Author: kendra

So my one hour per night sewing resolution was super helpful last week (this week, not so much).  I stayed up late on Friday just for that sense of accomplishment of having the sleeves DONE.

I did one more mockup, moving the upper/lower sleeve seam down.  Looking at it now, I think I should have angled it up even more towards the back, but what’s done is done and I was happy to move on to the real deal.  I cut the sleeves with a motif going down the front outside of the arm, and while there is a break in the pattern because of the elbow seam, I don’t think it’s very noticeable.

I also went through and fixed/reinforced all the gores that were pulling… altho one has pulled yet again.  Sigh.  So I need to get in there with some duct tape or hot glue or… I KID, I KID!

So it’s all done, minus the hem — which is going to be a total BASTARD.  I gotta start thinking of what I can offer as bribes to get someone to mark it for me!

And man, do I look like a sausage.  I’m really going to need a porn star wig (for any Pre-Raphaelite wearings) to detract from the sausageness.  Please to enjoy that monster horizontal wrinkle in back!

So I’ve made a new resolution:  sew for an hour every weeknight.  See, I used to be really really good at this — just a little bit of work each evening.  But for the past few years, I’ve come home exhausted and just flopped all night, leaving most of my sewing (except for hand finishing) for weekends and holidays.  I really want to avoid last minute rushes and panics, so this week I started implementing this resolution, even going so far as to calculate what time it will be in an hour and holding myself to it.

And it’s been bearing fruit!  Not tons of fruit, as that’s not the point, but it’s meant that slow and steady progress is being made, where normally it wouldn’t be.

I’m also trying to be disciplined and stay focused on my must-do list and to ignore any more CADD — if I can get through my must-sew list, then I will be free to do whatever I want!

So I’ve been working on the sleeve pattern for my Gothic Fitted/Pre-Raphaelite dress.  Being totally new to this era, I mostly followed Charlotte’s clear and useful instructions.  She’s right about the shape of the sleeve head — my dress armscye measurement was WAY longer than my bicep measurement, and even though I thought I’d flared the top of the sleeve a bit, I still had NO arm movement possible.  I futzed through a few mockups, finally flaring even more at the top and making the sleeve head curve relatively shallow, and got a nice sleeve top with some reasonable arm movement.

However, I was also getting some upsetting elbow-region wrinkles, and Tasha’s article on the “elbow hinge” was super helpful.  I ended up pinning a tuck (sort of shaped like a fish dart) in the sleeve where the wrinkling was happening, then repatterned with a straight edge for the top, measured out the width of the fish dart, and took all that out of the curved top of the bottom part of the sleeve.  It’s by no means perfect, but it helped.

I think I ended up with the seam connecting the upper & lower sleeves too high, however — I marked in Photoshop where I want to lower it to (on the last picture).  I also want the hem of the sleeve to hit my knuckles, so I need to add about an inch there.  So probably one more mockup before the pattern is finalized.

The one other good thing about this slow & steady approach is that normally, I would have made the above mentioned changes to the pattern and then just gone ahead without a final mockup (in my impatience to just get to the real deal). But since I was done with my hour of sewing for that night, I could resist that impulse and do the sensible thing of one final mockup!