Sacque sleeves

Super behind on blogging about this dress, cause I’m too busy sewing instead. Such is the life of a sewing blogger.

Anyways, sleeves! 18th century sleeves are set in a bizarre way. However, it’s a bizarre way that 1) actually makes fitting yourself pretty easy and 2) a whole bunch of helpful people on the internet have documented (thanks Koshka and American Duchess)

A helpful friend of mine helped me scale up this sleeve pattern so I could print it full size (I have no photoshop skillz myself), since I was too lazy to scale up the Janet Arnold myself. Cut out a muslin and pinned it on:

Hrm yeah, not enough room in that sleevecap. There is probably a better way to fix a sleeve pattern, but I just added ~2 inches to the top, tapering it down to where the sleeve did fit.

The sleeve is sewn in right side to right side on the bottom. The top is then basted/pinned/what have you directly on top of the lining, pleating the back to fit.

Then pop a rectangle or so on top, folding the edges under. Sew on with a running or spaced backstitch. These stitches will show on the finished strap, so be neat (unless you are about to cover with a robing like I did, in which case be as messy as you feel like).

The sleeve cuffs are sewn with point a rabattre sous la main, which is way too long of a stitch name. But there isn’t a better name for it – “running stitch where only one of the stitches goes through the lining” didn’t win the branding competition. Instructions here (seriously, I need to be giving Katherine some royalties for this dress, given how many of her tutorials I have used). You can see it really is a running stitch on the outside, and the inside looks like a whip stitch.

Outside of sleeve

Inside of sleeve

And then with sleeves it really starts to look like a dress FOR REALZ YO.