of pins, my sewing machine, gray/red thread, white/yellow fleece, and a piece from a red shirt. The key to this project was not rushing and the approval of my client, AKA my roommate, at important stages.

The point of reference was this chicken:

1) Make a pattern: nothing is more wasteful than cutting fabric and then constantly trimming or cutting new fabric. I made mine from printer paper. As you can see from the image, my chicken is headless, but using ratio-visual skills, I was able to estimate the correct size of a chicken head.

Top = headless patternBottom = pattern cutout with an estimated head — Top = headless pattern
Bottom = fabric cutout with an estimated head

2) PIN, PIN, PIN, PIN, PIN THE WORLD

Now embroider an eye!
I asked my roommate if she liked the sleepy chicken eye. She says she liked the stuck up chicken look.

3) Machine Sew! Hand Sew! Take out the pins as you go!
I sewed the wing accent with my machine and some gray thread. The red crown was hand sewed due to the flaky nature of the fabric, I did not want it to unravel and it was too small to sew by machine.

And that’s how the chicken sweater came to be. Hope you decide to make a chicken sweater too!
There’s really no better way to say things like happy birthday, I love you, let’s be awesome chicken friends ORRRRR

"want to fertilize some eggs ;)" -pervchicken — “want to fertilize some eggs ;)” -pervchicken

than with an upcycled chicken sweater.

Cheers & good luck!

XOXO Melisa

One Comment

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