FreeSewing v3.2 was released today, and includes three new designs, as well as bug fixes and improvements.
The Tristan Top
First up, there is the Tristan Top. Tristan is a top with princess seams and (optional) lacing at front or/and back. It’s origin story is the need for a costume for a Renaissance festival, so that is probably a good indicator of what to expect.
However, don’t take my word for it, you can get all details straight from the horse’s mouth (so to speak) since Natalia — who designed the top — wrote a blog post about the new Tristan design.
Natalia collaborated with Wouter for Tristan, and Wouter also signed for the two other new designs in this release, let’s look at those next.
The Lumina and Lumira Leggings
Wouter gifted us not one, but two pairs of leggings in this release: the Lumira Leggings and the Lumina Leggings.
I’ll give you a second to scan the end of that sentence again, but yes there are two different leggings patterns with similar names. Both were born out of Wouter’s desire for good cycling gear, and I suggest you check out the designer notes for both Lumina and Lumira to fully appreciate the difference between these designs, why they differ, and what would work best for you.
I am myself rather excited about these, since I could use some new leggings.
Bug fixes and improvements
While those are the main events for this v3.2 release, there’s a bunch of other bugfixes and improvements, here’s a short list:
A new panels option in Sandy
Our Sandy circle skirt has a new panels option that was added by Paula. You could aways create your circle skirt out of a number of a similar patterns by doing the match yourself, but now the pattern will take care of that for you.
A change to the armscye in Brian
What started out as a bug report for the biceps ease on Jaeger ended with a change to the way the armscye is calculated on Brian, in particular the depth of the armhole.
The way the armhole depth is calculated was changed in v3, and we now base it on the waist to armpit measurements. Previously — in v2 — we would calculate the depth of the armhole based on the biceps. That option remains available today by enabled the Legacy armhole depth option.
What we have changed now is to take the biceps into account when calculating the depth of the armhole. This fix was needed because without it, increasing the biceps easy would not (or no longer) influence the armscye. That in turn means that we want to draft a wider sleeve, but somehow still have to fit that into the same opening.
Given that Brian is our most foundational block, this will have ripple effects on many other designs, you can expect that out-of-the-box the armscye will reach a bit lower.
As always if you run into trouble, check the support page to see where you can turn to for help.
Fixes in Carlton, Charlie and Hugo
- In Carlton — and thus in Carlita — we have fixed and issue where the seam allowance on the undercollar was incorrectly drawn.
- In Charlie, the back pocket welt (4) and front pocket facing (8) incorrectly indicated to cut 2 instead of 4 in the cutlist. This too is resolved.
- In Hugo, we fixed a bug that caused the design to error when the complete setting was off, and we fixed an issue where the front pocket opening would get increasingly narrow as the hip circumference increased.
Path.combine() in FreeSewing core
We’ve added a new
Path.combine() method to
our core API. Its origins lie in a discussion in issue #5976 which was
originally filed as a bug report about how
Path.join() connects gaps
in the joined paths — caused by either move operations, or a difference
between the end and start point of joined paths — to be filled in with a line
segment.
That behaviour is expected/intended, but we’ve added Path.combine() to
faciliate the other behavior: Combining different paths into a single Path
object without alterning any of its drawing operations.
We’ve made Path.combine() variadic, so you can combine as many paths as you
want. And, for consistency, we’ve also updated the Path.join() signature to
make it variadic as well. The previous (undocumented) second parameter to
Path.join() to force a close of the path is still supported for backwards
compatibility, but will log a deprecation warning, and will be removed in
FreeSewing v4.
As a final side-effect of this change, the Path.length() method can now be instructed to include move operations in its calculation of the length of the path. The default behaviour remains unchanged, which is to only include drawing operations when calculating the path’s length.
Notes in design titles
The title macro now can be
configured with a notes and classes.notes setting in its config, allowing
designers to add notes to (the title of) a pattern part.
As a result, the classes.cutlist setting is removed from the title macro, and
cutlist info is now included as notes.
Support for nested arrays in designs
The i18n plugin now supports now supports translation of nested arrays of strings, which gives designers more flexibility to concatenate translated parts of strings. Something that is most useful when mixing translated strings with run-time information about the generated pattern.
In line with this change, the Pattern component, which is part of our
react-components
package, supports the same nested arrays.
That’s all for v3.2. Enjoy!