Sleeves On Saturdays

Last Saturday I showed you how to do the Squared Shouldered Sleeve. You can see those instructions here. In my attempt to kill two birds with one stone last week, (get a pair of pajamas made for summer and get the pattern ready for you) I was not happy with the outcome because it was difficult to see the lines of the sleeves due to the daisy print of the fabric.
We are going to revisit this sleeve today. I am showing the sleeve in muslin as I think you can see it a little better and I am showing you how you can take the basic sleeve once it is drafted and combine it with other techniques. Today we will add tucks to the sleeve. I especially like the tucks on this sleeve as they hang so nice and straight.   

My sleeve for the example is a short sleeve, but this can be made into a long sleeve as well. You can also combine this with a sleeve that has fullness at the cuff and sew the tucks down to just about the elbow and then release the fullness which makes a beautiful sleeve especially in a soft fabric. 

 Begin with the basic drafted square shouldered sleeve.

Draw in the lines for the tucks. Number each section. This is very important as once the pieces are cut apart it can be very difficult to tell which section goes where.

Draw in a horizontal line that intersects all of the lines that have been drawn in for the tucks. This is also important as this will give you a guide for lining up the pieces once the pieces have been cut apart.

Draw in a horizontal line on a new piece of paper.

Cut the pieces apart and then decide how deep you would like your tucks to be. I would recommend 1/4" for this sleeve. Just remember that if you want a 1/4" tuck, you will need to spread the pattern pieces twice that amount, so the space in between each section will be 1/2". In the above photo you can see that the sleeve has been cut apart and spread.  

Now fold the tucks in the direction that you would like for them go. If you look below, 3 tucks are folded towards the front, 3 are folded towards the back and the center tuck is folded to lay flat in the middle.

Once you have folded the tucks, cut the sleeve cap while the tucks are still folded. Once unfolded, the top of your cap will look like the sleeve cap below.

In order to know where to fold the tucks once the sleeve has been cut out of your fabric you will need to add notches to the tuck lines as you see below.

Be sure to add the notches to the top as well as the bottom of the tuck lines.

 Your final pattern will look like this pictured below.

 The picture below shows the top of the sleeve. It is very flat.

 In the pictures below you can see just how flat the sleeve hangs.

 

Next week I will show you one more alternative to this sleeve, we will add gathers.
I hope you're enjoying Sleeves On Saturdays. I know I do.
Hope you're having a wonderful weekend! It's bright, sunny and hot here in Chicago. I'm off to work in my garden.