Adding Cap Sleeves to shirts or dresses

The secret to adding a natural looking sleeve to a dress is using the dress's own fabric. Almost every dress has a cap-sleeve hidden somewhere! You just need to know where to look for it.

Before & Afters

This dress has godets ( a large triangular piece of fabric inserted in the skirt to give it flare). I removed one for each sleeve.As you see the skirt still has plenty of flare.

This dress is too large. Once I took in the sides...voila enough fabric to make 2 cap sleeves

On this dress I took the fabric from the large 80's rosette on the waist!

This one was tricky! No fabric to spare except on the inside. I made cap sleeves from the dress's neck facing.

Free Cap Sleeve patterns.

Just print out the two patterns in your size and overlap the patterns on the dotted line. Make sure the 1" square box prints out close to the 1" measurement.