Rydia Arm Socks

To be honest, I had no idea what an arm sock was until very recently.  Rydia wears arm socks underneath her flowing sleeves.  They are attached to her middle finger at one end and to a gold band on her upper arm at the other end.

I could not find a helpful tutorial online for making arm socks that attached at the finger, so I developed my own pattern.  This may look a little oddly shaped, but it miraculously worked out!

The basic idea behind this odd-looking design is to have more material at the upper arm where the arm is thick which then tapers down at the wrist.  Then, the top of the wrist to the middle finger tapers again.  Lastly, the end is for a simple cloth ring "fingerloop".

A stretchy material seemed appropriate to use...the sock needed to be able to bend at the elbow and flexible at the wrist.  Since the last sewing tutorial for slippery fabric helped me tremendously, I took a look at FashionSewingBlogTV's other videos.  Lo and behold, she had another fabulous tutorial for sewing stretchy fabric.

Lessons learned:

1. The type of sewing machine needle actually matters.  I picked up a ballpoint needle from Walmart.
2. Use a lower tension setting and a stitch width of 2.
3. Stretchy fabric may only be stretchy in one direction!  It is super important that you keep this in mind when cutting out your pattern.  Luckily I caught myself just in time.

For the arm bands, I ended up purchasing men's arm cuffs from Amazon.  They don't stretch per se, but do expand just a little bit.  I would not recommend using these unless you have very slim upper arms.  They are a gentle snug fit on me, yet do not look all that flattering for the exposed upper arm.