Hey, it's Haley at Seamwork and in this video I'm going to be sharing with you how to do
an armhole depth adjustment. So you might be thinking "Haley, what's an armhole depth
adjustment?" I'm here to explain that to you and then show you how to do it. So an armhole depth
adjustment actually adjusts the length between your shoulder and your underarm um and when this
length is not quite right you can have issues with mobility. You can't move your arms as well
or it could just be straight out uncomfortable. So let's talk about having an armhole depth that's
too long for your body. If the armhole depth is too long, your armhole is going to sit
too low and that's a big problem because a too low of an armhole decreases your mobility. You really
want that underarm seam to be up you know, in your armpit without being uncomfortable, in order for
you to get good lift and to be able to raise your arms within reason. So if your armhole is too long,
you're going to see some bagging of fabric in this region and you're going to have poor range
of motion. If you are finding this in your garments, you're going to want to reduce the length right
around here. So what you can do is you can take some pins and kind of mock up how you want that
to fit. Determine how much you want to pinch out. If your armhole is too high, it's just gonna be like
uncomfortable, gonna be right up in your underarm and that is also a problem because
if it's uncomfortable, you're not gonna wear it and you wanna make things you wanna wear so
if that's the case, you're going to want to lower your armhole. With this, if you made a muslin you
can slash your muslin and kind of mock up how much extra length you want, or you can eyeball it based
on how much room you want to add underneath your armhole. Now that we've talked about what
the adjustment is and how you know if you need it or not, I'm going to show you how to make it.
Okay, so before we get started on this adjustment, I want to give a little bit of
insight on what we're looking at now that we've switched to a two dimensional view of our pattern.
So this is our armscye, fancy word for an armhole, this is your sleeve cap
everything that lives below these notches here so this area this is in
up in your armpit, so when we're adjusting armhole depth which is basically a lengthen and shorten
adjustment, that's done across the chest and the sleeve, we don't need to remove room underneath
here. What we're looking at removing room from is the parts that we can see, the part above
the armpit. So we're going to be working in this territory up here, not down here. All right now
that we're acquainted with our pattern, let's make some lines, some slash lines for ourselves.
We are going to start by drawing a line on our bodice, this is our front bodice, this line is
going to be perpendicular to the grainline, which is the center front of the pattern in this case
and is going to extend from the center front to the armscye.
And this line is about an inch and a half above my notch.
And then I'm going to draw another line that corresponds to this one but on my sleeve. So you
can see that my grainline doesn't quite extend up this far, so I'm going to extend my grainline
just to make sure everything is all squared up and straight in our final pattern.
Now I am going to draw a line perpendicular to that grainline
across my sleeve cap so these two horizontal lines are my slash lines
and I'm going to cut along those.
While I'm cutting, I do want to say that this adjustment will be made across the entire
pattern meaning the front, the sleeve, and the back. I can't fit the back on my table right now,
but you'll repeat all this on the back.
Another thing I want to mention is that I'm working with a pattern that has no seam allowance.
This makes it a whole lot easier to adjust our pattern and true everything up accurately.
So always remove your seam allowances before you get to pattern adjusting. All right, so now I've
cut along my slash lines and you can see I have this space here and what this allows me to do
is it allows me to add room should I need it and it allows me to reduce room by overlapping these
pattern pieces together, so regardless of whether you need more or less depth to your armhole, you
will create these slash lines and then slash right along them. Let's talk about removing depth first.
So in most cases, this is going to be an adjustment that's
probably going to be under an inch. An inch would be pretty generous,
so in this example I'm going to remove a half inch of armhole depth. I'm going to draw a line
parallel to my slash line here that's a half inch away. This is why a gridded clear ruler is so nice,
it makes this so easy to do and I'm gonna do the same right over here, half inch.
If I was working on my back piece too, which you will do if you make this
adjustment I'd just do it across all of them. All right, now what I can do is I can overlap
my pattern pieces to remove that little bit of depth and I'm lining up my center front
and lining up along that slash line and then I'll tape.
You can see there's an itty-bitty baby jog right there in my pattern that I just need to
um smooth out and I'll just use a clear ruler
and oh it's a curved ruler, I'm going to use my curved ruler and just remove that little guy,
it's like literally so small, it doesn't even want to like hang out underneath the ruler.
Teeny, teeny, like I'm going to shave off like a sixteenth of an inch there. All right.
But you'll find that the more shallow a curve is, just like this one, it's not a super
curved line, the less smoothing you'll have to do. But when we move over here to our more
dramatically curved sleeve, we'll have a little bit more adjusting to do. That's okay. All right,
we're going to repeat all of this on our sleeve cap. I'm going to line this grainline up and
line the cut edge along my guideline and this is going to ensure that my sleeve doesn't get all
cockeyed. I mean even if it was by like an eighth of an inch would probably make your
sleeve hang a little funny, we don't want that so just line it all up and then tape in place.
All right,
so now we just need to do a little bit of truing. You can see this sleeve needs a
little bit more help than our armscye did. So what we want to do is we want to find
a curve on our ruler that matches the curve our pattern's trying to kind of show us. Typically,
your notch on your pattern piece is going on your sleeve is going to represent kind of where
that sleeve goes from a concave curve to a more convex curve and so we want to honor that and
keep to the those um those curves, so I want to make sure that above this line, I'm using pretty
um convex curves and see that's
kind of a good spot it gives me a pretty nice transition. I'll do the same thing over here.
Right, that looks good.
We'll just need to extend our notch just there just so we can see them once we cut everything away.
I just eyeballed that part. All right, and then we can use our scissors and trim up a bit.
So trimming that away, oh my gosh it's looking more like a sleeve again,
and same thing over here.
Okay look at that, sleeve city. All right, cool. So this is how I would remove
depth from my armhole. Um once all of that is trued up looking smooth looking great
you would just want to add in your seam allowance again and then of course don't forget
repeat all of this on your back piece as well and it'll look very much the
same — drawing that perpendicular lines, slashing, reducing, truing, and adding your seam allowance.
Again, pretty easy. All right, so that's reducing depth, let's talk about adding some.
Okay,
so if you need to add a little bit of room, everything's going to start out the same.
You're going to draw those lines in, you're going to slash along them, and now we have
some negative space that we can add some paper underneath. So grab yourself,
grab yourself a piece of paper, we use craft paper here at Seamwork because you can buy it by the
roll relatively cheap, it's nice and contrasty so you can see what I'm doing in these videos.
You can use anything if you have just like some scrap printer paper around,
use that, use a newspaper, whatevs. Okay so let's add a little bit of depth for those of us who need it.
First, I'm going to start by taping down
the bottom part of my bodice
you can kind of go about this a few different ways um and I'll explain that in a minute.
So again, this is an adjustment that you're gonna make in like very small increments, most likely um
in this example, I'm going to add a quarter inch of depth, that sounds probably like not very much but
in something like this, it's going to make a big difference. So
I am drawing a line one quarter of an inch in, parallel to that edge that I just taped down,
and then next, I'm going to extend my front, my center front line. This is gonna ensure that
everything lines up straight because again we don't want this to be cockeyed. Now that we have
our two guidelines in place, I can align my upper bodice with those guidelines and then tape it down.
Okay we're all taped down, now I can take my curved ruler and I can just smooth that line out,
kind of join those two lines.
Beautiful. Now we can do the very same thing over here on our sleeve. So
tape it down. If you've ever lengthened a pattern
like a skirt or top this probably looks super familiar, it's the exact
same thing, just on a sleeve and a bodice, and in a different location. Clear ruler,
drawing a line parallel and a quarter inch away,
if you need more than that, you add more, if you need less, you can add less, and then
I, again want to give myself something else to align my pattern piece with so
I'm going to extend my grainline, and I forgot to do that before
I started so I'm going to line everything up here,
line these raw edges up and extend my grainline through both of those so that it's
continuous, I have something to line it up with and then extend it here as well.
This keeps me from getting crooked.
I forget things too sometimes, lots of times.
Okay, now we're going to tape it in place, aligning my guidelines up,
tape it all down and then grab your curved ruler and
we're going to re-true this curve. So you can see here, when I'm lining up my curved
ruler I have kind of two options, I can either shave a little bit off the cap
or I can add a little bit kind of below where that slash line is. In this case, because you're
looking for more room in this area I would err on the side of adding, rather than taking away
because that's the reason you did this adjustment, you did it to add a little bit of room to your
pattern, so don't take it away like somewhere else. That's my reasoning. It's a very small amount, may
not make a huge difference in your end pattern, but that logic makes sense to me. All right and then
now that we're all taped in place our lines are all trued you can take your paper scissors
and you can cut along those new lines and then add your seam allowances back in and
you have a beautiful pattern piece that has that extra armhole depth that you need and as always
don't forget to do it on the back as well. And that is how you do an armhole depth adjustment. I hope
you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. I'll see you next time and happy sewing!