Monday 6 September 2010

Phew! I've got it!

This is Medieval Sleeve Nr. "I lost count".
More precisely, this is Medieval Sleeve Nr. 3-b-"I lost count of the underarm gussets".
It looks rather weird.
But it works.



The triangular gusset goes to the back seam, as seen previously. The other gusset is the final underarm gusset and goes from the very pointy point at right up to the bend at upper right-to-middle. That bend itself is there because of the changes I made to the front armscye.
(And do not worry if you got lost. In flat form, I can barely wrap my head around it myself. That's probably why it took me so many attempts.)
To provide you better understanding, here's the much more - at least for a modern seamstress/tailor - intuitive Medieval Sleeve Nr. 1b:



The width in both cases is the same - 29 cm. So is the back seam gusset, 9 x 9 x 9 cm. The difference is in the height of the sleeve cap and its additional width which results from the changes to the front armscye. I think it's kind of what happens in the back of the Irish Moy Bog Gown - a milder version of it; except that in my sleeve it happens in the front. (There's a pattern for the Moy Bog gown on this site, under "Undergowns".)

I have no idea if this construction of mine is period-correct or not. But it works. And that's most important.

2 comments:

  1. I really like that dress. I have only ever used square underarm gussets. With using square ones, it's best to cut them big and keep trying them until they fit, I have no clue how you would use a triangle.

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  2. The underarm gusset is not really a triangle (it's the bigger piece; the smaller one goes to the back seam and adds width and shape to the sleeve).
    The underarm gusset started out as a diamond-shaped gusset - with a 12 cm side, I figured a square would give me too much excess material on the diagonal. But somehow it turned out that the armscye was actually shorter than the corresponding section of the sleeve. I have no idea how this came to be - after all these sleeve mock-ups, I do not trust my measuring abilities anymore. Apparently it does not really work for custom-fitting on a person.
    Anyway, the 24 cm of the gusset were too much for the armscye, so I re-pinned it and arrived at this shape.
    The underarm gusset goes way into the front, actually. I'll post detailled pictures of it when the dress is finished (or at least when this section of the dress is finished). I have a photo of the pinned mock-up from yesterday, but with all the pins and seam allowances it's difficult to see what's going on there.
    Although I may try to make a diagram of how that flat pattern goes together, complete with numbers or letters. :-)

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