Adding sleeves to an A-line dress (or any dress!)

I make lots of A-line dresses fror my grand-daughters, but there are times I want sleeves. Either it's winter - or the two fair-skinned girls need at least their shoulders covered to protect them from sunburn.

There are several different ways you can add sleeves to an A line dress. However, it will depend on the pattern you use as to how easy this will be. I have found a number of A-line patterns which already have sleeves, but some do not really work, because the pattern author/designer has just added a sleeve to a sleeveless dress pattern without really taking account of the shape of the armscye. Often sleeveless dresses have a more cutaway armhole than you would have in a dress intended to have sleeves. So it's not always straightforward. But it can be done! If you'd like to vary A line dresses so you don't have bare shoulders, read on!

I start with what I think are the easiest ways to add sleeves, and move on to the ones that I think require a bit more experience or skill. You may disagree with my analysis!

Partial flutter sleeve

One of the easiest ways to add a sleeve (in my humble opinion) is to add a flutter sleeve that only goes round the top of the armscye. That way, you won't have a sleeve that pulls against the back of the bodice when the arms are forward or stretched across the body. And you don't need to modify the armscye.

The red flutter sleeves above, and the ones on the blue dress below, are both made from the pattern that comes with my A-line dress pattern. These make for a broad shouldered look, especially with the added trim. But I like the fact that these sleeves help keep the shoulders shaded from the sun. And they are very easy to add.

The flutter sleeves below are actually on a peasant top rather than an Aline dress, but the same idea. These came from It's Always Autumnn's Flutter Sleeve Dress or Top. The pattern is free in size 4 only, but I've modified it for other sizes too. So if you want a peasant top with a flutter sleeve, here it is!

And there's another variation on a smaller flutter sleeve in this Craftiness is Not Optional pattern.

Partial Cap Sleeve

It's also possible to avoid the full armhole shaping issue is to make a cap sleeve that just covers the shoulder. Sew Can She has a very good tutorial on how to add this type of sleeve. The picture below is edited from her web site to show what we are talking about here. This would be a good choice on a more formal type of dress, but would also work well on a knit fabric. However, with woven fabric, there is less freedom of movement than with a flutter sleeve, so this style is less forgiving.

Kimono cap sleeve

I wasn't sure how to describe the next type of sleeve. I'm thinking specifically of the case where there is not a separate sleeve, but the shoulder line is extended over the shoulder and down the arm to a greater or lesser extent. This style is sometimes also called kimono sleeve, but I tend to think of kimono sleeves as wider and longer. Whereas a cap sleeve can in fact be a separate sleeve, but just very short. So neither term quite describes this extended shoulder line sleeve. 

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about. Anyone with a better suggestion of how to describe them, please let me know!

Note no armhole seam:

The one below is an A-line dress gathered into elastic at the waist, but it has the same no-armhole seam cap sleeve. (The dress is actually It's Always Autumn's Play All Day dress.)

Both the above examples are using knit fabric, but the style also works with a soft woven fabric. 

I have designed a cap sleeve / kimono sleeve / extended shoulder sleeve (or whatever you like to call it!) option for my A line pattern. If you are using a different A-line pattern, it's quite easy to redraw the armscye like this. You'll need to do it separately for the front and back (assuming it's a pattern where the back armscye is different from the front). Here's how I designed it.

I just continued the shoulder line out as far as I wanted the sleeve length to be. Then I took the sleeve hemline down at a slight angle, to an inch or two below the bottom of the existing armhole. And curved in towards the dress side seam.

But once you've created a kimono shape sleeve, you can make it as long as you like - cap sleeve length, elbow length or wrist length. You can just draw it longer, or add an extension - see below. If you just draw it longer, I'd suggest making a muslin first, or cut the sleeve longer and wider than you eventually want it to be, so you can try on and repin / recut until you are happy with the shape.

Longer sleeves on kimono style cap sleeve.

It's also possible to add longer sleeves to this style of dress, particularly if the dress is in a knit fabric, for example the A-line pullover dress from Scattered Thoughts of a Crafty Mom. Such sleeves are pretty much cylindrical, narrowing to the wrist, with no need to think too much about the top shaping of the sleeve. This shape of cylindrical sleeve would work well with any pattern that has the 'sleeve cap' effectively already included in the bodice.

If you can't find a suitable sleeve (one suggestion below) it should be quite easy to draw your own, measuring how long you want the sleeve to be, and how deep the armhole is. (Normally you'd want to narrow the sleeve down a bit to the wrist - but don't make it so tight it won't go over the hand!)

The dress below, made from a hash-up of the free Tiny Tulip pattern from Patterns for Pirates, has had the long sleeves from that pattern added. You could make that sleeve extension fit any similar armhole by measuring and comparing the depth.

Set in sleeves

A lot of people try to avoid set in sleeves, as they are that bit more complicated. And the types of sleeves covered above enable you to avoid that. But let's assume you want set in sleeves. 

I've been leaving this till last, because designing them is a whole module in itself in a pattern design course. Which I've never taken. I more or less wing it, but a) I've been sewing for more than 60 years, and b) you can guess that I'm going to give you a number of links to many people who are much more expert than me. You are not going to find your set-in sleeve design module here.

Set in sleeves can be short, elbow length, wrist length - or any length you like. And they can be fitted, puffed, flared, they can have a frill added, they can have a cuff. But the thing they have in common is that the shaping at the top has to fit the armscye of the dress. (Or to be more precise, the seam line on the sleeve has to fit the seam line of the armscye. On some of the ill-fitting sleeves I've found, I think the designer has just drawn round the armscye. Since the seam line is a bit bigger in circumference than the cutting line on the armscye, and a bit smaller on the sleeve, the sleeves can be too small.) 

With knits, a little bit of stretch can help if the sleeve pattern is not quite a perfect fit for the armscye.  With a woven fabric, it's important to get a really well-fitting sleeve. The front and back should not be the same shape on a woven inset sleeve, as more ease is needed on the back to allow for the forward movements of the arms and shoulders.

If you are starting with a sleeveless dress, like my A-line dress, I think it is preferable to redraw the armscye to give a full shoulder width, and then design the sleeve to fit the new armscye. If you already have the dress cut out, you could add the extra shoulder width into the sleeve top, or add an extra band of a contrast fabric into the shoulders of the bodice.

So, having got this far, how can we make a design for a set in sleeve? Here are some solutions.

Using another sleeve pattern

This blog from McCall's Patterns simply suggests adding sleeves from another similar pattern. That's fine, of course, provided you have something similar. But if you look at sleeves from commercial patterns, they vary enormously. You might need to redraw the armscye using the other pattern as well.

On the dress below, which was stretchy fabric, I did redraw the armscye, using a pattern I had for a sleeved dress, and the sleeve pattern from that dress, but I wasn't very scientific about it because I thought the stretch would make up for errors.

This dress below was based on the Good Deeds Dress from Elysium. I love this pattern, have used it several times, but it's sleeveless, and this was going to be a winter dress - for Christmas, in fact. So I found the sleeve from the Ruffle Dress by Sew Much Ado worked well.

The larger of the two dresses below is in fact the same Ruffle Dress, unfortunately only in a limited size range (c 4-6 years).

You can read more about these dresses here.

Altering a sleeve pattern you have, so it works with your pattern

I made this dress out of woven tartan, in the main following The Holiday Dress pattern from Shwin and Shwin. You can find the link to this pattern on my post about this dress. 

However, in the size I wanted to make (size 8), I found that the sleeve provided wasn't going to fit. Measuring the seam line on the armscye and on the sleeve showed the sleeve was smaller by about 1". So I added in half an inch in the middle and 1/4" on each side, to get it to fit. And it did.

Using an easy-fit sleeve

One of my favourite free dress patterns recently is Life Sew Savory's Sweet Rose Dress. I've made several of these now, in various sizes from 3 to 8. This is a size 6. The wonderful thing about the sleeves on this pattern is that they are loose fitting, and designed to have a small pleat or tuck at the top, rather than needing to be gathered or eased to fit. Since you could make the tuck larger or smaller, I think this sleeve would also fit other patterns.

sweet rose dress

Trace a sleeve from your bodice armscye.

This all sounds so easy. I found a couple of tutorials on how to do this. Firstly from Merrick's Art; and secondly from Sew Much Love, Mary. The first of these shows how to add a short sleeve, but it doesn't really make clear exactly where you should start to change direction on the top curve of the sleeve.  The second gives an alternative method, though similar, but it doesn't make it clear that it is the seam lines on the sleeve and the armscye that need to match, not the cutting lines. Also, both of these appear to assume that the front and back of the sleeve will be the same (i.e. no allowance for the wider width needed on the bodice back to allow for arm movement), though I dare say you could trace these separately. It may be worth a go, but I might try a toile first. 

Sleeve Pattern Drafting

I told you I wasn't going to teach you how to draft sleeves, and I'm not. And I'm not going to point you towards full tailoring courses. But if you'd still like to learn more, without tears, here are some ideas for you.

First of all, I love this post from Ikatbag, which shows you why sleeves are the odd shape they are. 

Next, if you'd like to know more about different types of sleeve, checkout this fun post from Sew Guide. They talk about 40+ different types, and I can still think of others! Sew Guide also has a quick way to draft sleeves to add to a sleeveless dress, (some of the measurements may need adjustment for a child) as well as a more sophisticated (but still easy) method of drafting sleeves. The limitation on this is that measurements for the "Plain Sleeve" are given for only 26" to 42" chest measurements, so you won't find detailed measurements for a small child under about 6 or 7 years old. 

I also like the Melly Sews Sleeve pattern tutorial. She explains how to measure and draft - and comments on fitted and less fitted sleeves. She does also warn, as I did above, that not all sleeveless dresses have an armscye shape that will work with a sleeve unless you also alter the armscye.

There's another post on adding sleeves here. 

And finally, one other tutorial I have found helpful, is from Threads Magazine.

Good luck with your adding sleeves to sleeveless dresses!