Tutorial: Make long sleeves short sleeves on a men's dress shirt

I am a beginning seamstress, and hardly ever do clothes, but I wanted to make some dress shirts short sleeved so that my husband can wear them to work in warm weather. Making a long sleeve shirt into a short sleeve shirt should be easy! Plus, there are lots more long sleeve shirts on clearance racks.

1) First, I ironed the shirt and made a mark where I wanted to cut the sleeve. I used a short sleeve dress shirt to decide where to mark, adding an extra 1-1.5 inches for the seam.

2) Next, I used a quilting ruler to make a straight cut. I made the cut perpendicular to the top edge of the sleeve. You could use a regular school ruler and scissors, just make a line with a pencil and try to cut as evenly as possible.

3) Now I folded the other sleeve over and used the first sleeve to measure. Then I cut the second sleeve exactly the same length as the first.

4) I folded the cut edge under and ironed, then folded and ironed again to make the new sleeve edge.

I wanted them to be equal, so again I used the first sleeve to decide how much to fold under on the second. Here is the finished doubled-under edge.

5) Now to sew it! I picked a line on the sewing machine and kept the edge of the shirt lined up with that line so that the seam would be the exact same distance from the edge of the sleeve all the way around. My folded fabric was not always the same distance, which is why I measured from the line on the machine.

6) When I got to the hem on the inside of the sleeve, I had to make a cut along the seam. Otherwise the fabric would have puckered. I stitched a few stitches on the cut side to keep it from fraying. On one shirt I repeated step 5 to get a double line of stitches and it looked like a professionally made short sleeve shirt.

7) All done!

I found this link for making short sleeves on a woman's t-shirt.