Cinderella Alterations - Sleeve

Many years ago, our family was in the play "Into the Woods." The girl playing Cinderella in the play needed a blue dress. 
 
I had purchased some heavy blue curtains to make one of my girls a dress at some point. They needed a dress for the play so I gave them the blue fabric to make her a dress. 
 
I am not sure who they had make the dress but it wasn't made very well and they didn't like how it looked so they ended up using a different dress. Since the fabric was mine, they gave me the dress. 
 
Princess Five is going to do "On the Steps of the Palace" for musical theater this year. She needed a costume for the song. I pulled out that blue dress and asked Princess if she thought we could use it.  


She said she wanted more "Puffy" sleeves and also, the skirt was WAY to thick and heavy. I told Princess that I would do some alterations and if she didn't like it, we could find some other dress to use. 
 
I pulled the skirt off and took out one of the skirt panels to make the front of the skirt thinner and left the back thicker. 

I then cut that panel of the skirt to make new sleeves and shoulders. I zig-zagged over fish line on the top edge and used the fish line to gather the top of the shoulder. 
 
I couldn't actually take the see through shoulders off as I didn't want to make a new shoulder. The shoulders that I put on are more poofy and would fall off the shoulder if we didn't have the one that is there. I had to hand stitch the new one over the other as you can see in the more close up picture here. 

You can see how it is sewn over the other one. I hand stitched the top of the sleeve that was gathered over the existing see through sleeve. I just folded over the gathering to the underside of the sleeve and then pinned it until I stitched it. 
 
Once the sleeves were on, I hemmed the bottoms evenly. 

After they were hemmed, I wanted to make them "puffy." I thought about gathering the entire thing but that would make them poofy on the bottom and not on the top. I also thought of sewing a piece of elastic just on the top bottom edge but I really wanted it to be more just on the top and puffy on the top.
 
I accordion folded the top center with about three pleats and hand stitched them and then stitched the pleats toward the back so the openings faced the front.    

To make the sleeve more "puffy" I took some tulle and and folded it in the center and the center again and put it in the shoulder area over the satin/see through they had and the new shoulder I put on. I hand sewed it in and it did make the shoulders look higher and more "poofy."
 
In my next post, I will share how I added sashes, bows, frilly neck and what I used to do that. 

This project would have been easier starting from scratch but I was glad that we were able to use somethings we had already to make the dress and it didn't cost much.