Hello. It’s been awhile. I’ve been busy. Busy trying to figure this sewing shit out. Also, gardening.
I think I may have finally crossed a major sewing knowledge gap, which feels like the best thing ever. I’ve learned some things in the past few months as I’ve been making muslin after muslin after muslin. It’s mostly concerning sleeves. I have to say, thank GAWD for the internet. It was both my doom, but ultimately my savior. Sometimes too much information is a bad thing. It’s finding the right information that’s the key – and the hardest part.
- I thought I had a giant back and/or needed an FBA, but I discovered (on some sewing forum I didn’t keep the link to) that most commercial pattern armholes are too low for me. This was causing weird pulling across by back, which made me feel like I was the Hulk about ready to bust out of clothing in a fit of rage. To fix this, I need to raise the side seam inch or so on the bodice front and back, and add that same amount to sleeve itself. Like this:
![sleeves]()
That original fitting shell I did acts as a great template. Which really underscores that it was super worth the time to go through the steps to do this in the first place.
- I was having THE HARDEST time setting in a sleeve, as I mentioned in my last post. I thought I figured out the issue: I had to much ease in my sleeve cap. After trying multiple times to take it out and redraft a sleeve that always looked totally mutant and nothing like a sleeve, I pretty much gave up. Every sleeve I would sew I would ALWAYS get puckers. ALWAYS. I came to the conclusion that it must be me, and something that I was doing. How can every stinking sleeve on every pattern I sew have too many puckers? That seems weird. After much Googling I came across this blog post and my life was changed forever.It’s using pins to ease in the sleeve instead of sewing two lines of gathers. I tried this one evening after I got home from work KNOWING it would fail like everything else and I swear, I had that sleeve pinned and SEWN with NO FUCKING PUCKERS, in like, 20 minutes. I will never go back to the other method unless of course, the sleeve is meant to be puckered.
I am having a hard time articulating how I feel about this because I LOVE LOVE LOVE sewing and I have felt for so long that I just sucked at it and intellectually I wasn’t ready to accept it because I know I am a smart and talented person so now that I’ve cracked a major stumbling block I feel so hopeful.
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