Two piece sleeve – drafting comparison

In general I’m very impressed with the pattern drafting classes by Suzy Furrer, as you have read in previous posts. Watching her doing the two piece sleeve though I had my doubts. It looked so different from what I’m used to in a two piece sleeve, both from commercial patterns as from the way I’ve drafted those before.

After my holiday I want to make a jacket, so I started changing the sloper to a jacket sloper and thought it was time for a sleeve draft experiment. I drafted the two piece sleeve using Suzy Furrer’s instructions and drafted it too using the method I was already familiar with. For both I used the same draft for the jacket itself.

Writing this post as much for those interested in drafting as for keeping track of what I’m doing myself.

The first picture is the way Suzy Furrer starts her two piece sleeve, her base is the normal sleeve draft and you take the outside parts and combine those to the under sleeve. The second picture is the Danckaerts method I’ve learned in the past year or so. In this system you don’t start with the base of another sleeve, the instructions are especially for drafting a two piece sleeve, based on the circumference of the armhole.

 

What I noticed in Suzy Furrer’s method is that there is less curve to the sleeve. She instructs you how to make it curve more forward, but in the result it’s less than in the other method. Also, because the “square” used in her method was rather wide for my armhole circumference, the result is an upper sleeve that’s very wide at the bottom, and an under sleeve that’s very narrow.

	The final pattern pieces using Suzy Furrer’s method
	Final pattern pieces using the Danckaerts system
	Upper sleeve pattern side by side
	Under sleeve pattern side by side

There is one important difference between the drafting systems: in Suzy Furrer’s method you decide yourself how much ease you want in the sleeve cap, as you measure the front and back length including the ease while drafting. The Danckaerts method is designed to always have 4 cm of ease. In the instructions it says: the sleeve cap must always have 4 cm of ease. Opinions differ on the need of ease at all and to how much is needed depending on the fabric you use. To me 4 cm is too much in general, I prefer less, so it will be a bit more complicated to change that in the pattern.

To me the draft of the under sleeve looks too narrow in Suzy Furrer’s method. To really compare I will make up a muslin of the jacket sloper and use both drafts.