Tutorial: Altering Sleeves That Bug You

This is a tutorial on sleeves.  Specifically, it’s for anyone who sews who has had trouble with your garment feeling tight or binding across the front or back as soon as you lift or move your arms.

I’m not talking so much about the sleeves being too tight around the bicep.  That is fairly easily remedied if you’re willing to widen the sleeve and put in a few tucks or gathers at the top.

I’m talking about a mysterious malady I’ve struggled with for years.  You make a dress and fit it carefully so it seems to have the right amount of “give” around the bust and back.  Then you insert the sleeves and suddenly you feel like you’re in a strait jacket.  You reach forward slightly and the dress pulls tight across the back.  You reach back and it stretches tight across the bust.  Or you lift your arms and the whole dress lifts along with it.

 If this has never troubled you, or if you figured out the solution in 7^th grade Home Ec,  you can move along.

Or if you sew and wear only stretchy knits.

If you have a touch of claustrophobia like me, and that tight, binding feeling makes you panic, stick around.

Back in the 1980’s and early 90s I sewed lots of dresses and never had trouble with this sort of thing.

Patterns looked like this:

 

Now obviously styles were pretty loose and big.  But was that the only reason the dresses didn’t bind?

I don’t think so.  Later in the 90s we had semi-loose-fitting styles, but this was the era when the sleeves started driving me crazy in both homemade and ready-to-wear.

 

I could never figure it out.  The dresses themselves weren’t tight, and if the sleeve was big enough across the bicep, why did it feel like the underarm seams were going to pop if I gave someone a hug?

I made ridiculous-looking too-wide sleeves with puffs and pleats and gathers at the top and bottom to take in the excess, hoping to fix it.  It might have helped a little, but never enough.

Recently I made two dresses to wear in Thailand, where it will be hot enough that if anything is tight and binding I will panic.

So I measured very carefully to get a good circumference around the chest.  I widened the sleeves, which looked a bit silly but I wanted plenty of room for movement.

And to my great frustration BOTH dresses pulled tight across the chest and bicep as soon as I moved my arms a couple of inches.

 

Obviously I was missing something, and I was determined to figure out what it was.

There is something inherently daunting about the science of fitting a sleeve into a garment.  I mean, your arm is a moving cylinder attached to a stationary cylinder, and how in the world do you figure out how to fit a piece of cloth around it all?

But I was going to learn if it was the last thing I did.

So I researched online and bought a book and thought too much about it.

Here’s the first thing I discovered: The amount of flex in a garment when you move your arms is NOT primarily due to how wide the sleeve is, but to THE ANGLE OF THE SLEEVE IN RELATION TO THE GARMENT.

For example.

T-shirt sleeves are almost perpendicular to the body of the shirt.  Or, 90 degrees, or sticking straight out.  This gives you the MOST flexibility.

 

Polo sleeves angle down just a bit more, closer to the body of the shirt.

[Sorry, I'm not the best Paint artist.]

 

In most blouses, the angle is even narrower.  This is when you start feeling that tug when you reach.

 

In this dress from the 50s, it looks like the sleeve hangs almost parallel to the dress and the angle from sleeve line to dress line is very small.  This is when you’d truly feel like you’re in a strait jacket.

 Maybe this was the pattern Paul's mom used for her wedding dress.  Here's Jenny modeling her grandma's dress from I think 1956.

 

Conclusion: if you want flexibility, the sleeve needs to be set in at the largest angle possible, with the most flexibility when the sleeve sticks straight out from the body.

How do you do that?

Here's a typical sleeve pattern.

 

 The key is in that curve along the top of the pattern.

The sleeve seam is kind of like the sine curves you may have seen in high school math.  If you’ve sewed much, you can sort of see the top of a sleeve pattern in these pictures, like a hill curving into valleys on each side.

 

Note the difference in the heights of the two "hills" here.

Here’s the formula:  A high curve at the center = a small angle of sleeve to body = a tighter fit and less flexibility

A low curve = a large angle of sleeve to body = a looser fit with more flexibility.

Before we go further, remember there's a trade-off here--with the more comfortable sleeve you'll also have more bunching of extra fabric under the arm.  So you have to find a balance that works for you.

 

How to:

One thing you can do is make the body of your blouse/dress from a modern pattern and use a sleeve pattern from the 80s.  First check to make sure the sleeve opening is roughly the same size and the old pattern doesn't have a dropped shoulder.

Or alter your pattern.

Lay your pattern down and put a pin at the top of the hill.  Pivot the pattern to the right and mark the top edge, then pivot to the left and do the same.

Then taper in so you're back to your normal sleeve width. It makes for some funny wings on the pattern but makes a lot less bulk than if you went straight down to the wrist.

Like this:

 

 I got this picture from a website about altering your dress patterns so you can wear them for flamenco dancing, and I didn't have the Paint skills to remove the label. 

Just so you know.

Since you used the original pattern and didn't change the length of the armhole seam, the sleeve should fit into the armhole just fine.

Et voila!

A dress you can move in.  And hug, and tie an apron, and reach to the top shelf, and maybe even play volleyball.

Have fun.  Let me know how it goes if you try this.  I'm still perfecting the process.

P.S. Lots of further insights and great ideas in the comments, and a recommended book, and how to order it if you're internet-shy.  Thanks, everyone!

 Quotes of the Day:

"Oh dear, Mom.  It looks like an old lady dress.  And yes, it minimizes your stomach, but only by making your hips look huge."
--Emily, affirming two more reasons why the above yellow flowered dress was a "fail."

"Ach, ich hass nehe fuh mich-selvet.  Es fit nee-net kscheit!!"*
--My mom, who was happy to sew for the rest of the world but hated to sew for herself.  I understand.

*"I hate sewing for myself.  It never fits right."