In case you’re wondering, I’m officially uncomfortable. I’m at that state of pregnancy where things just aren’t that glamorous anymore. So it should come as no surprise that comfortable clothes are the name of my game. Since I’ve started sewing for myself, I cannot get over how much more comfortable my clothes have become. I’m using GOOD fabric for my clothes. Fabric made of REAL cotton-ya’ll its like wearing sheets. I cannot recommend making something for yourself more, if only so you can experience the insane comfort of real, polyester free garments.
Sooooo when this Hill House Nap Dress appeared on my Instagram feed (and several friends messaged me it for inspiration) I immediately saved it and knew it had to be mine. Right around the time this dress appeared in my feed so did ByHandLondon‘s shirred dress tutorial. If you’re interested, she has it saved in her Instagram Highlights. At the same time, I ran across the McCall’s Pattern #7946. I thought that between the Mccall’s pattern and the tutorial I had a decent chance of getting the look I was after. Clearly the universe was presenting me with everything I needed to make this dress happen….so I HAD to make it!
In this post I’ll cover how I made the shirred angel sleeve to get the sleeve from the Hill House dress on my shirred dress. I’ll get into shirring on a later post but there are a ton of tutorials on how to do it. Here’s one of the videos I used.
To make the angel sleeve I used an existing angel sleeve pattern I had (this one is the Ikatee Louise Mum) and folded one of the curved edges (the one that normally goes into the armscye) down, creating a straight line. You could do this with an existing angel sleeve or draft the sleeve yourself. The curve doesn’t have to be precise, as its not going into an armscye at all. You can kind of see the dimensions from this image below. This is a sleeve pattern that is placed on the fold. The straight edge of this pattern piece becomes the neck edge and the curved edge becomes the shoulder edge.
Once I cut out two sleeves, I finished the long edges using a satin stitch. My stitch was a zigzag with a width of 2mm and a length of .6mm. This is something you’ll want to experiment with on your machine to see what makes the prettiest edge. I placed a stabilizer behind my fabric because my stitches were so dense. I used my trusty Stitch & Ditch…I’m pretty sure there’s not a project I don’t use this on. After the satin stitch is complete you simply use appliqué scissors to cut as close as possible to the stitch. I used a quarter inch seam allowance on each side so I ended up cutting off approximately a quarter inch of fabric on each side.
After the long edges are finished with a satin stitch and the excess fabric is removed, measure an inch in from the straight edge (neck edge) and sew one row of shirring. When I did this on my machine, my straight stitch length was set to 3.4 mm and tension was set to 5. I used elastic thread for my bobbin that I purchased on Amazon. After the initial row is sewn, sew two additional rows, moving toward the shoulder edge of the fabric, approximately a quarter of an inch from your original stitch line. If you fabric is thick, you may consider adding additional shirring rows and adjusted the pattern width to accommodate it.
When you’ve completed you’re last shirring line, that’s it! You just place the sleeve on the garment as you would any strap. I even used the existing strap placement mark from the pattern. To finish the edge I attached to the garment I folded them over twice (about 1/8″ fold x2) and then top stitched. You could also do a sating stitch edge for this end too.
I can totally see this sleeve on quite a few other garments-even children’s garments. How about you? What would you use this sleeve for? I’ve got more to come on these shirred dresses but the kids are awake! Time to mom 🙂
