There I Fixed It: Advancing Sleeves by 100 Years

but in a good way, not like this

At the (comparatively) last minute, by which I mean "about a fortnight ago", I decided to go to Coronation yesterday; and it being a genteel and courtly event, I wanted to be dressed all fancy-like...which of course, as I have just shared with you, is something of an issue for me[1].  The best option was to wear my 1540s Florentine silk gown, but I was feeling unusually Fussy™ about the sleeves; they had been wrong from the start, which I realized the first day I wore the dress, and my unhappiness had finally got to the point where I could not even with them any more.

What about them?  Well, let me illustrate, and then I'll explain how we got there.

Here's me (and my lovely & talented ronin-sister)
from the front.  Looks pretty OK, right?

Here's me, same day, from the side.  WTAF NOPE NOPE

So what happened?  As per usual, it was me plunging into a new technology without fully grokking the fundamentals thereof--partially due to time pressure, and partially due to not understanding the questions before they needed answers.  More specifically, I hadn't taken in how sleeve tech evolved between the 15th and 16th centuries; my chain of thought ran something like "the bodice of this dress is really quite like a gamurra in final shape, it's just that the seams are different; so I can use the same sleeve design I used for my gamurre."  Well, in fact, nope.  The gamurra has an inset armscye, which means you have a pretty dramatic shape change on your sleeve to get the thing to fit and still give you decent movement; it is rather like a sine wave, with the peak being at the top of your shoulder.  However, the 16th century dress, in a lot of cases, the sleeve isn't really part of the dress; it's a separate instance that you tie or pin or sometimes tack on, so if you have a massive amount of fabric up top, stupid things happen (as you see above)[2].

Eleanora di Toledo,
by Bronzino

The obvious answer is "make some new sleeves", but I don't have any of that silk left, so I took thought to how I could best frob them to better effect.  Step 1: look at some actual portraits, idiot (which I share a few of here for your delectation).

Anonymous lady,
by Pier Francesco Foschi

Bia de'Medici,
by Bronzino

The commonality I noticed is these ruffly bits at the top of the sleeve, which from that point are then attached to the shoulder of the dress in some wise.  Since much of my problem was "an excess of fabric at the top of the sleeve", I felt I could make something of this.  Of course, by the time I'd internalized all this information, it was the night before the event...

I started by running a gathering stitch along the point of the sleeve where the shape started getting all dramatic, and drew it in to make the sleeve's circumference about correct for my arm width, and pinned that solid.  I still had a goodly amount of fabric upstream, so I finger-pressed that to make a second ridge, and played around with that on my arm to see how it looked.  It was the right size, came up to an acceptable place on my arm, and gave about the right effect, so I sewed it all down.  

Lacking ribbon in any workable color, I took some acid-green silk dupioni and cut strips of it to serve as the sleeve ties. It's fraying like whoa, which is annoying, but I expected it; and once it finally gets fringed enough to stop dropping threads everywhere it will have a nice effect, I think.   And I finished it in just enough time to get properly dressed for the event.  YAY TIMING

We utterly failed to get any action shots of it on me, but here's it off of me:

a slightly different bow style is probably in order too

In retrospect, I might have done better to combine that extra fabric into a single pouf or valance instead of the two ridges; that's probably closer to most of what we see; but the silk, although stiff, may not have had enough weight to maintain that on its own.  In any case, it looks 100% better when I'm wearing it, and I'm pleased with the result considering the strictures I was operating under.

[1] I did cut out the blue silk under-dress last week!  It is, as they say, a start.

[2] On some other occasions we've tacked the sleeve to the back as well, which makes it somewhat less awful, but it still isn't great--the silk sticks out in all kinds of ungraceful ways.