M. Müller & Sohn Review: The perfect sleeve

Hello everyone, I'm back with my third and so far last part of the M. Müller & Sohn pattern drafting review. As with both my other reviews on how Müller & Sohn address ease and special figures, this one is also based on their book on drafting dresses and blouses and is entirely devoted to their genius way of drafting sleeves.

Before I get into Müller & Sohn's sleeve draft, let's have a look at one typical way in which sleeves are drafted. Below you can see a sleeve draft according to Modern Pattern Design from 1942 by Harriet Pepin. This draft is fairly similar to more modern sleeve drafting resources like, for example, Helen Joseph Armstrong's Patternmaking for Fashion Design. The sleeve cap is fairy flat and the length on either side of the shoulder line is the same. The slope and length of the cap is also not dramatically different on the back or front of the sleeve.

Source: Harriet Pepin's Modern Pattern Design (1942)

This type of sleeve draft suggests that our arms hang symmetrically from our shoulders, having the same slope from the shoulder point to underarm seam on both the front and back of the armhole. Below I've borrowed a picture from the Japanese Digital Human Resource Center, showing a new and more anatomically correct dress form to the left and a traditional not so anatomically correct dress form to the right.

Source: Digital Human Resource Center

I have drawn in a red line to suggest the hang of the sleeve perpendicular to the floor from the shoulder point. As you can see the not so anatomically correct form suggests that the sleeve cap is fairly the same length and shape on the back and front, whereas the more anatomically correct form shows that the sleeve caps are quite different in shape and length on the back and front. The less anatomically correct form pairs up nicely with the sleeve draft found in Harriet Pepin, whereas the more anatomically correct sleeve cap shape - i.e. as on an actual body - is much better addressed by the sleeve draft you can see below.

This is my own draft of a sleeve according to M. Müller & Sohn and shows how the hang of the sleeve from the shoulder is not centered. The back cap (on the right) is much longer and has a different shape from the front cap, much like a real arm and shoulder. Before I drafted my own sleeve according to M. Müller & Sohn I couldn't quite believe that this type of sleeve would actually allow for a greater range of motion for the arm but it really does. The difference is quite severe and I now find it hard to go back to the other type of sleeve found in many home-sewing patterns.

If you are a follower of Fashion Incubator I'm sure that you have read about this sleeve drafting issue before. This is how I heard about the different sleeve drafts first and started to become more interested in the German method of drafting. For a much better and more professional and informed explanation of different sleeve drafts and sleeve ease, here are some of the posts on Fashion Incubator which relate to this topic: the ever so popular Sleeve cap ease is bogus, a review of Patternmaking in Fashion by Lucia Mors de Castro, and an entry on Japanese dress forms. There are many more entries on Fashion Incubator that relate to this  topic but I can't locate them all.

Again, if you would like to draft a German-style sleeve but don't speak any German at all, Lucia Mors de Castro's book Patternmaking for Fashion, which I suggested in a previous post will show you how to draft this type of sleeve in English.

I'm planning on reviewing a couple more pattern resources in future posts. I really like writing these kinds of posts. Müller & Sohn's book, although being pretty comprehensive and very, very good, is not the be all and end all of pattern drafting books. There is so much more out there.

Hope you enjoyed this review and found it useful. Happy drafting everyone!