An end-of-June check-in
Hello sewists! What have you all been up to recently?
I finally finished making test sleeves and made a REAL clothing item with ACTUAL sleeves, and all of that long slog was 100% worth it because they’re the most amazing sleeves I’ve ever made. They fit me beautifully and they have a great range of motion. The first day I wore the top, I couldn’t stop staring at them in the mirror because they’re so good. (Overall it took about 9 or 10 test sleeves to get this result, but that’s OK because now I have enough muslin scraps to do more dyeing.)
The pattern is now completely unlike any sleeve pattern I’ve seen before, since it has a dart in the sleeve cap and another dart in the back seam. Long sleeves do sometimes have elbow darts, especially in couture, but this is a short sleeve which ends at the elbow and hence traditionally would not have any darts at all.
(If anyone else is aware of other sleeve patterns with darts in these places, or discussion of doing so, please point me at it! I’ve tried googling to find other people’s thoughts on doing this, but have drawn a blank so far.)
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Oh, collars. I'm pretty sure there are some shirts composting in the repair pile because the only thing that has disintegrated is the collars. I even have a box of collar points somewhere that I acquired in a closing down sale at least 20 years ago, which I've never opened, because I have avoided collars!
I did not remember the zips today, which is only a little bit annoying. I have several days before I need them, but I really want to remember that they need doing before the day of!
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I used freesewing.org to generate the pattern for the collar stand and collar. That took a bit of fiddling because their collar pattern is part of a shirt pattern rather than being standalone, so there’s no way to ask it to just make a pattern to fit the specific neckhole length of an existing shirt.
But now I’ve done it, it’d be easy for me to do it again, so if you’d like me to generate patterns for you, just let me know the length of the neckhole sewline and what size of paper (e.g. A4) you’d like to print the pattern on (it will be more than one sheet of paper so you’ll have to glue them together before cutting out).