So, if you struggle with drafting a sleeve from an existing armscye, this may be for you. Having fiddled a long time with getting the actual armscye the way I liked it (more on that later), I was struggling to draft a 16th century sleeve to fit it. I had even tried draping it. I didn’t like how it was going and came up with this idea.
I measured the armscye (in this case, 32.3cm in the front and 31 cm in the back. I marked this on “Swedish tracing ‘paper‘.” I then ran a stitch on that line and a line about an 1/16″ on either side of it.
I then folded it in half and clipped it on both sides up to the center line. I laid it out in the shape of a sleeve I drafted from the Modern Maker II.
I transferred the initial draft to an upper and lower sleeve. Its pretty cool, as you can lay it out in any shape sleeve head you like. This is the result:
By golly, it even looks like a sleeve! It fit perfectly the very first time.
If you are wondering why the sleeve is so wide and weird looking it is because eventually it will look like this:
