hi I've got a client who has staff who are quite small and so even the standard small t-shirt doesn't fit so what I'm going to do they wanted me to do it as quickly and economically as possible so what I'm going to do is take you through that process so you can see the t-shirt on the left it's quite large I mean even though it's a small and have splits on the sides and what I'm going to do is I've got to put those foots back on as well most of this on mass polos they usually run in the sides and then they just stitch it down so that's a good thing from the point of view that I can do the same for the client so we'll need to undo that stitching to hold it down and do that on both sides you now I also need to take out the sleeve so what I'm going to do is just mark around I don't want to take too much from the armhole of course I just want to take it from the shoulder and when the sleeve goes on because I'm just going to cut it off I'm not going to unpick then it's going to lose the seam allowance for the sleeve and for the armhole so what I've done is I've calculated how much I need to take off and then that will also take into account the seam allowance so because I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this because the client you know it's got to be done as economically as possible because I think I've got something like 72 to do so I'm just cutting the sleeve off I don't really want to take any off the sleeve as such because by the time I actually attach that I'm losing the seam allowance anyway it wasn't necessarily the sleeve being too long that was the issue it was the shoulders being too low so now I'm just going to cut into that and as I said I don't want to take too much from the underneath section and I'm just going to cut around my chalk mark and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use that section that I've cut off as a template and pin that on to the other side and cut the other side exactly the same but before I do that what I thought I'd do is just pin this sleeve back on so it's important to make sure that you put the the top of the sleeve find out whether which is the top of the sleeve and pin it on and I'm going to pin it so that when I saw it back on I'm sewing on to the sleeve now once you've got it pinned into place at the top then the best the easiest thing to do is to turn the t-shirt inside out and then you can lay the sleeve out around and just because this is a t-shirt it's a work shirt just pin around as far as you can to the front the body of the garment is going to be a little bit bigger than the sleeve which is fine because it's going to be taken in anyway so it shouldn't fit see how there's a difference there that's fine we'll make the adjustment for that you now because the the sleeve is smaller I'm going to pop a pin in just to the inside seam on the body of the polo and I'm just going to place a dot for the amount that it is the same as the sleeve and I'll just place that dot all the way down and then I'll also do that for the split because I'm going to repeat the split I'm just put in a line there where the split ends and aligned where it's been over locked up too so that the split opens out so now we're going to cut the sleeve off the opposite side and then once the sleeves cut off we'll take that template and we'll lay that template right side so it's right sides together and then we can cut the same amount off the body of the garment as we did on the other side you you can use this method for anything when you're altering something and you've obviously you've got two sides to it you do the first side cut it and then use that as the template for the second side you know we do that for say shirt sleeves when you're cutting them and they've got tails you only have to cut the front and then from then on it you can lay that over to the back and then once you've cut to the center of the back you can lay that across to both sides and then you get the same amount coming off both sides so when you have splits it's very difficult to just sew down and stop right at the top of a split you can do it and if you're going to get it to sit probably properly you probably need to clip it so rather than do that I prefer to over lock probably twice the distance of the split again so that the the two sides are left and right hand side of that seam allowance are over locked off and then higher up you can bring those two seams together and join them higher up so what I'm doing now is I'm just trimming off the excess and then what I'll do is I will over lock those two sides and then I'll come down from the sleeve to the end and over lock off the excess and then I'll come down and join those two together but that means then that the split this the seam allowances of the split will fold back and they will sit flat and the next thing I'm doing is I'm going to unpick that label because you know legally labels must be on garments that are being purchased it's a legal requirement and so because these are going from the manufacturer to the new client they haven't been received by the client yet then it's extremely important that I put the care label back on you so because this is a a uniform er because it's a stretch polo what I'm going to do to save time is I'm not going to use my sewing machine at all the only time I'm going to use that is going to be to finish off the splits so I've threaded up my overlocker with four threads and this is the only time that I use four threads as if I'm making a garment or in this case resizing a garment and I'm using the four threads usually I have my overlocker set at three threads because most of the time all it's doing is it's doing the edge of a seam or it's doing the edge of a hem and you don't want to have the fourth thread on if you're doing ahem because what it will do is it will tend to pull the fabric slightly and that's why your hand won't sit as flat as you would want it to so the fourth thread is like this called last a stitch so I'm going to just over lock the two sides now I'm using the loop turner there I apologize about the lighting I thought it was a little bit better than it is I'm using the loop Turner just because the threads at the end of the the split I'm going to fold that back I don't want to just cut the overlocking because if I cut the overlock in then the stitches will stick out aren't they go fray so if I use the loop Turner and I take the tail and I hook it back through the overlocking then I have a nice neat finish so when I fold the and I stitch it there's not going to be any bits of thread sticking out see I'm just doing that again I'm just threading it in and catching it and the other thing that I need to let you know of is that I've dropped the blade normally the blade as you would so with an overlocker you have the blade up and it cuts the fabric at the same time because I've actually trimmed the splits to where I want them to be with plus seam allowance I've taken the blade down so that all I'm doing now is stitching on the very edge of the splits only when I'm ready to do the rest of the sides above the split then I will put the blade back up in this instance I'm just over locking the sleeve from the underarm to the edge and when I do that I will then use the loop Turner to pull the tail through because again I'm going to be folding that seam allowance down so now I'm ready to do the sides and I want to lift the blade back up so you need to take the thread catcher off and it depends on your overlocker they're all going to be different I've got a Janome I've just got to push it and lift it up and it's it's done so now I'm taking in from the underarms down to the splits and I can see exactly where my my dot is because nothing's been stitched right this is just over locking off and it's cutting at the same time as a saber locking and I'm just going to come straight down until I come to the top of the split and I'll meet up with the overlocking which is on each side of the split and then when I get down to there I'm going to make sure the blade is not cutting any of the edge and then I'll run it off like so now you'll notice that I'm doing the other side now and I'm starting from the split and I'm going up to the underarm the reason I do that is that I believe that overlocking has a top in the bottom as you know you know the top is different from the underside of the overlocking so I like to have the top on the front panel and the underside on the back panel so when I'm taking something again I'll one side will be from the top down to the bottom and the other side will be from the bottom up to the top now we come to reattaching the sleeve which I had pinned on and again I haven't sown it on with the sewing machine so all I'm going to do is run that around and and as you can see it's got the four threads which means it's going to use that stay stitch and overlock at the same time so now we're going to sew the splits and Stitch the seam allowance down and the needle that I use is a 7511 stretch and I'm using my plus single plastic buttonhole foot purely because it gives me a little bit more flexibility to see what I'm doing and it's just a matter of laying the seam down and stitching it I'm going to just show you using the Jean Genie here some of you will have something similar in your sewing kettle with your sewing notions the reason I'm using it is that I need to raise the foot so it's as high as the thickness at the end of the sleeve because it's got piping and because of the piping it's making it very very thick and hard and then you've got the seam allowance across as well so it's quite thick so all I'm doing there see I've just placed that so that it raises the foot to the same level and then it's just a matter of stitching across and you know you're like I'm doing there I'm moving it by hand just and then popping with the pin pushing the underside back so that it doesn't stick out now we come to the splits and the only thing you want to do here is you need to stitch down to the section where the split is going to end not that down the bottom of the hem I mean you know at the top of it and like most splits are around two and a half inches which in metric is for you metric ladies five and a bit six centimeters so now we're going to start on the edge of the overlock and stitch down to where I put the dot which is the top of the split and then we'll do that on both sides and then we'll just turn the seam allowance back on the splits stitch them down and then it's finished oh and put the label back on do check and make sure that both sides of the splits are even because sometimes when you're sewing depending on the fabric one side can stretch a little bit more than the other course you'd have to unpick them and ease it back in so that they are the same and now all I'm doing is stitching the splits down you'll notice that I used the Jean Genie at the very front and I'm also using it again at the end I mean I use it for everything you can buy plastic ones the jet I do have some of these available sure for how long but you know they're worth their weight in gold or anything similar that's going to lift the foot so that it's the right size as the thickness of the fabric that you're sewing you you you so this is just one of many ways you can downsize a t-shirt I had to do it for a corporate client therefore I had to do it in such a way that it was almost as close to or some of the to how I received it happy aldrin