Wednesday 12 February 2014

Split sleeves from Christmas dress

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Trena asked if I could share how I drafted the sleeves for my Christmas dress, so here it is! This dress was made super quickly as a bit of an experiment, so the drafting was rather rough and ready... Rather than redoing the draft to show the steps, I've done a pretty picture to show the main steps!

The red outline shows the original sleeve shape (after my adjustments for forward shoulder, and removing the ease), plus the "centre" line, which is dropped from the shoulder point. I decided how much to have the pieces overlap and marked these lines parallel to the centre line (shown in grey), then drew in the curves for the new shape (shown in blue). After that, it was simply a matter of tracing off the two sides, with balance points marked, and adding seam allowances.

You'll notice that I ended up with two pieces. This is because I decided to shape the underarm seam slightly. This was really completely pointless (and possibly contributed to the halves pulling apart too much when wearing the dress) - I would recommend just putting the two pieces together at the underarm seam (remember to mark this as a balance point on the pattern piece!) and cutting the sleeve as one piece. I would also probably increase the overlap. I think these would also look nice with a pleat or gathering in the overlap to add a bit of drama to the shape.

Hope this is helpful!

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