Here at Cashmerette, we believe that women of all body shapes can have limitless style. Those antiquated “fashion rules” about what you should or shouldn’t wear to hide or accentuate your curves? Hard pass! We’ll wear our horizontal stripes and bold prints and maxi dresses as much as we want, no matter who says we shouldn’t. But of course we all have our personal preferences, for any number of reasons, and one of the most strongly felt is on the subject of sleeves! So that’s why we’ve introduced new “With Sleeves” and “Sleeveless” filters to the Cashmerette website: one click and you can find the patterns that work for you.
It’s a hot topic: when we release a new pattern, we always get a loving flood of emails asking whether the pattern can be hacked to add sleeves or remove sleeves—it’s clear that people are often strongly either in #TeamSleeves or #TeamSleeveless! As we add to our pattern collection we make sure we have a balance of both options. In fact, right now we have an almost-perfect balance of 8 dress/top patterns with sleeves, 3 sleeveless patterns, and 4 patterns that swing both ways.
Now, to make it easier to find what you want, when you browse our pattern collection you can filter the list to see only sleeveless or sleeved options. To use this new filter, go to the Patterns page and scroll down to the “Refine” section of the menu on the left-hand side. There at the bottom under “Other”, you’ll see the options for “Sleeveless” or “With Sleeves”. Click on your style of choice and you’ll then see only dresses and tops with that sleeve style!
If you’re on a mobile device, scroll to the bottom below all of the patterns to see the filters:
You’ll notice that some of our patterns appear in both lists. Changing the armscye of a pattern can be a complex adjustment to make and one we don’t usually recommend to beginner sewists, so we’ve released a few sleeve/sleeveless additions, like the Upton Sleeve Expansion Pack and Lenox Sleeve Expansion Pack.
Prefer a long or short sleeve? Many of our sleeved patterns, like the Concord T-Shirt, come with two or three sleeve lengths, but you can always choose to lengthen or shorten a sleeve to your ideal length!
We hope these new filters help you to find patterns that fit your style more easily! If you have suggestions for other ways you’d like to be able to filter Cashmerette patterns, let us know in the comments below.
