After all the slashes have been completely jointed and cut to length I was ready to assemble. This is the final layout of the pieces ready for connection and attachment to the sleeve.
Here is the layout compared to the silk sleeve. You can see that the strips are about 45 inches and the sleeve is about 24 inches long.
I ran a single silk thread through the center of each strip of wool that I could then use the gather the panes together. The wool is rather thick and you can see in the image below I was able to pierce the center of the strip very nicely.
After all the pains were joined together I tightened the basting thread to gather the panes to the correct width that was required to fit the sleeve it would be tacked to. I then placed the panes onto the sleeve and pined each pane down in the proper place to check the layout. I found that I was not able to gather the wrist as much as I liked and therefore simply overlapped the purple and teal panes on top of the black. It was sort of difficult to gather 24 inches of panes into about 9 inches around the wrist area.
Here are all the panes pinned and ready to stitch.
And... I'm done! Took a ton of time, but I'm really happy with the look so far. I am still pretty sure that I will stuff the sleeve a little bit. I have some cotton mesh which was sold as a shower curtain lining. It is rather stiff and will hold up some body and at least it isn't plastic or polyester.
My next step will to be to create some blue and/or purple straps to cover up and accent the section where the panes are bound to the sleeve. Not sure exactly what or how I will do it yet. I have a design in my head, and I have some blue and purple leather and blue wool coat I bought. I have to play with some designs before I continue on the real sleeve though. I can't wait to see one sleeve done and the design final. At least at that point I can start plugging away at the second sleeve without thinking much about the design and simply focus on the process.
