Almost everyone who’ve read my post about the Red Dress I made using Burda Style’s 08/2012 no. 121 pattern, were very interested in how I made the origami sleeves and added it to the original dress pattern. 

As said before in my related post, I was inspired by Straight Grain’s project she made for her adorable daughter. She provides a great tutorial about it in her blog. But let me share with you how I interpreted the technique and adopted it into a commercial pattern. 

So here we go:

1- In a normal  raglan sleeve pattern you do not need to follow this step. But for the Burda Style’s 08/2012 no. 121 pattern, you need to stick together the 2 shoulder pattern pieces to proceed.

Get the shoulder / sleeve pattern in one piece. Measure the length of your pattern and make sure that you have at least twice amount fabric for getting the origami effect. 

Cut a rectangular shaped fabric with given length.

2- Start folding the rectangular shaped fabric with app. 3 cm (1.2 inches) and pin it. 

3- Arrange the width of your machine to the max. 

4- Start stitching.

5- When you finish the first fold, follow the first steps for the following folds and make sure that you get a straight line and same width.

Follow the measuring lines next to the presser foot to get the stitches neat. 

6 - Once you have a folded fabric long enough to cover your sleeve / shoulder pattern, pin your pattern onto the fabric. 

Make sure that the folded pleats will look down once you sew it onto your outfit.  Remember that this is a raglan sleeve. 

7- In order to keep it neat, straight stitch around the pieces before you take the pins out. 

8- Now your raglan sleeve should look like this. 

9- Take the center of your shoulder and mark it with pins from both ends. (If you’ve used this very pattern, just follow the center line of the 2 pattern pieces)  

10 - Now pin the folds backwards. 

11- Since this is a tight-fitting dress, make sure that you get the folding line correctly.

For a tight-fitting sleeve, it’s not exactly in half as suggested by An from Straight Grain.

12- Now machine stitch the folding line and you have a gorgeous looking origami sleeve! 

For the ones who intend to adopt this technique onto the BurdaStyle’s pattern, you are now free to stitch it onto the dress and then to the long part of the sleeve.  

Now say cheese! :)

Cheers!

irem

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