Announcing FreeSewing v2.0

Welcome to version 2 of FreeSewing, the open source platform for made-to-measure sewing patterns.

This release culminates more than a year of work, and comes two years to the day since FreeSewing first went live. Today, we once again raise the bar for what you can expect from modern-day sewing patterns.

🦄 Harder, better, faster, stronger *

We are extremely excited about this release, which is not just merely a new major version with some breaking changes, but a complete rewrite in JavaScript/Node.js. We won’t go into the nitty gritty here, but if you’d like to know how we’ve done it, check out the developer docs or FreeSewing on GitHub.

✨ Live preview

FreeSewing has always had a reputation for publishing sewing patterns with tons of options for you to tweak. Which is great, but can be a bit overwhelming because you only got to see the result of all those tweaks at the very end. But those days are gone. Now, no matter what changes you make, you get a live preview of what your pattern will look like, taking the guesswork out of configuring your pattern exactly as you like it.

🧂 Recipes

Where we used to store your patterns for you, now we’ll store your recipes instead. You can go through as many pattern iterations as you want. And when you’re happy, we’ll save all the settings it takes to create that exact pattern in a so-called recipe.

You can then at any time re-use that recipe to recreate your pattern, or use it as a starting point to make a slightly different pattern. You can also share these recipes, allowing others to generate the same look for their own measurements.

🤝 Getting involved was never easier

What hasn’t changed is that we still support 5 languages (shout-out to all translators) and that FreeSewing is still a 100% communal effort (shout-out to all contributors). There’s only volunteers here, and if you’d like to help out, it’s never been easier.

For those who are interested in our code, head over to our new developer documentation at freesewing.dev to learn about the new platform, our core API, our plugins, and more.

For those of you who are interested in designing patterns, we have updated our pattern design tutorial so you can hit the ground running.

There’s good news for translators too, as we now use Crowdin which makes translation a breeze. If you’d like to help out with translation, or maybe even add a new language to FreeSewing, make sure to get in touch.

💩 Usual caveats apply

It’s conventional wisdom in software development that refactoring code is good, but rewriting it from scratch is bad. Still, we did it anyway because we wanted to make it easier for people to get involved in the project, and generate patterns in real-time in the browser.

That being said, this is a .zero release so you may stumble upon an issue left or right. When you do, please let us know or submit an issue.

🤞 Tell us what you think

We’d love to hear your feedback. We’re @freesewing_org on Twitter and Instagram, use the #freesewing hashtag, or check our share page.