2022 Spring edition

Welcome to the 2022 Spring edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Today is April 1st, so to be clear; None of these are jokes:

👸 All hail the Showcase Queen (by Karen)
🕵 Behind the Seams: Eléonore (by An)
🤓 FreeSewing’s new lab as a preview of things to come (by Joost)
🤝 Friendship ended with Netlify / Now Vercel is our best friend (by Joost)

Let’s go, we don’t have all day.

👸 All hail the Showcase Queen

For just over a year, there’s been one person at FreeSewing who, when someone posts a cool new FreeSewing project on Discord or on social media, made sure that it didn’t just disappear into the internet ether like so much ephemeral web content. In fact, this person was so accomplished that we developed a special Discord role just for her: “Showcase Queen.”

During her tenure as the Showcase Queen, Natalia posted dozens of Showcases, first in the old format and more recently in Strapi. (Full disclosure, the number here is not specific because I stopped counting once I got into the thirties.) With Natalia’s help, there are now examples of almost every FreeSewing pattern available on the website’s Showcase. If you read that “almost” as a call to action, just wait, your time to shine is in one more brief paragraph, because…

Now, after an unprecedented reign, our queen has decided to relinquish her post and turn her role over to the people.

Here’s the part where you come in.

Have you used a FreeSewing pattern to make something you just can’t wait to share with people? That you’re proud of? That looks or fits or feels fantastic? If so, we would love if you would consider adding it to the FreeSewing Showcase! Don’t worry, the technical part is easy, and there are tons of folks in the FreeSewing community who can help if that bit is daunting.

But there’s one thing we can’t help with, and that’s creating great and helpful images for your Showcase.

Or can we… 🤔

Below are just a few easy tips and tricks for helping future sewists with your Showcase post. Of course, any Showcase is infinitely better than nothing, so go ahead and send us those low-light mirror selfies - we love them.

But if you want to take things to the next level, a few things to consider:

Show the whole garment! From multiple angles, if possible. It’s awesome to see garments from the front, but back and side views can be really helpful, too. Bonus points for adding in a seated picture, which are especially great for sewists who use a wheelchair.
Take pictures in the best light you can — that might be next to a bright window, in a room where you’ve turned on all the extra lamps you could find, or that elusive “golden hour” outdoors. Bonus points if you can make it bright enough to not need a flash.
A neutral background can be helpful for seeing details. So can close-up pictures! If you nailed that welt pocket or hand-stitched all your buttonholes, go ahead and show them off.

If you read all that and thought, “Yikes, that’s intimidating!” never fear. The beauty of FreeSewing Showcase posts is that they’re created by the entire FreeSewing community, and each of them, even the ones taken on a potato phone, make FreeSewing just a tiny bit better. But if they’re really great, or you start making sure incredible garments get added to the site, you might just get the chance for your own title as “Showcase Queen.”

Thank you, Natalia! 👑

🕵 Behind the Seams: Eléonore

How did you learn about freesewing?

I met Joost through some mutual sewing friends back when FreeSewing was still Makemypattern.com. I loved what he was doing with the project and how he wanted to make it grow, so I stuck around.

How did you become a contributor?

I’m really bad at saying “no” when someone needs help.

What has been your contributor work so far?

I manage our Instagram (badly) and help out with translations (occasionally).

When and why did you start sewing?

I learned the basics from my mum, but never heard about the concept of sewing from a pattern. I just more or less winged it whenever I wanted to make anything. Those projects all turned out terrible, of course. Then when I went through a long period of depression years ago, my parents gave me a sewing machine and I started looking into making my own clothes more seriously. It kept my hands busy when my mind was wading through the mud. That machine was the best gift I’ve ever received. I seriously think sewing saved me.

What is your daily job, outside of freesewing?

I am a copy editor and I do communications and training for a healthcare IT company. That last job is very new and was sort of sprung on me in the middle of the COVID crisis. It’s been A LOT, but it’s so rewarding.

What are you currently working on?

In sewing? I am working on clothes that fit my behind. I’m not going to lie, my butt is proving a tough nut to crack.

Which project did you just finish?

I took a break from my own fitting woes and made a pair of trousers for my husband. He said the previous pair I made him was perfect, so I made no adjustments. And wouldn’t you know it: he’s gained weight. THEY DON’T FIT. Always take new measurements, kids.

What sewing/coding project are you most proud of?

I once made a TARDIS outfit for a wedding. It was what I imagined the TARDIS would look like if she were invited to a fancy party. It was nerdy and glorious and it included a corset with a hand-embroidered patch that said “bigger on the inside”.

What in your life are you most proud of?

That I’m still here.

What do you love the most about sewing?

The certainty that if you just keep at it, you will see progress.

What do you hate the most about sewing?

That sometimes you have to keep at it for a VERY long time.

What’s the hardest part of sewing to you?

Fit. Always and forever, fit. I find it fascinating how a 2D pattern translates into a 3D garment, but wow, it can be frustrating when it doesn’t translate the way you want it to!

What would be your advice for starting sewists/sewistas?

To keep at it! And not to get too hung up on “fails”. If you end up with a garment that you love: that’s great. If you don’t, that’s fine: you’ve spent a few hours doing something you enjoy and that’s worth just as much, if not more.

Are you a dog person or a cat person?

Definitely a cat person.

Do you have pets?

Cats! We have two: sweet, reserved, anxious Aiko (who takes after me) and hyperactive, talkative, goofy Asra (who takes after my husband).

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

Oh, do I have to choose? My Kindle, my sewing machine, my piano? No, the piano would hate the salty air and I’m guessing there are no power outlets on this island for my sewing machine. I’ll take the Kindle. Wait, I would need to charge that too. But just one book would never be enough. I’m getting anxious about this whole island thing.

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

I’ll have to say my husband, since there’s a good reason that I married him. He can come. If he’s quiet and serves me drinks.

🤓 FreeSewing’s new lab is a preview of things to come

On the very last day of 2021, we published our new website for developers, available at freesewing.dev. It was the first major milestone in our migration from GastbyJS to NextJS and the consolidation of our frontend code in our monorepo. Our roadmap has all the details.

The next logical step would be freesewing.org, our flagship website for makers and the one you’re most likely to be familiar with. But in parallel we’re also looking to provide a better developer experience for people working in our monorepo.

So, I decided that I would start by tackling the very heart of what makes our website meaningful: The interface to generate, test, and export patterns. It is by a wide margin the most complex thing to make happen (not to mention make intuitive) and the thinking is that whatever problems we’re going to run into, this is where they will prop up.

The result of that work so far is now available on https://lab.freesewing.dev/ If you’re expecting a freesewing.org-equivalent site there, you’re probably going to be disappointed. It really is only about the pattern configuration. But there’s some things that I think are worthy of some excitement.

One website, many languages

FreeSewing currently supports 5 languages (en, fr, es, de, nl) and the way we handle that is by having a subdomain for each language (eg the Spanish site lives at https://es.freesewing.org/). On the surface, that is an elegant solution and it works well when it works well. In practice, what we’ve found is that sometimes language-specific bugs crop up, more often than not because some malformed content generated by the translation software. Problem is, when this happens, it’s not always picked up/noticed and the result is that it’s not uncommon for the non-English versions of the site to lag behind one of more releases.

There’s also the fact that building 5 sites for each change requires 5x the build minutes, and recently we’ve been overshooting our build minutes graciously provided by Netlify pretty much every month.

The lab site implements a different solution that we hope to use as the blueprint for the future freesewing.org. It’s one site that carries all languages with the language changes handled in the URL. That means one single build for all languages, keeping all our users on the latest and greatest release.

One development environment, many patterns

Currently, each pattern has its own development environment, which is the same as what you get running npx create-freesewing-pattern. For developers working in our monorepo, that adds friction, in particular when working on patterns that extend another pattern.

The new lab is one development environment for all our patterns making it easy to make cross-cutting changes to various patterns. Furthermore, when you spin it up in development mode in our monorepo, it will load all pattern code from source and seamlessly update whenever you make changes to any pattern.

One development environment, many versions

This improvement is aimed squarely at making it easier to track down regression bugs in patterns. A regression bug is when things worked fine before, but now for some reason they do not. This typically happens when a new feature or improvement has unintended side-effects.

Previously, there was no simple way to compare the (result of the) latest version of the code with the previous version. Our new lab however has a dropdown that simply lets you pick the version of your choice and will create that version of the pattern. This should be a real boon for tracking down those bugs.

Custom layout (work-in-progress)

If your eyes has somewhat glazed over from all that developer talk, fear not, there’s also some cool features for end users in this new code.

For one thing, I started working on one of our most popular feature requests: Custom layouts. The idea is that you can change yourself the way the pattern is laid out since computers are actually not very good at choosing the optimal layout.

This has been divided into two different layouts: One layout for printing (where you can try to cram everything into as small a space as possible), and one layout for your fabric (where you will want to keep grainlines and so on into account).

It’s still a work-in-progress and certainly rough around the edges (as is the entire lab to be honest) but the intent is clear: We absolutely want this to be part of freesewing.org on the very first day of our migration.

If you’re interested in seeing what work working on, or just curious, head over to https://lab.freesewing.dev/ and we’d love to hear your feedback on Discord.

🤝 Friendship ended with Netlify / Now Vercel is our best friend

Ok, so I kinda wanted to reference this meme but let me be absolutely clear: Friendship with Netlify is not over. As a matter of fact, they are a really great company and I can’t recommend them enough.

But, some of our plans and ambitions bump into the limits of what can be done in a static site (looking at you i18n routing) and so we ended up with these great plans/ideas but no obvious way to deploy them without breaking the bank.

Which is why I am very happy to let you know that Vercel — the very company behind the NextJS framework that we’re migrating to — has agreed to become a FreeSewing sponsor; In other words, Vercel will host and build FreeSewing’s websites free of charge, much like Netlify has been doing for us for years.

But unlike Netlify, which is a pure static hosting service, Vercel runs a server-side NextJS instance which means we can do all sorts of cool stuff server-side.

This is really exciting news and I’m very happy that Vercel has agreed to sponsor FreeSewing. We also want to thank Netlify for the many years that we’ve benefited from their service. And, while we’re at it, I feel obliged to point out that we have more sponsors:

Algolia handles our search
Bugsnag handles our bug reports
Crowdin handles translation

To be clear: We don’t receive money from any of these companies and this is not some sort of paid advertising. But all of these companies wave their fees for FreeSewing because they believe that what we do is worthwhile.

And I for one do not think that’s something we should take for granted.