An end-of-June check-in

[nou]

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.)

Comments

[shermarama]

Ooh, the Dior dart looks interesting - I mostly do things like that with princess seams, since they allow so much bust adjustment, but that looks like a good alternative for some things.

I don't really have a huge demand for household textiles, or the sorts of things these are wouldn't really suit anyway. The one that really grinds my gears is a long jacket made of sweatshirting and lined with fleece, and all the seams were done with a lightning / stretch stitch that's a nightmare to unpick, and I've already tried one round of fixing things around the neckline that didn't really work... but I still can't bring myself to either junk it or complete the overhaul.

[nou]

I’ve seen the Dior dart described as a way to have a princess seam that’s further toward the side of the garment rather than running over the bust point, which makes sense to me.

I’ve done a bunch of two-part experimentation now, which has resulted in the below. I can’t get rid of any more of the dart because shortening it any further would make it impractical to sew.

(I was puzzled for ages about why I can’t just keep shortening the dart until it’s not there any more, but then I realised there’s actually a singularity at the dart point — as the dart gets shorter and shorter, there’s less and less length at the fabric edge to deal with the dart angle in, and even setting aside practical considerations, you can’t keep reducing that to zero because then you’d be trying to make a triangle with a side of length zero. And if you don’t close up the dart angle, then you end up having to sew a straight seam on the undersleeve to a seam with a sharp bend in it on the upper sleeve, whereas with the dart closed, both seams are straight and the same length.)



That jacket of yours does sound tricky to repurpose. I guess you could cut it into rectangles and layer them to make a kneeling pad, but that’s no use unless you actually need one. If it’s just the neckline you dislike, could you cut out the neckline area, piece in some new fabric (cut off the bottom if you don’t have any left — a short jacket is better than no jacket), and make a completely new neckline? The piecing line would show, but maybe you could make it look purposeful.