Secret Sleeves

There seems to be tradition that the first blog post is a mission statement or statement of intent for the blog to follow - so who am I to buck tradition, particularly when it is a good one.  And the Selfish Seamstress (whose blog I read assiduously) has taught me that blogs can be written for selfish reasons.  So this blog is really for me.  If it helps or inspires others then that is a bonus but my aim is to record sewn items that inspire me or techniques that I think are worth remembering and that I will forget if I do not record them somewhere - with lots of photos for reference.

So this is my first blog post of something I want to record.

The sleeves on this dress hide a secret.  They look like cute short slightly puffed sleeves accented with rows of beading.

However, this picture shows that the rows actually form a V pattern and that is because they have a dart at the centre of the sleeve head.

The dart is about 7cms long -just long enough to take out any excess easing that there might be in the sleeve head, a great solution for any commercial pattern that has that problem.  But it is also a good solution to the problem of adding width to a pattern for someone with heavy arms without adding excess length and therefore ease in  the sleevehead.
The usual solution to this problem is to split the pattern lenthways and crossways and add the extra in the middle but the problem is that this flattens the sleevehead and if you are adding a lot of width, the sleevehead can be flattened too much.
With a dart, however, you can just slit the pattern through the middle, add as much as you want in the centre and then take the excess in the sleevehead out with a short dart - no problems with a flat sleevehead causing the sleeves to pull up and no difficult easing either.