A recipe for de-puffed sleeves

I have broad shoulders, and anything that makes them look bigger (ahem, puffed sleeves!) is something I'd rather just avoid. However, I have gotten a ton of puffed-short-sleeve blouses from friends offloading their old career-wear, so I've had lots of opportunities to learn how to make puffed sleeves into something a little more streamlined. Often I just remove the sleeves entirely, but I discovered a useful technique for keeping the sleeves and just removing the puff!

In short form...

Start with a shirt with puffed sleeves:

Detach the top halves of the sleeves.

Iron out the wrinkles, re-attach the sleeves from the bottom up, and sew a seam across the new top edge of the sleeve!

After cleaning up the new seams and hemming the sleeves to your ideal length, you will get something like this:

That's the gist of it! I go into a little more detailed description over on my blog post.

It seems like huge sleeves are coming back into fashion, but they're just not for me, so I'm glad I can count on this technique to get ordinary, unobtrusive sleeves out of any puffy top! I hope this helps some other people, too! Thanks for reading!

--The Unfashionista