The elephants in the room / Missing my Upper Arms

I haven't been thin in  twenty years, but I had shoulders, even in this grainy photo 

I am missing my arms.

I discovered lifting weights when I started going to the gym twenty years ago. I'm no competitive weight lifter (although I lift with a couple) and I have enough congenital deficiencies to prevent me from a lot of activities. The hip/replacement hip never liked running or biking. It's hard to find a real yoga teacher (mine died).  But I have never stopped trying.

Nevertheless, weight lifting is fun. You can improve so incrementally, it's relatively easy to make any progress. Adding a pound a week is 52 pounds more after a year.

Or less, if weight loss was where this was going. But it's not about numbers; it's about feeling better.

In a fit of home improvement, I ruined my right shoulder a year and a half ago. Don't move trees by yourself. And either tore or injured something, beyond just the frozen shoulder I developed.

I've had frozen shoulder in my left shoulder, I know how this works. And this is different.

The problem for me is that I have lost all the progress I made over twenty years, and now have those big flappy 'lady arms'.

And why am I calling them that? And why do you know what I mean when I say that? That alone makes me mad. 

 I have been having trouble redrafting sleeves/bodices over my flappy arms, partly from "I will be able to get them back in shape quickly enough to avoid dealing with this set of alterations" to "I'll just wear sleeveless shirts and cardigans"

You know me: I have no difficulty with talking about fitting jeans over my sizable butt.

That's no sway back kids. It's a pinochle table!

My arms make me sad. I could bench my own weight. Now I can barely lift 25.

Which is better than the 20 of a month ago.

Or the 0 of the last year.

So we're going to spend some time talking about sleeves and sleeveheads.
I had to widen my sleeves but I didn't want to add shoulder pads that I'd have to remove.

Bigger sleeve needs some structure; sleeve heads.

Adding a sleevehead (a tube of rolled fleece in this case) provided some needed definition to this jacket's shoulders. And using a cool stripey bit to add to the collection of interior colors makes me happy.

eh. Miyake 1664 gets the job done.

And there's the nifty button set to jolly up a severe style

Just a slice of fleece please (doubled and graded)

The encased fleece rides on the top of the armscye on the seam.

Then I finished the sleeve seam with a bias trim from the lining, The inside of this is so much prettier than the outside; the blue print is silky faille from Spoonflower from Edsel 2084

I'm cleaning house right now.

Or decluttering the hoard, or pruning the stash.

I'm putting in the earplugs and cranking up the shop vac; serious vacuuming in five.