Alterations with the AT2000D and CoverPro 3000P

Before we dive into this post, I want to encourage you to remove all the negative non-sewing energy in your life, or at least your sewing room.

While sewing and writing this post, my husband, a non-sewist, came into my studio. He observed that I had the Janome AT 2000D air thread serger and the Janome CoverPro 3000 Professional side by side on my sewing table. “Why do you have 2 of the same machine?” he asked.

CoverPro 3000 Pro

AirThread 2000D

The audacity! Sure, they have a similar foot print, and similar styling, but they are very different machines! How can he not see that?!?! lol! Non-sewists just do not understand, so never let them make you feel bad for having all those machines and all that fabric. They all have a purpose! I’m teasing, of course; this is meant with a lot of laughter and love!

I’m not a sporty person. I played hardball one season when I was in grade 7. One fateful game I got hit 5 times, the last time ended up with me in the hospital with a potential broken cheek bone. It wasn’t broken but I did look a complete mess for months after. That was enough for me! I joined the band instead. 

Fast forward to being an adult; having a couple kids and realizing that my youngest LOVES sports. I was not prepared for this, but I have mostly embraced it. When it comes to team sports, one thing I’ve noticed is they get jerseys in for each team in numbers 1-20 or however many kids are on a typical team. Each kid in their mind has a special number they want to have and if the coaches let them, they get that number. The problem is they often order the jerseys with the lower numbers being the smaller sizes and the largest numbers being the largest size. All of a sudden you have the smallest kid swimming in the largest jersey and the biggest kid unable to move their arms in the smallest jersey. It is quite comical.

Here is my bruiser in the “Sin Bin” (penalty box) for pushing the boys around a little too hard. Happy as a clam! Sorry for the photo quality I was really far away but couldn’t miss this joy.

This year at Lacrosse, we had this happen with my tiny kid wearing a jersey that was not only falling off her shoulders, it could be considered a tea length dress. I also heard the coaches discussing leaving the goalie jersey on the equipment for the season as it is so small it took 3 of them to put it on the poor kid. I quickly raised my voice and told them that I (and my Janome machines) could fix it for them!

I would like to take a second to caution you at this point. Unless you have the capacity to help more people than you can imagine, please do not let the entire team know about your sewing super powers. This from the person who made 25 skirts for a skating carnival where her oldest kid, at 5 years old, barely made it to centre ice while every other kid had time to skate around the rink multiple times. Yes, “someone” had to skate out and pick her up and help her off the ice so the show could go on. She’s going to be my theatre kid, lol!

First up, let’s tackle the too big jersey. This one is very straight forward. I had my kid gear up so I could decide the length of the arms and the body for her jersey. I allowed 1″ for a hem to the length, then just cut off all the excess. Since I used the Janome CoverPro 3000P, I folded up the 1″ hem and used the 2 needle narrow stitch. The fabric of the jersey was a mesh, so I decreased my stitch length to make sure my stitches weren’t missing the fabric. I also ran a test on scrap fabric to make sure my settings on both my stitch length and differential feed were good. You can read more about this here.

To fix the too big neckline, I didn’t bother to take off the neckband and just made 2 darts in the back equal distance from the tag. I actually hand sewed these but it could be easily done on your sewing machine. I offered to take in the sides so it wasn’t so baggy, but she assured me she liked this look.

Making the goalie jersey bigger was actually a straight forward process, too. If I was altering something that people would see up close, I would take the time to remove the arms, add in the material in the body and arms and rework the armscye if needed and reattach. Since this was never going to be seen outside the arena, I decided to make this quick and easy. I cut out the side seam from the hem of the body to the hem of the cuff. I also took out approximately 1″ of the cuff on both sides of this opening I created. I did this so I could attach the new piece and make sure the cuff could be remade.

Cut along both sides of the side seam pictured here from the bottom of the body all they way through the sleeve cuff, then opened up the hem 1″ on either side.

I cut 5″ strips of similar fabric and used my Janome AT2000D to stitch them back in. Again, since this fabric has holes, I decreased the stitch length and I also made sure that the differential feed fed this fabric well. I didn’t have to do much tweaking. I just wanted to make sure that one epic save in the field wasn’t going to see this jersey ripping apart at the seams!

Once I had the additional pieces serged in on both sides, I took it over to the Janome CoverPro 3000P and hemmed the cuff and bottom of the body. A nice easy fix that now gives the jersey lots of extra space and the goalies are able to move freely save all the goals!

The newly revamped jersey held together a lot better than this Mum’s nerves did as that lacrosse ball came whipping at my little goalie. In the end, she was able to save a lot of shots and their team continues to be undefeated!

Stitch on!

AmandaBee