newsletter:2024 Autumn edition

Welcome to the 2024 Autumn edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've got for you for our last newsletter of this year:

• 🕵️ Behind the Seams: Vili (7-minute read by Vili & Karen)
• 🛟 Highlights from the Need Help channel on Discord (2-minute read by Ben)
• 🏋️ Six languages weigh more than one (5-minute read buy Joost)

Shall we get started?

 

 

 

 

🕵️ Behind the Seams: Vili

We chatted with Vili to learn a little more about their background and journey to becoming a FreeSewing contributor! Vili has consistently wowed us, both with their enthusiasm for tackling bugs, typos, and dead links on FreeSewing, as well as their dedication to a handmade wardrobe. And we mean truly handmade - Vili’s been working their way through a series of Simon’s created entirely without a sewing machine. (Note from Vili: I’ve since come around to the idea of supplementing my hand sewing with a machine.)

The interview below has been edited for length, and any errors, oversights, etc. are entirely the fault of the interviewer.

How did you learn about FreeSewing?

I started sewing about two years ago, and I had an ebook on things you can do without a pattern. I think it was called Radical Sewing. There were resources at the end that mentioned FreeSewing. Open source, programmatic, parametric patterns? Sold.

How did you become a contributor?

I’m studying computer science, focusing on networking and system administration. I was interested early in contributing something back to the project, and then noticed a bug where some links to pattern option documentation weren’t showing up. I submitted an issue, and mentioned I could take a stab at it, and Joost being Joost came back with a super detailed list of what was wrong and how to fix it. So I did.

What has been your contributor work so far?

Mostly I’ve contributed minor quality of life improvements. If there’s a bug in a pattern that’s causing a crash that’s easy to fix, I’ll take a look at it. Also a lot of dead links. My favorite was when there were quite a few dead links on the dev side of things, which went to a 404 page, and the “let us know” link on the 404 page was also a dead link.

How do you spend your time outside of FreeSewing?

Besides FreeSewing and sewing, I spend my time on a lot of computer stuff. I host a lot of stuff for my own personal use.

What are you currently working on? Finish any projects recently?

On the FreeSewing side of things, more of the same: fixing bugs, housekeeping, and dead link extermination on the freesewing.org side of the site.

On the sewing side of things… Simons! I took a bit of a break, but am back at it with something that is starting to resemble a shirt. I’m 26.5 hours into making this current Simon. I don’t actually care how long it takes, but I want to know, plus I’m curious if I’m getting faster. My first one took 60 hours, so still plenty of time to come in under that.

Did you make any updates after your last Simon? Do you have plans to sew any other patterns?

Well, first I retook all my measurements.Surprisingly enough, when your measurements aren’t complete garbage, the patterns come out nicer. When I had measurements that were more (or at all) accurate, all the things that I knew I needed to fix about the pattern kind of fixed themselves in a lot of cases.

Beyond this Simon, I want to sew more Teagans, some Bruces, and I have four more Simons to go (I have the fabric for them).

What sewing/coding project are you most proud of?

I thought this would be an easy question because you just say “the last Simon I made.” I think it still might be the last Simon I made, and when I get done with this one, it’s gonna be this Simon. I think the pride in a project comes from “we did something cool here,” but the enjoyment… if I learn something new on a project, that’s more enjoyable.

What in your life are you most proud of?

In general, I try to have an overall positive impact on the people around me. I get a lot out of helping others, and supporting the people around me.

What do you love the most about sewing?

I think what I love the most is the freedom to just decide for yourself what exactly you’re going to be wearing. If I want a specific garment, I’m not depending on someone else deciding it’s profitable, I can just make the garment I want.

What do you hate the most about sewing?

Tracing and cutting out pattern pieces – If I could just get my patterns precut from the fabric I want, I think that’d be pretty good. I’m often working with fabrics where the grainline is extremely obvious, and any imperfection is going to show up immediately. I try to pattern match to an extent, the fronts and backs match, and that’s about as far as I will go.

What’s the hardest part of sewing to you?

Actually, either getting the pattern pieces traced and cut out of fabric, or just getting the patterns to fit. For my second Simon, I didn’t do any fitting, because I could compare the pattern pieces to the first one. I looked at the differences, and felt pretty sure they’d fix the issues I was having. For the first Simon, I went through five or six muslins, cut out the pieces, and did a combination of running stitch and backstitch here and there to lock it in so it didn’t take forever. But it still took a long time.

What would be your advice for starting sewists?

A lot of it is going to come down to finding your motivation for sewing, and picking a project that is going to motivate you. There’s a lot of beginner friendly projects, but if you’re not interested in it, you’re just going to stop doing it. Find out what you’re interested in, then figure out what skills you need to do it.

My first two garments were hand-sewn Teagans – it was trial and error to figure out what stitches actually worked, and it eventually worked great, but the first one is a lot rougher, I think there are three or four types of stitches on the first Teagan. Eventually something is gonna stick.

Do you sew mostly for yourself, or for others like friends and family?

I haven’t sewn any garments for anyone else. I did make three burp cloths for my brothers kids baby shower, but that’s the only thing.

Are you a dog person or a cat person?

More of a dog person, but I will happily pet and cuddle both.

If there was one thing you could take with you to an uninhabited island, what would it be? Why?

Is this a survival situation, or a get-away-from-civilization situation?

For a get-away-from-civilization situation, I think it’s going to be a sewing project. That’s the one thing I do that’s properly unplugged from everything. One of the things I love about sewing by hand, I can just grab the fabric and a very minimal set of things and sew pretty much anywhere.

I recently came up with a super-minimal sewing kit with a friend, and I’m pretty proud of it. A seam ripper, with the cover holding a pin, a needle, and some thread wrapped around the shaft of the seam ripper. Weighs absolutely nothing, takes up no space, has everything I need, you can take it anywhere. And if you do need to cut something, a seam ripper is better than nothing.

If there was one person you could take with you to an uninhabited island, who would it be? Why?

Any single person you bring with you, you’re gonna hate by the end of a couple of weeks. But going alone, you’re also going to go insane. I’d gravitate most to picking a volunteer out of my friends or family.

Can we find you on social media?

I’m not on any social media, but you can check out one of my FreeSewing showcases here and stay tuned for some Simon showcases.

 

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🛟 Highlights from the Need Help channel on Discord

FreeSewing superstar Ben F. pulled together some recent highlights from the #need-help channel on the FreeSewing Discord.

If you've run into trouble with a pattern, your answer might just be one of these. If you've run into an issue, hop on over to the Discord for support and discussion about ways to troubleshoot.

Jaeger sleeve circumference

A sleeve that doesn't fit because sleeve circumference is smaller than biceps circumference? For v3 FreeSewing designs, it was noted that the "Waist to armpit", "HPS to waist", and "HPS to bust" measurements have become very important. Inaccurate measurements can result in incorrect armseye and sleeve circumferences.

Please help! Messed up Hugo measurements

Too small sleevecap and armscye? Another issue with v3 FreeSewing sleeves due to an inaccurate "Waist to armpit" measurement. Enabling the "Legacy armhole depth" option to use v2 armholes (instead of using the "Waist to armpit" measurement) is another possible remedy.

My Bruce Pants are... Pants!

An initial attempt at making Bruce boxer briefs resulted in a too-short garment? The fix was to correctly locate the location of the waist and retake the "Waist to upper leg" measurement.

Uneven shoulder measurements

How to deal with a medical issue causing the left and right shoulder measurements to be significantly different? Ideas for creating garments to accommodate this issue could include generating separate patterns for left and right sides (using two different measurement sets), making garments with a center separating zipper, and using a diagonal/asymmetrical hem.

Sewing leather on a Singer

Using a jeans needle successfully pokes holes in the leather, but the thread doesn't seem to be creating stitches? Tips to use a microtex or leather needle and to make sure the leather fabric is feeding properly.

Cross seam measurement:

How do you measure the cross seam measurement: nude, with tight-fitting underwear, or with good-fitting pants on? Suggestions included measuring while wearing the underwear intended to be worn with the garment, tying a ribbon around the waist and using a second ribbon along the cross seam, and taking the measurement while walking. Also, double-check your vertical measurements if your pattern isn't fitting correctly in the crotch area.

 

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🏋️ Six languages weigh more than one

Without wanting to alarm anyone, I recently suffered a bit of a crisis feeling completely overwhelmed by all the work that is sitting in my inbox. It's arguably not really new, and I don't think anyone is waiting for yet another open source maintainer apologizing for being busy.

However, this was the first time this feeling crossed over from phew, this is a lot into I can't do this any longer territory.

It's always darkest before dawn, and now that I've acknowledged that there's a problem and came up with a plan to deal with it (which I'll get to in a second) I'm feeling much better already, so no need to worry about me. However, I want to be open and honest about where these changes are coming from and why I'm making them.

What changes? Well, effective immediately, I will work towards making FreeSewing simpler to maintain, and put more strict boundaries and what we do and what we don't do.

I've already ported FreeSewing.dev to Docusaurus, which makes it a lot easier to maintain. There will be more under-the-hood changes like these that make our life easier, without creating a material difference to our users.

Unfortunately, that alone won't cut it, so I also intent to drop support for translation, and only maintain English from now onward. This too will go unnoticed for the vast majority of our users, but obviously not for all of them.

In May 2018, I wrote the following on the subject:

I’ve decided to add a new challenge to the mix: i18n.

In case you’re wondering, i18n is short for internationalization, aka making the site available in different languages.

Yes, May 25th will be here soon, and yes I need more work like I need another hole in my head. But I feel it’s an important project to try and make freesewing.org available to as many people as possible. And for this, we need to get rid of the language barrier.

Six and a half years later, I still believe that removing the language barrier is important to reach as many people as possible. But I also think that it's fair to say that if we are looking to do less then this is the obvious candidate of things to drop.

To put things in perspective: 87.9% of FreeSewing users have selected English as their language of choice and thus will be unaffected by such a move. Of the remaining users, those who prefer French form the largest contingent (7%) followed by Spanish (3.2%), German (1.7%), Dutch (1.1%) and finally Ukrainian (less then 0.1%). I don't have an easy way to extract similar data for our patrons, but I can safely say that if you combine the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia you have covered the vast majority of patrons too.

To those users who are affected, I am sorry that it has come to this. While translation as such does not add too much overhead (although I handle most of the Dutch translation so it's not nothing), the main culprit is the technical complexity that comes from supporting multiple languages. This is also why dropping one or more languages does not make a meaningful difference.

I'm sharing these numbers because they provide context to frame these changes. They are not a justification for these changes. All users matter, and all patrons matter the world to me. Just because one group is smaller than another does not mean we should throw them under the bus. I hope that's something that needs no explaining. That being said, when something's gotta give, I feel dropping translation is the least impactful because in practice, I'm not convinced it matters all that much.

Today's browsers will translate pages on the fly, and I've more than once seen people interact with the site in non-English, not because they opted for a different language, but rather because their browser is in the habit of translating all English content to whatever is their preferred language. Furthermore, despite the great work of our many volunteer translators, a significant amount of FreeSewing content remains machine-translated because there's just a lot of it. Does it really matter all that much whether it's us providing the (machine) translation or the browser? I don't believe it matters all that much.

To come full circle, I feel it's worth pointing out that nobody has ever asked me to add translation to FreeSewing. I decided to add it because I felt that in a perfect world, everyone could access FreeSewing in the language of their choice. With the way machine learning (or AI if you want) is going, that reality is perhaps already upon us.

I apologize to those of you for which this is bad news, and if you are using FreeSewing in your own projects, rest assured that this does not mean we are removing translation support from our core library.

Long story short: I have come to realize I've bitten of more than I can chew, and I am making adjustments to lighten the load. If you have a better idea on how to do that, I'm all ears.

joost