Courtesean Gown: Sleeves

The pattern for the sleeves -- you can see the marks that will be used to make the final pattern pieces.

The drafted pattern pieces. That's just not quite what I was expecting....

The sleeves changed a little between the sketch and the finished product. That's what happens when I start running low on time. The original plan had included a set of spiral paned sleeves, and a small sleeve head dealy. The sleeve head dealy was eliminated, and the spiral paned sleeves became a bit less fitted than I had originally sketched.

The sleeve pattern was made by drafting up a simple sleeve pattern, then marking diagonals that would match up to form panes. That was the theory, at least. You can take a look at the sheer number of lines drawn on the pattern piece -- clearly, things went awry. Ms Geometry-is-your-friend over here failed to realize that she was dealing with a tapered sleeve, and that all of her nice neat straight diagonals had to be really funky curves. Rather than figure out how to do it the exact right way, so sort of fiddled with adding gradual curves to my lines where they were supposed to meet up (at the edges of the sleeve) until it all worked out alright.

So I got curved pieces. The panes were then cut out of the dyed velveteen, and backed with plain off white cotton duck. Now, each piece is about a yard and a half long, and I didn't really feel like turning them, so they are edge finished with off white bias tape. This is hidden under blue and antique gold braid. The panes are caught together every 3" or so with hand stitching. All of the hand assembly was done in the FoF garden, and, in one of the more embarrassing moments of my life, I had to publicly admit to being absolutely stumped by my own pattern. I looked at the pieces, all nice, neat and pretty, and I had no idea how to get them back into a sleeve. That's it. No bloody clue. It took me about an hour or so of fiddling with it before the light bulb went on. In the mean time, just about everyone I knew who sewed (and several people I didn't know) asked me what I was doing, and how precisely it was going to work out. One particularly kind woman even assured me that sewing got easier the more you did it, and suggested that I bring the pattern next time. (I was entirely too embarrassed to tell her that I had drafted the pattern, and simply hadn't had the good sense to mark anything on the pieces.) But they did finally go together; and a good thing, too - my mom and gramma were going to be up at faire the next day, and mom had requested that I wear this dress.

I still have a whole mess of topaz colored gems that are supposed to go on the sleeves over the catch stitches, but I haven't quite gotten around to that yet.