The Aldrich instructions require the sleeve to be drafted ‘overlaid’ on the bodice, whereas Kershaw drafts his sleeve in isolation.
In terms of placing balance points and notches, the Aldrich instructions look better to me, except I’m a bit worried about it all looking very messy.
Do you draft your sleeves in separate files to the block, or on the same and overlap them?
I’m vaguely aware that points can be toggled on and off, is that the main/recommended approach? Toggle off everything I don’t need for the sleeve then draft the sleeve, with a naming convention for its points like S1, S2 etc?
If you were to draft the sleeve in the same block as the bodice I would definitely put the bodice and sleeve parts in seperate groups that will allow you to toggle on / off which parts you want to see at any given time. In fact, your’re going to want to make use of groups in general. For example… lets say you draft a sleeve in it’s own block, with a long and short version. You can put the objects that make up the long sleeve in one group, and the objects that make up the short sleeve in another. Now you can choose to see the long sleeve, the short sleeve, or both.
As @Douglas said, it’s best to put the bodice into a group. I don’t do well with toggling notch labels off, so I use groups to toggle things on & off. Unlike @Douglas, I did the Aldrich sleeve exactly as she instructs… on top of the bodice, but with the bodice in a group and the sleeve in a group. The reason is that she actually uses nodes in the bodice as the starting points for the sleeve. She does use different label names for the shared objects but I just pencilled the original node labels into the book to replace her new labels and left the pattern labels alone.
FYI, you won’t be able to access the curves, lines & nodes, for reference if you draft the different items in different files, so best to keep them, all nice, neat & tidy, in one file. Some like to place them on different drawing boards inside the file, but then you can’t rotate the sleeve (for example) and move it to create a dolman sleeve which gets grafted onto the bodice, so I do everything in one file and on one drawing board, just nicely filed into groups.
Yeah… I start with A (mainly for the bodice), then B for perhaps the sleeve, then C for the skirt, etc. etc. and I name the groups accordingly… A - Bodice front, A - Bodice back, B - Long Sleeve, B - Short Sleeve, C - Skirt front, C - Skirt back, etc. etc.
This way, I know that (in my master pattern) everything in one the Bodice groups will only have nodes that start with A and the sleeve will be B. But this is how I do it and you can develop your own system. I also have groups that are especially for creating the pattern piece and one for all the extra objects that are necessary to get to the point of creating a pattern piece, so that I can hide all the extra goodies while selecting the needed objects for the final pattern piece.
Yes… I would add, that I would draft by whatever way the system is using. Given that my main focus has been on mens wear, most of the systems I’ve used draft the 2 part sleeve separately from the body, as multiple jacket styles will use the same sleeve pattern.
now to start figuring out sleeves.