This is your monthly roundup of the freesewing news of the last four weeks, and a look at what lies ahead in the next month.
Looking back at october
In retrospect, I should have made the october background image haloween themed. I guess I’ll try to remember that for next year.
Meet Huey
First up: a new pattern. The Huey Hoodie is now available in beta.
Huey is a zip-up hoodie, have a look at the Huey showcase page for examples. The announcement blog post also explains what it means for a pattern to be in beta.
Community building
Freesewing is slowly evolving into a communal effort. The freesewing chat room is turning into a rather chatty place, which is really wonderful to see.
Furthermore, a number of people are taking a stab at designing their own patterns with freesewing. I think that’s very exciting and I’m looking forward to the day we’ll all be able to enjoy the fruits of that labour.
Meanwhile, people are also helping out with the site, suggesting fixes and improvements left and right, and Wouter even added an entire page on Git basics which should be a great stepping stone for people who like him want to get involved, but lack prior experience with Git (and GitHub).
Needless to say, I am very appreciative of all contributions big and small.
If you’d like to get involved, come say hi.
Cover pages for patterns
This is something I’m kind of excited about: but I’ve made some changes to freesewing tile to add a cover page to patterns.
The tile repository holds software that turns your pattern into multiple pages you can print on your printer (so called tiling, hence the name).
You need to sticky-tape those pages together, and even though there are markings on the pages to help you with that, it would be nice to have an overview page that shows the entire pattern and how it’s layed out over the different pages.
Problem is, because freesewing patterns are drafted on the fly, based on your measurements, there’s no way to know how big or small your pattern will be. In addition, you can pick a variety of paper sizes which will also influence how the pattern gets tiled.
So for the longest time, I felt it was simply not possible to add an coverpage with an overview of how everything needs to be stuck together. But everyday is a school day, and I’m glad to announce that starting of today, when you download a tiled PDF, it will come with a cover page detailing the layout.
This is obviously very new code, so if for some reason you run into trouble with the tiler, make sure to let me know about it.
Roy will design cover images for patterns
I’ve made some changes to the patterns page because I felt that the previous layout wasn’t doing the patterns justice.
While the layout is a bit better now (I think) the pictures are still a bit meh and they don’t really say freesewing.
So, I’ve talked to Dutch illustrator Roy Van der Hel (who also signed for our measurements illustrations) and I’m glad to be able to share with you that he’s agreed to do illustrations for the different freesewing patterns.
Roy will be working on these on and off, but I hope you’ll start to see more of his work here relatively soon.
Looking ahead to november
Last month I said I was working on 5 patterns. One of those (Huey) has been released now and these days I’m occupied making a test garment for another pattern on that list: a wintercoat.
I don’t want to give away too much about this yet, because it’s kind of exciting, but I hope to be able to show more of this during the month of november. If for no other reason that it’s getting cold and I could really do with a warm coat.