Random musings on HEMA jacket sleeve design: the elbow hinge

I know I haven’t posted any real sewing/tailoring content from Sartoria Insulindica for something like one and a half years by now, so I guess here I am, playing catch-up with the actual amount of patternmaking, fitting, sewing, and all the associated kind of activities I’ve been involved in over that timeframe. One of the most significant projects I’ve been working on since the last update is yet another attempt at developing a HEMA (historical European martial arts) jacket model that would be suitable for scaling up into larger-scale production. Meet Bess.

Why Bess? Well, the previous model was Nellie, and it happened to be the third model in the series (after the 2017 experimental gambeson and the Gorillambeson). The Imperial Japanese Navy’s Mitsubishi G3M bomber back in World War II was given the Allied codename “Nell.” The G4M was “Betty.” So why not run with the theme and name this one “Beth” or “Bess?”

It took me less than two months back in 2022 to come up with a satisfactory pattern for the body pieces, which has required nothing more than minor tweaks since then. The sleeves were a different matter entirely. I spent the better part of this year drafting, fitting, redrafting, and tweaking things until I felt like I had a couple of options that worked decently enough by September. The first was a multi-part sleeve as in the picture below, with the lower arm being encased in a separate segment that included an elbow hinge:

The second variation (again, picture below) was actually a simplification of the first one into a conventional two-piece curved sleeve pattern.