I can do that

Burda patterns were recently on sale at JoAnn.  I don't pay much attention to Burda, because they don't  go on sale often, so I had a look and Burda 6401 caught my eye.  It's a lot like the dresses I've been making, only with a gathered bell sleeve, so yes I liked it.  I was plotting my trip to JoAnn when I had a second thought about how very much like the dresses I've been making it is, especially the dresses like this that I've made by adding a gathered slightly A-line skirt to the shirt pattern from Butterick 6740.

I found a few pattern reviews for the Burda, and they all mentioned how roomy it was.  Yeah, that sealed it--I didn't need the pattern, I only needed to hack a bell sleeve for the pattern I already had.

And bell sleeves are easy to hack!



Place a pin at the shoulder seam mark of the original, non-gathered sleeve pattern piece (I keep a big piece of cardboard on my ironing board to use as a work surface, so there's no problem jabbing a straight pin into that.)

Pivot it to one side--yes of course I didn't measure anything--and trace the edge from the shoulder seam mark to the edge of the sleeve cap seam, copying the notch and the dot

Return the sleeve to its original position and see something like this

Repeat for the other side

Now you have a wider sleeve with a sleeve cap that is the same size--just...flattened--as the original, so it will fit as smoothly into the armscye as the original sleeve piece fit.

I used another pattern that had sleeves the length I wanted to make the sides, and I flared them out a bit more than needed, I think--especially since the pattern piece is about 23" wide, which means it's not going to fit on a piece of folded 45" cloth.

This didn't matter on the first sleeves I cut, since the cloth was a vintage 36" width so I wasn't cutting the cloth folded, but the second sleeves I cut were on 45", so I folded the pattern sides in a bit--still need to edit the pattern piece properly.

I also got the arm band from the pattern I used to get the sleeve length, and...heh heh oops, it was too tight.  And cut on the length of the grain so it had absolutely no give.  And I didn't discover this until I had finished the bodice.

After attempting to let out the seams and still not getting enough clearance, I removed those bands and, after looking again at the Burda pattern, not only added some width to the pattern piece, but also cut the new bands on the bias.  They're actually really loose, but that's fine.

I cut out an attempted mock Burda 6401 from this print

but decided that I didn't want to change the thread in my machine, since it had a nearly-full bobbin, so I cut and sewed another dress instead, and of course it deviated from the look of the dress I was originally trying to emulate.

But that's something for another post.