sewloud

It's a mutual loathing...I'm working away at setting sleeves the 18th century way which involves sewing the bottom half of the armscye then fitting the top over the shoulder...or in my case on the dress form, take the dress off try it on, take it off move pins, try on again, lather, rinse, repeat. I've gotten them to the point where it looks perfect on the dress form, and it fits wonderfully if I stand with my arms slightly out in that  quintessential 18th century pose..but if my arms are straight down I have wrinkles!! And I'm starting to think that's just the nature of it. Looking at extant dresses the sleeves DO seem to stick out a bit and not hang straight down. 

At THIS angle they're perfect 

Same as this:



So I'm starting to think that's just the nature of the beast? Silk taffeta isn't stretchy enough to be perfectly smooth in every angle, so you have to pick one and this is their favorite? If I made it perfectly fitted with my arms down I wouldn't be able to life them at all, and while you'd never wear this dress for manual labor you still have to lift your arms to get a fork to your mouth! 

I hate sleeve. 

I had a really hard time getting myself going this morning, didn't feel great. Then I found out that kass_rants and Bob's awesome dog Sebastian passed. And you know, you wouldn't think  I'd be a sobbing mess over my ex boss' dog's dying, but dammit I spent a lot of quality time with those dogs! I can't say I was surprised to hear the time had come, he was an old man, but I certainly wasn't expecting to hear that today. Between that and an IBS flare I spent more of the afternoon watching TV than I probably should have.

But I did make some dress progress. I got the bodice side seams sewn, and I created a Frankenstein sleeve pattern. A Franken-sleeve. I started with the Simplicity 3637 sleeve which has the seam down the back, and looking at PoF and Costume Close-up the seam goes straight down the underarm so the pattern is almost symmetrical. So I traced off a copy of the Simplicity pattern cut it out and then cut off the extra from one side and taped it to the other. Then I compared it to the marquis.de sleeve pattern, which was actually a lot smaller than the simplicity one, but I have huge arms so I didn't scale down, I just borrowed the curves from it. 

I made a muslin and it appears like it's going to work...granted I need to do a fitting before I can really know that, and an IBS flare and a corset don't really go together. So I'm sitting watching hockey making another pair of baby booties for etsy.  I'll try to convince myself to try it all on tomorrow after class.