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Drafting sleeves - school update
Oct. 25th, 2011 11:17 amYesterday I had a big "Doh!" moment in school. Part of our homework over the autumn break was to draft the front and back of a basic block for a blazer, and to draft the sleeve with a seam over the shoulder so it could be placed into the front block. Everyone thought we would work on the homework, calculating the waist darts and doing the difficult stuff on the neckline and the sleeve in class.
Of course, teacher Hanny had a surprise for us: the homework was to be handed in for review and we would coninue the work on the blazer on copies she made of the block.
The thing I noticed immediately was that her sleevehead measurement was some 4 cm less than what I had in my homework assignment. It's quite a difference: 21.4 or 17.8, especially in a sleevehead height!
I asked, but the only answer I got was "well, we'll see that when you get your reviewed homework back" -- I guess she wasn't in the mood for more questions as the rest of the class was quite restless. We continued on placing the sleeve into the front block and drafting an underarm gusset to make up for lost lifting height*
*) The sleeve overlaps the front block somewhat, and it's placed at an angle (think: some 45°). This means that if you were to cut the front in one piece with the sleeve, you would never be able to lift your arm. So we slash into the front pattern piece and add a gusset to make up for this missing lifting height.
During the lesson, when we had time, I put my ruler over her copy and checked the line she used to measure the sleevehead height.
During drafting, We connect the vertical line where the front armscye is drafted to the back neck to "square the back neck". I always measured the sleevehead height from the center of this line to the underarm line.
Apparantly, I skipped a step. You need to connect the shoulder points of the front and back panel and measure from there. Since the point I use is some 4 cm higher up, this would account for the difference.
Added an image to illustrate. The second line near the letter H is the one I forgot to draw and you can see, even at a quarter scale, how much difference this makes!
I've been using this in my patterns for god-knows-how long (and yes, I've been known to fudge a sleeve in stead of gathering the excess as I am supposed to do) and if it weren't for this particular homework assignment I might not have found out about this for quite a while (although I am sure that she would have noticed in the four pieces of homework, including sleeves and pattern pieces, I just handed in).
In any case, I'm very happy we figured it out during the lesson and that I won't have to wait another week to get back the corrections on my homework.
The lesson continued with a continuous rolled collar shaped to look like a regular jacket collar and I was happy to have done some collars in my homework because we're really setting a fast pace in class.
I now have five or six pieces of homework to still catch up on, but now that I've figured out what I'm doing wrong in the sleeves, I can also see why the sleeve we use for raglan just doesn't add up for me. I'm going to redo this one (it's the sleeve with the seam over the head) to see if it makes more sense now before I start on drafting the coat with the raglan sleeve which was next on my list.
Of course, teacher Hanny had a surprise for us: the homework was to be handed in for review and we would coninue the work on the blazer on copies she made of the block.
The thing I noticed immediately was that her sleevehead measurement was some 4 cm less than what I had in my homework assignment. It's quite a difference: 21.4 or 17.8, especially in a sleevehead height!
I asked, but the only answer I got was "well, we'll see that when you get your reviewed homework back" -- I guess she wasn't in the mood for more questions as the rest of the class was quite restless. We continued on placing the sleeve into the front block and drafting an underarm gusset to make up for lost lifting height*
*) The sleeve overlaps the front block somewhat, and it's placed at an angle (think: some 45°). This means that if you were to cut the front in one piece with the sleeve, you would never be able to lift your arm. So we slash into the front pattern piece and add a gusset to make up for this missing lifting height.
During the lesson, when we had time, I put my ruler over her copy and checked the line she used to measure the sleevehead height.
During drafting, We connect the vertical line where the front armscye is drafted to the back neck to "square the back neck". I always measured the sleevehead height from the center of this line to the underarm line.
Apparantly, I skipped a step. You need to connect the shoulder points of the front and back panel and measure from there. Since the point I use is some 4 cm higher up, this would account for the difference.
Added an image to illustrate. The second line near the letter H is the one I forgot to draw and you can see, even at a quarter scale, how much difference this makes!
I've been using this in my patterns for god-knows-how long (and yes, I've been known to fudge a sleeve in stead of gathering the excess as I am supposed to do) and if it weren't for this particular homework assignment I might not have found out about this for quite a while (although I am sure that she would have noticed in the four pieces of homework, including sleeves and pattern pieces, I just handed in).
In any case, I'm very happy we figured it out during the lesson and that I won't have to wait another week to get back the corrections on my homework.
The lesson continued with a continuous rolled collar shaped to look like a regular jacket collar and I was happy to have done some collars in my homework because we're really setting a fast pace in class.
I now have five or six pieces of homework to still catch up on, but now that I've figured out what I'm doing wrong in the sleeves, I can also see why the sleeve we use for raglan just doesn't add up for me. I'm going to redo this one (it's the sleeve with the seam over the head) to see if it makes more sense now before I start on drafting the coat with the raglan sleeve which was next on my list.
