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I don’t know if this is something that a lot of people need to know how to do but I guess it’s nice to know it’s possible, so let’s talk about how to remove sleeves from a dress (or another piece of clothing).
The teen has a dance coming up as I write this, and she found this great dress at Goodwill for $9. She loved it and it fit perfectly, but it was a cold shoulder style (where there’s a gap between the top of the armhole and where the sleeve starts) and she preferred it to be sleeveless.
No problem, I said. Easy.
And it was, but it took a lot longer than I expected.
Why Remove Sleeves from a Garment?
Before we tackle how to remove sleeves from a dress let’s take a moment to consider other reasons why you might want to. Maybe you don’t like the shape or fit of the sleeves as they are but you otherwise like the garment.
Maybe you have a dress that has long sleeves but you think you’d get more wear out of it without them (honestly eyeing a dress in my closet right now for this very reason).
It could be the armpits are a little funky from regular wear and you want to turn a shirt or dress into a tank top or tank dress without just cutting off the sleeves like I did in the tutorial linked here.
Whatever the reason you want to remove the sleeves, it’s an easy way to change the look of a garment.
And the good news is you don’t need a lot of supplies. Just a seam ripper, maybe a little pair of scissors, some pins or fabric clips and a whole boatload of patience. Seriously, this took like four hours over two days. The things we do for our kids!
How to Remove Sleeves from a Dress
We join this sleeve surgery already in progress, but you can see both the before and after in this photo. These sleeves, like most in purchased garments, were sewn with a serger, which makes them a little harder to rip out than regular machine stitched seams.
I know that the easiest way to rip out serger seams is to rip out the rows of straight stitching at the bottom, then the loops from the top will pull right out.
But if you’ve ever tried to rip out black stitching from black fabric (stretch fabric at that) this is definitely easier said than done. Thus the need for all the patience.
Once I got a little bit of the seam opened up I found the easiest way to rip it out was from the front side. Slightly pulling the pieces of fabric apart I could see the stitching holding it together and unpick it there. I’m showing the seam ripper holding two threads here, but you’ll want to pull out each one rather than ripping because you’ll end up with a million tiny threads if you do. Of course you need to use extra care to not rip the fabric, too.
The really tricky part here, though, was where the seam on the sleeve converged with the seam on the dress. Here I had to rip out part of the seam on the armhole to release the fabric of the sleeve that was sewn into the same seam. That was the truly tedious part (and really hard to see as well).
Finishing the Armhole
Once you’ve released the sleeve from the dress or top, you’ll need to sew the armhole seams. Here I had half a seam already because the top of the armhole didn’t have a sleeve attached.
So I just folded back a small amount of the raw edge to try to make it look consistent with what was already seamed. It turned out pretty narrow in spots so I stitched from the inside out and on the slowest setting on my machine to make sure I was getting the fabric sewed down.
Again because it’s black thread on black fabric, I didn’t need to worry much about the stitching being visible, which is nice. I also didn’t sew all the way around the armhole since the top was already stitched down, but if you’ve removed a full sleeve you’ll of course need to go all the way around.
If there’s not enough fabric left to hem, I think I’d put bias tape over the raw edge and sew it down. This is a great opportunity to add a little more color.
As it is, I think this dress looks great and you’d never know it used to have sleeves. And now you know how to remove sleeves from a garment in case you ever want or need to!
