So, welcome to the next talk about free suing by Yost and yeah, have fun.
All right, thank you for coming to my little talk here at Fostam.
Before I start, I just want to say it's really cool to be here today.
I came to Fostam the first time I think it was 2003.
It was amazing. It was also absolutely overwhelming.
I was afraid to talk to anybody.
And all of these people seemed like, I don't know.
It would be cool to be like them, but I just didn't think that that was something that I had in me.
And yet here I'm today.
And the road I took to get here was, I think, an unusual one.
Because I'm here to talk about free suing, which is an open source software that I created and maintain.
And yeah, suing. So for those of you who are in the room, because the room they actually wanted to get into had one of those dreaded the room is full signs.
Okay, that this might be a shock, it's a bit of a niche topic.
But don't panic. I'm going to do my best to make it interesting.
Okay, so I got into suing by accident, really.
It was the end of 2010.
And I got sick with mono nucleosis.
Also known as mono, also known as glantula fever, also known as the kissing disease.
It's not a good evidence, but I was not in relationship at the time.
So I can vouch that that label is accurate.
The hallmark feature of mono is extreme fatigue.
And I can tell you, I was so tired and exhausted, it was incredible.
I was too tired, even to eat.
I mean, I was so skinny.
I mean, I don't recommend it, but it really mono gives a Zen pick around for its mono.
It comes to weight loss.
This was the end of 2010.
And so by the end of my sick leave, because I couldn't work,
it was coming up to the Christmas holidays.
Between Christmas and New Year, I had time from time off from work, you know, from my job anyway.
And so I found myself in these weird days between Christmas and New Year,
feeling a little bit better, still not great.
But like, so bored.
I was like bored out of my mind, I'd been stuck in bad for a couple of weeks,
and I was like, I need to do something.
And I had a sewing machine that I had bought at one point,
because I felt it was like, something you should have in your house
to do repairs and stuff.
But it had mostly been gathering dust.
So I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to make some clothes.
I'm going to make something.
So I ventured out to my local haver dashery.
And I should point out that back then, I had no idea what a haver dashery was,
because it's one of those weird words that I learned through sewing,
but it's basically a shop where you can buy sewing supplies and, you know,
knitting needles and things for textile crafts.
Actually, went to this one.
This is from Google Street Hill.
It's the very dust in Runoff here in Brussels,
very close to La Serujer, which is where I lived back then.
So I went in there, I bought some fabric, you know,
some trat and little bits and pieces that you need to get started,
and I also bought a sewing pattern.
Now, I don't really know that it was exactly this sewing pattern,
but it might have well been.
You know, this is sort of like the cover, the envelope,
sewing pattern is actually inside of it.
And so what I did in those final days of 2010 is I set behind the sewing machine,
and I tried to follow the instructions and the pattern,
and tried to make these trousers, because I was like,
it would be nice to have some trousers to go to work, right?
And then, lo and behold, in 2011, at the start of the year,
when the holidays were over, I went to work,
and I was wearing these new trousers, you know?
And I wore them with sort of like confidence of like,
yeah, I made this thing, ain't that great,
and then also the ignorance of like not realizing how terrible they actually were,
because, you know, my first pair of trousers was not great.
These I made two years later, I don't have pictures of the first pair, I'm sorry.
I think you can still see that they were handmade,
but, you know, they're acceptable, and, you know,
I think I can do better today, but, you know, these were sort of like, okay.
So it was the start of the year, it was January,
and I was really like hyped about this, you know,
like not just that I had been sick,
but then also to come out of it with something that I made with my own hands,
that I could wear, you know, it was really like a great feeling,
so I was like, okay, that's it now.
From here on forward, I will make all of my own clothes.
I will not buy anything, I will just make everything,
I'm going to be that guy.
Well, this is the issues with this to be honest.
For starters, I quickly figured out that socks were not something I was going to make,
because I don't need, and so, you know, I was like, okay, socks are okay.
For the longest time, I only bought socks.
Of course, I still wore the clothes that I already had,
and then as those started wearing how to start realising,
there's other things that are not that obvious for me to make.
So that being said, until today, I still don't buy any clothes
that I can make myself, and of course,
I made everything I wearing today, because, you know, I felt this was important.
Thank you.
Not the hat though, should not the hat.
Okay, so, like, I would refer to this as like the honeymoon period.
I was really on the high of having that initial success,
because, I mean, I was willing to fail.
I just did it out of boredom, but it worked out,
and I was like, this is great.
And so, I immediately pictured myself as like,
you know, this is going to be a life changing event,
and I sort of imagined in my head that I'd be something like this guy, right?
Just like this super swath, like, everything.
And this has not happened, right?
Because sewing does not really change who you are.
I mean, I've learned a lot through it,
and there's definitely things that have changed,
but I'm still the same person, right?
Some things that do change is that I'm a lot more conscious
about the clothes that I'm wearing,
and the clothes, how they fit, how they are made, stuff like that.
There's a pay a lot more attention to what other people are wearing
and so on and so forth.
And if you're like, oh, but yeah, I also pay attention to
what other people are wearing, you know?
Because I saw such and such where it isn't that,
I don't take talking, and I ran out to T-Moo
to buy a knock-off version of that.
That's not really what this is about.
So, I think I need to explain this a little bit,
with this strangle.
So, at the top of this sort of
triangular spectrum of people who might be drawn
to sewing at the hobby,
where the people who care about craft, right?
And I put that at the top because that's where I reside.
So, you know, I wanted to project this era of, you know,
this is the best way, but that's not true.
And then on the right hand side, if the people who care about style,
right? So, the people at the top, they care about, like,
how our things may take care about the fibers and, you know,
like the threads and stuff like that and techniques, right?
And then the people who are here predominantly interested in,
like, does it look great, you know?
And they might be interested in historical styles.
And they know all of these rules about, like, oh, you should combine
a double-breasted suit jacket with that length of winter code
and stuff like that.
Like, I got a lot of respect for those people,
but like, for as I might, it's just not me, right?
And then on the left side,
or the people that maybe traditionally would think,
or the most likely to get into sewing,
people who read fashion magazines and, like, all into that stuff.
But in my experience, those are not the people actually so,
or actually end up enjoying it, because if you're chasing high,
if you're going to have a less of a good time,
then if you're interested in making something with your hands,
or chasing, like, a particular style.
And this does not have to look like that.
These are also, like, you know, people who are, like,
gods, or, you know, in other sort of niche things,
are typically more drawn to sewing.
All right.
So, ain't be chover, that was it.
So, as I mentioned,
sewing is software to generate parametric sewing patterns,
or I hope I mentioned that, and if not, then I did so now.
So, it begs the question, what is the sewing pattern?
You know, and I can show you one.
This is a sewing pattern.
It's a matter of fact, it's one generated by free sewing.
It's our Simon pattern, which is our most popular one.
It's a pattern for a button down shirt.
But the sewing pattern really is just a blueprint
to make a garment, right?
So, all of the parts that you need to make a shirt,
or lay it out, and then typically it comes with some instructions
on how to put those together,
but then experience people wouldn't even need those instructions.
This is also a sewing pattern.
This is a commercial sewing pattern.
It's not from free sewing.
It's one of those that comes with a sewing magazine,
which is a popular way that people traditionally use together.
Sewing patterns.
Now, they try to save on paper here, so there's a lot going on, right?
You can't really use this as this.
People would typically trace that on paper,
but basically the different colors are different parts of the pattern.
You know, they sleeve the front, the back, and then so forth.
But then also, every part is there in different sizes, right?
Which is a problem that we also have with clothes in the store.
I think that pretty much everybody here will know the frustration
of going to the store trying to buy some clothes,
and then, wait, these don't fit.
What's going on?
These legs are too short, or these arms are too long,
and that's sort of stuff like, maybe after a while,
you figure out how this brand kind of works for me.
You know, or like you're unlucky, and basically nothing works for you.
And we have the same problem with these store bought
and commercial sewing patterns is that they're not made for you.
They are just made for a set of standard sizes.
But these, according to standard sizes, are just a lie.
Because there is no such thing, this is just how the industry
wants to commoditize the traditional craft of garment making,
which was always made for a specific person, right?
Now we have standard sizes, and so we have all of these problems,
and sewing patterns that coming sizes have exactly the same problems.
Historically, though, as I said, clothes were made for some money,
made to measure, so to speak, or bespoke, as we sometimes call that,
and there's actually two jobs that come into place.
There's the tailor, and there's the cutter.
And the reason that I bring this up is that, with the garment,
if it's not in your own size, you can, you know, maybe roll up the sleeves or something,
and with the sewing pattern, you can also make changes to the sewing pattern
and make adaptations.
But it's a little bit like patching a binary, you know?
It's possible if you're knowledgeable about the subject that you know what you're doing,
but it's going to be a lot easier if you have the source code of the sewing pattern, right?
So what is the source code of the sewing pattern?
Well, traditionally, the tailor is the person who actually makes the garment.
These are the people who are experts with needle and thread sewing machine,
and so on and so forth.
And the cutter is the person who actually does the blueprint,
comes up with the pattern, and then actually cuts it out of the fabric.
Because historically, the cost of the fabric was like the biggest cost factor in manufacturing garments.
So these people did not just sort of like come up with the blueprint and then advocate the responsibility,
you know, they cut into the fabric, owning their decision of this is going to be it.
And then once they had all of that ready, all of those pieces, they handed it over to the tailor.
Incidentally, this is the origin of the phrase, having your cut out for you.
Okay, so this is, like, as a species, we've been making garments for eons, right?
And this is also a very old craft.
This is an addition of the tailor and cutter.
I picked this one because it's from the first of February, so to the date, this is from the 58 years old.
You might think from the very fancy the tailor font,
that is the thing, but actually the cutter is traditionally seen as the more high level sort of craft.
It's like the most masterful craft is to actually cut out the garment,
and then assembling it and making it is also very impressive, and there's also master tailors,
but still cutter is sort of like up there, because it is like, you know, the most difficult skill.
And so when we think about what is the source code of a sewing pattern,
it really is what's going on inside the head of the cutter.
You know, all of this experience, all of this know how, why do you put that line there?
You know, what we're trying to do with the sewing pattern is still this sort of relevant experience
and know how of a cutter into a blueprint so that you can just play the tailor role.
Right?
I just have to make the thing.
So we, of course, would not know what is going on in those people's heads,
if we were not that they wrote books about it, right?
This is a 200 year old book, so once again, this is a very old craft that we're dealing with.
This is about the art of cutting garments.
You can find these books online.
There are so old that they're in a public domain.
This like this arcane language, right?
Faded text and strong illustrations, like it's also quite mysterious,
which you can also just buy a modern book, full color, which is probably a bit easier to decipher.
And if you open one of these books, I have this one.
You will find instructions like this one, you know?
Draw a vertical line, mark the top at point A from point A square out to the right,
measuring one quarter of the circumference of the chest, at two inches, mark this point at point B.
Very typical drawing instructions.
It's basically, okay, this is what the cutter would do, right?
And so I bought that pattern and then tried to make a few other things,
but I quickly got frustrated in those early months of 2011,
you know, doing my new hobby.
I got frustrated with this sizing issue, right?
And so I learned more and more about sewing and I discovered,
wait a minute, then I can just buy one of these books,
and then I can plug in my own measurements.
And then, in principle, should be perfect, right?
So that's what I did to start it up with pen and paper,
but I wanted these people who has trouble reading their own handwriting, you know?
So this was quite frustrating, like I just didn't really,
and at a certain moment I was like, it's got to be a better way to do this, right?
What if I do this on a computer?
And that really was the start of my journey that let me come here,
because if that hadn't happened, I don't think I would be here today.
So I'm going to quickly go over the timeline just to show,
you know, how much time it took me to get here, because when I started out,
I didn't really know what I was doing.
So as I said, I started sewing at the end of 2010,
first couple of months, I was using patterns, then I was like,
I gotta do this on the computer, and once you're on the computer,
you start making abstractions and stuff like that.
And at a certain moment I was like, this is starting to become a little bit useful for me.
I'm scratching my own it here.
And as I mentioned, I came to France the morning 20 years ago.
We didn't like these e-tars of free software and all that stuff.
So I was like, I'm going to create a little website so that other people can benefit from this too.
So in February 2012, I registered the domain, and then in September, I opened it up.
It was not false back then, but that was just because I was completely embarrassed
about the code that I wrote.
I was like, I'm not sharing this.
This is just terrible.
Okay, fast forward a bit.
This is the most old data that we have in free sewing production data base today.
So the oldest accounts are from back there in January 2014, just for myself.
And some test accounts, and then, you know, a bit later towards the start of 2015.
It was like early access.
We had some early adopters.
And then towards the summer of 2017, I launched free sewing homework.
So now it was open source.
I had released this sort of core library earlier in March.
But then I still had to build the UI and stuff like that.
So that took some time.
And to show that, you know, I was still really learning a lot about what it takes to develop software and stuff like that.
I think this this graph will tell a great story.
Because we have no data about all those users because there was a book and their registration date
was not correctly saved in the database.
And well, that's just how it is.
We don't have that data now.
But then when we released free sewing 3.0, I finally fixed that book.
This also shows that I really don't keep track of these things.
And so all those users are then registered on that date, right?
So the scale of the graph now makes it seem like there's nothing going on there.
But like, yeah, so at this point, we've registered about 50,000 people.
But those are just all the people that had signed up there.
And did I already got them way bigger than I ever imagined?
Because I mean, it is a niche topic, you know?
Like the previous two presentations ago was like at billions of people or your potential users like that.
That's not true for sewing.
Right? So 50,000 people signed up and then people were signing up at a clip of about,
I don't know, like between between 3 and 7,000 users a month.
At the end, this summer, last summer, we are at like 148,000 and something users.
And yeah, I mean, I think that's a lot, I don't know.
And then TikTok fans.
And so yeah, we had some rough months.
And now we're at 364,000, something users.
And yeah, you know, it shows that I first speak with a book because it's just like one month and then back to normal.
But like here you see it's more organic, you know, because we're shooting up and then we're shooting higher.
And then it's sort of like tape was off.
So yeah, look, those week numbers, you tell me, like everything is relative in life.
But what I do know is that this is just not something that I imagined when I started out.
But what I take more value in taking more stock in is this graph.
Because in 2015 started accepting donations.
And the reason I did that was that people were asking me, how can we donate?
And I was like, you want to what?
And then like, yeah, we like this and we want to support you.
And I was like, okay, I didn't really think about that.
And so I gave it some thought.
And I was like, I don't really want to do this for a living.
I already have a job and this risks becoming then the second job.
And I don't want that.
But after giving it some thought, I was like, you know what?
We are pretty privileged to be able to do this for fun.
Basically, a lot of people are not that privileged.
A lot of people are in shitty situation.
So yeah, give me your money and then I will just give it a charity.
So that's what we've been doing ever since.
And so until this point, we've given more than 70,000 euros to make sense of content
or doctors with that borders.
And this is really for me, the thing.
I mean, thank you.
But it's so that people's money, you know, that, right?
But now, at jokes aside, I'm really happy about this because, you know,
this is all fun and writing software and I learned a lot of stuff like that.
But we also have to be, you know, aware of the fact that it's a privileged position to be.
And a lot of people are in dire straits and this is nice.
This is a nice thing to do.
All right.
So I'm having a hard time when I talk to people who come from a sewing perspective
to explain, free sewing because of all the open source stuff.
And I think vice versa.
Here there might be people who are like, I can't even imagine what this is.
So I'm going to do like a 30 second live demo.
Let's hope I don't mess this up.
Just do sort of show what it is that we offer.
Why does 300 and so many people wait, now this doesn't show up.
Trying to drag it to the other screen.
But there we go.
Not great at this.
Okay, so, um, well, so this is the sewing pattern.
This is a simple one because it's about the principle.
And then on the bunch on the right here, so this already has my measurements loaded.
And it's parametric.
So if you load this different measurements,
I'm not going to go into all of that because I just have to show you like, you know,
if we do this and then we say like, okay, I want that a little bit more like this.
More like that, you know, then you can just change that and this more like that.
So that's basically the what we do and what we offer and what drives the people to free sewing,
which is one of us.
As I said, it's going to be a short demo.
Well, I mean there's more but like, you know, this time limits and I'm trying to be respectful of them.
So what is parametric design?
Because that's basically what we're doing.
And I think that really goes back to that moment where I switched from paper to computer.
Because if you look at these instructions and they're talking about one quarter of the circumference of the chest.
When you're on paper, you're going to measure one quarter of whatever it is and you're going to draw that line.
But when you make the step to computer, I think a lot of people in this room will just sort of intuitively say,
well, we're going to put that in a variable, right?
The chest and I will just take one quarter of that.
Like that seems kind of obvious.
Well, that's parametric design really.
Because now you can just change that variable and your design will adapt.
So traditional sewing pattern if we sort of make the code translation would be something statically defined.
We have a pattern and then it's some sort of digital representation of what a sewing pattern is.
With parametric design, or pattern can take some inputs and then adapt itself.
And then return a digital representation of a sewing pattern that takes that inputs into account, you know, a function basically.
So that is sort of like the high level ID behind parametric design.
So how do we implement that in free sewing?
What do parametric sewing patterns look like? Well, they look like this.
But, you know, this is not a masterclass.
So today we're going to focus on this part, right?
So on the left you have your input, then you have your pattern, which is one function.
But then under the hood, we actually have different parts.
Different parts are like the front, the back, the sleeve, the cuff, the collar, that sort of stuff.
They sort of like exist on their own.
And all of those are going to be a function. They're going to have points, they're going to have parts which are lines.
We're going to get into that in a second.
And then we can render that to SVG or we can also render to react.
Right?
Today, to get to a simple pattern, well, a simple.
You get to a parametric sewing pattern. This is all we need, right?
And if you're thinking, then what's all that other stuff? Why do you have to make it so complicated?
Well, all that other stuff is for more advanced use cases, right?
So vertically you have stacks and stacks allow you, normally if you have different parts,
they are laid out next to each other, stacks allow you to stack them on top of each other.
So you can see a left.
And then vertically these boxes are different sets.
So rather than give our pattern one set of like measurements and all that,
you're going to give it multiples.
And we use that to do things like show the effect of a particular option,
a particular parameter, on the design.
So you can see here, the designer can set a minimum and a maximum value of that option that makes sense.
And we can visualize that by using this extra feature.
Another thing that we do there is we run automated testing or repository to test patterns for the quality assurance.
Make sure that they don't go off the rails.
We test this for a range of sizes.
Measurements that we have, but we also test this for both loads and like giants, right?
Because a good parametric design should adapt to the extremes of that sort of size range.
If that looks familiar to you because you're used to sewing, it looks a bit like a commercial sewing pattern,
but there's an important difference here that I have to explain, which is drafting versus grading.
So drafting a draft of a sewing pattern, we call it drafting when you make it a sewing pattern.
grading is how things are done traditionally in commercial sewing patterns.
So have an example here, this is a commercial sewing pattern.
And this basically comes in sizes.
But only one of these sizes is typically drafted from scratch.
You know, with like quarter of measurement, quarter of test stuff like that that I explained earlier.
The rest of those sizes are sort of like extrapolated.
Add a little bit there, add a little bit there, and a little bit there.
Okay, that's the next size.
And then once again, and then maybe also down.
That's how it's made, this is called grading, right?
On the left, we have a free sewing pattern.
You put in the measurements and it comes out for you, right?
So no grading.
Now, why does this matter?
Well, because parametric design is better in every way, except in the ways that it is not, right?
By which I mean, on the right side with a graded pattern, you might not get good fit,
but you will also always have something that resembles a normal sized garment, maybe not your size.
On the left side with parametric design, you're really vulnerable to the garbage in garbageized problem, right?
If people put in like bonkers measurements, like that one,
Well, the result is going to be like real bad, like unwareable and makeable.
And that's a problem that we have, because when you think about this at one point,
do you tell the user, hey, these measurements that can't be right?
Because maybe this right, you don't know their body.
And, you know, it's really sort of like, potentially hurtful to tell people that I think you should double check your measurements
because something seems off, right?
We shouldn't be making assumptions about people's bodies.
Like this is a bit of a mind field.
So we tend to not say too much, and you know,
sometimes that the instrument results, because the input is bad.
I think it's fair to put that out there as like that's a problem.
Okay, let's look at how this actually works.
We're going to look at some code now, right?
So on the left we have our instructions that we're going to use as a guide,
and then on the right we're going to see how do we turn that into code, right?
So we have our function, but we already learned actually it's not like that.
We have a function, wait, what I'm saying here.
So we have a function that gets apparently this, and we're going to return our pattern,
or a digital representation.
But as I was saying, we know that every part from sleeve back all that stuff,
is going to be something.
So we have an example here, our front part, is a function,
I switch to fat iron notation here, and it gets a bunch of parameters, right?
And the free sewing core library is going to give you a lot of parameters that you can work with.
One of them is the part object, right?
Which is actually the thing that we're doing.
So what we're going to do is we're going to mutate this object,
and then we're going to return it, right?
So if we look at our instructions on the left,
we need to draw a vertical line and mark the top of a point A, okay?
We need to create a point.
How do we do that?
Well, we can destructure points, which is an object that holds all the points of the part,
and we can destructure the point constructor.
And now we just do points.A, it's new point zero zero.
Because the point takes the x and the y-coordinates,
because we're just mapping a point in a 2D plane.
This is not rocket science, right?
It's got a straightforward.
Now we need to do from point A square out to the right,
measuring one quarter circumference, it's just okay.
So circumference are the chest.
How do we get that in free sewing?
Well, you get an object that is called measurements,
that you can also destructure,
and it holds all the measurements that the user supplied,
in millimeters.
Okay, cool.
So we can do measurement chest over four.
All right.
So far, so good.
We got this.
Now we need to add two inches.
Okay.
A bit of a problem when we think about the fact that we need to support ball
floats and grown-ups.
How do we translate these two inches into something that makes sense?
And what even are these two inches?
Well, it says there that this is ease, but like what is ease?
Right?
I think we probably need to do a little side adventure here and explain what
is, don't worry, just one slide.
So ease is what is extra fabric in the garments that allows you to move.
So that later on the left would not be able to move our arm
if there was no ease in the garment.
You would get stock, right?
So this is sort of like functional ease.
It's added to the garments so that you can move, right?
Then we also have design ease.
In the middle, the t-shirt that that lady's wearing is way too big.
I mean, if you don't see that, that's fine.
But trust me, it's way too big.
You see the shoulder seam is halfway around down her arm.
But that's just the style choice.
So when we say it's too big, it's not too big.
It's absolutely fine, but like, you know,
if you look at the sewing patterns like the wrong sides for her,
but it's the style choice.
So that's design ease.
And then finally, we also have a negative ease.
Negative ease is when the garment is actually too small,
but you can also, you know, you need stretch to use negative ease.
And this is typically used so that the garment is like tight.
Sportswear, swimwear, skinny jeans, they'll have negative ease.
All right.
Back to it.
So we know, okay, so this is ease.
So how do we do that?
So if we sewing, we're going to define a so-called design option here.
Because if we're adding all this stuff, why not let the user control this?
Why should we decide how much ease there is, right?
So typically, we're going to destruct your options object,
and then there's going to be an option,
and we're going to call it chest ease now,
and then we do one plus because it's a percentage,
and divide by four and both your own goal.
Okay.
Adding points.
We've got that.
But we need to connect the dots at some point.
So those we call paths in free sewing.
And I'll give you an example.
So once again, just like we did with points and points,
the constructor, we have paths which also hold the paths,
and the path constructor.
Parts of example is new paths.
Instantiate paths, low parameters.
And then we have all of these methods, move, fly and curve.
Right?
And if you've ever worked with both scripts, SVG,
Canvas, or basically most graphics APIs,
they'll use this sort of way of drawing.
Right?
It's sort of this pen-polar way of doing.
So move, move somewhere without drawing a line, line draws a line,
and then curve uses cubic bestier curves.
And once again, I don't match the time to explain what that is,
but I assume a lot of you know,
and if not, it's quite intuitive, check Wikipedia.
Okay.
So adding points and lines that's, you know,
what's the value of resowing.
We also have a lot of sort of helper methods in our API
to make it easy to do things that you typically do in a sewing pattern.
Right?
You can 100% use this to do other 2D line drawing stuff,
but like it's really for sewing patterns.
You know, an example here is shift traction towards,
you can call it on a point to say like,
okay, I need the point between these two points.
You know, that's sort of stuff.
The paths also has a bunch of methods.
Let me put them on the slide here quickly.
Don't worry, I'm not going to go into them,
but resowing the death slash reference slash API,
has all of the free sewing API documentation,
with examples and code and stuff like that.
So, you know, you can look into it if you're interested.
Okay, I'm going to give you a complete example now
of how you can create a new design as we call that, right?
The first thing you do is you import the design,
what we call super constructor from a free sewing core library.
Then we have some internationalization data,
we have some metadata about,
and then we have our actual parts that we constructed earlier.
Right?
And then to create a design, I've called it for them.
You do a new design because design is a super constructor,
so it will return a constructor,
and then you give it some metadata and basically the list of parts.
Right?
So, we now have for them, which is a constructor,
and if you instantiate it, you get a pattern.
So, we have design and an instance of a design as a pattern.
And then we export that stuff,
and we use name and export so people can import a metadata
without having to instantiate a pattern.
So, let's look at all those different imports that we have there.
This is the internationalization data,
aka translation.
So, our core library supports translation,
and at a certain moment, we offered free sewing
like the website in six different languages,
but we had to stop that because the maintenance was just killing us.
So, now we're just English. Sorry about that.
But we still support translation,
we just only provide English.
And these days, with AI, I think most people can get around that.
So, this is just a little bit of a structure,
with the title and the design and the part names,
and the strings that we might be using,
and then the options.
And you see that I used hello for them there.
We have this thing where if you're going to put text in the pattern,
you need to make sure that you're using actually a translation key,
rather than the real text that way you can get translated.
Now, we have some metadata.
This is where we blur the line between what the core library does,
and then what we do in our monorepo,
the title of these patterns together,
and give some information in the front end.
The core library doesn't care at all about this.
This is just to help front end integration stuff like that.
And then here, we're finally at the good stuff.
This is our part, you know?
The only difference is that we're previously,
we said it's a function.
Now, our function is on the draft property,
and we have some extra data, a name.
We tell it which measurements are required,
and our options are stuff like that.
And the reason that this is important is that every part
and free sewing stands on its own.
So you can freely combine parts from different designs
to make your own Frankenstein design.
That's 100% supportive.
Okay.
I'm going to just briefly mention,
so now we have a new design,
and it can go in our collection.
I'm going to briefly skip through
how you get from that design to a pattern.
Should you be interested?
So you can just import your pattern there.
We also import a plugin to style the SVG.
Any of you a pattern is a new.
Fulls the design.
You give it all of the options that you want.
You use the plugin, and you call draft.
And then we call render on that.
We get the SVG.
That's all there is to it.
If you want to get started with free sewing,
you can start on your own with
mpxet free sewing class studio,
which pins up our development environments,
or you can check out either our monorepo on code work
or a fork of it,
and then you can run mpm kickstart.
For the people who have a sewing background,
we often team up with people who have more of a coding background,
and people with more of a sewing background to make one design.
So in the venn diagram,
there's not that many people in the middle.
So teaming up is a good way to go.
So if you're watching the stream or here and more from the sewing background,
you can totally reach out to us.
We'll hook you up with somebody's good at code.
So you can run free sewing in Node.js
or another JavaScript runtime like Bond or Denno.
On the back end, on a serverless function,
or of course in the browser like we do on free sewing.eu.
I'm going to looking at the clock.
So there's a stuff that we do for a previous speaker talk about this,
there's this difference between your target audience being developers,
or your target audience being users.
So on the left side, you know,
we publish and again packages,
semantic versioning, we keep a change low API docs,
developer experience, all of that stuff.
But then on the right, it's like we have to create an entire UI.
We have to support export to PDF.
We have to let people tile in page sizes for their printer.
You know, we need to provide sewing instructions,
website docs, they need to be able to manage their account,
like a whole bunch of stuff.
And of course, the scope of the project gets quite a bit wider
when you actually start building stuff for end users.
So, you know, this is sort of like a big thing.
I want to quickly talk about the infrastructure we have,
in case there's people who are more from that background.
So we are hosted on statichost.eu today,
which uses the Bonnie CDN.
The free sewing website is a completely static pile of HTML,
CSS and JavaScript.
So we basically ship all the code to the user and let them run it.
Sort of like a bring your own compute.
Thing, which means that it's,
we don't have to pay for that and that's good.
The flip side of that is that we have to ship all of that code.
So I think we passed eight terabytes of bandwidth per month last year.
So, you know, it's a lot.
But thankfully statichost has made a good deal for us.
And then we have a backend, which is the rest API express.
We use SQLite because we like it simple.
And then we also host our own forum instance.
Okay.
So, lessons that I've learned as a maintainer.
This has been a long journey.
I learned a lot along the way.
It wasn't always easy.
So here are three tips for people who might end up in a similar situation.
The first is to touch grass, as they say.
This is me and my wife and a cycling trip.
I like to cycle.
And it's good to go out there and do something different.
My day job is computers.
Free sewing is also computers.
And like, do sometimes just need to do something else.
So, you know, while on one hand I want to encourage you
to get into this stuff.
On the other hand, I'm also like, you know, step away from time to time.
The second thing is that people come and go.
This is my cat who passed away sadly last year.
And I was really heartbroken by it.
But then it's better to have had her than to have not had her.
And I think it's the same with, you know, contributors or people who support the project financially.
Like, they go.
And, you know, they might have other interest in the lives of like that.
And like, it always hurts.
It always does.
But then you have to be, you know, mindful of the fact that, you know, there's all those people out there who didn't contribute.
Then you really need to be appreciative.
And I am very appreciative of all the contributors of free sewing.
All the people who support it.
I think that's really good.
And then the final piece of advice is that you should prepare for retirement.
What I mean by that is that at the beginning you're going to be working on your own.
Right?
In a certain moment, we're going to have other people helping out.
And that is fantastic.
But I think that you should always try to think about, okay, but like, what can I give away so that other people can take care of it?
Right?
Because I think that the ultimate goal should be that the project algorithms you and it's bigger than what you can do.
I think it's also a good ego check to be considered the fact like it would be good if I can give this to other people so that they can carry it even further than I have been carrying it.
All right, that's a bit of old man advice.
And then the final thing that I want to get into is the sort of interdisciplinary false difficult work.
You know, I learned a lot through this journey when I started out.
I didn't really know what I was doing.
I was so far out of my comfort zone.
But like when I look back now, I'm very happy of all the lessons that I learned and I feel much more confident in the code I write and the stuff that I do.
And it's been really great, but at the same time, the more I know, the more I am conscious of my own limitations and the fact that, well, you know, yeah, I guess I'm a developer and how, but like I, I'm sure that this kind of people in this room who will, you know, or much better at this stuff than I am.
And then on the flip side of that in the sewing thing is like, yeah, I'm pretty good at making clothes, you know, I can do that.
But like, I also know a lot of the people are much better at that than I am.
Yet somehow in combining these two things, sort of ended up with something that is seems to be valuable to a lot of people.
So if you're like me, first time at Phos Demore, if you're just like a little bit like I just don't think that I have what it takes to write a new font and framework or whatever.
Like you don't have to. You can look around to the other interesting life and try to find out other ways there that I can sort of combine these things combine different skills and then come up with something that is, I don't know, maybe great.
Do you have any questions?
Amazing talk.
I'm using Simlee. I'm wondering I'm using Simlee.
Oh, okay. I'm wondering if you have a way to import to translate patterns that I created in Simlee to free sewing and then kind of moving on.
Yeah, Simlee is nice.
Yeah, so for people who don't know, just with a complex.
Simlee is a seemingly valentina, the forks of the same codebase is also a software to create sewing patterns, but it's like a point and click graphical thing, right?
Where is free sewing is patterns of codes?
So to answer your questions, can those patterns be translated in principle?
Yes, because they're defined in XML, but then the question is, what's the parametric angle?
Because Simlee does not really enforce that the way that we do, so you can get a pattern, but will that pattern and work?
And when we put something on our website, we have a certain bar of like, okay, that's the work for all of these cases.
So technically it is possible, but the devil's really in the details.
Hi. Oh, that's loud.
Right, you said something about if you're good at sewing, we can find a developer for you that's going to help with that stuff.
If you're good at developing, can you find somebody in sewing that can help us to make patterns for free sewing?
Yeah, so speaking from experience here, and we get often the question of people are good at sewing like, I can't do this code stuff.
This is why I'm rolling that out as an example. I don't often get the other questions, so thank you. Yeah, the other way works around too. If you're like, I want to help, but I don't really know about this pattern stuff.
We can 100% hook you up with some people who are in the other can.
The slides are also uploaded on the Fauston thingy, so you can also go to codebook.org slash free sewing slash Fauston 2026 to find all the source material for the slides.
And I'll also be outside after this talk. I also have goodies, so if you want that, you can come get them.
Thank you so much for the presentation. I have one more question. You've mentioned the intersection of the venn diagram between code and sewing.
I think I might be somewhere in there. My mother owns both a Habitatuary, a textiles shop, and she also has a huge pile of those part of magazines that you showed right with tons of really cool patterns, but they are all in paper.
I'm not aware of them being digitized. Have you ever considered taking such commercial patterns and digitizing them so that other people can share them?
Of course, I'm sidesteping the intellectual property rise question here, but I'm more interested in the technical challenge and parameterizing that would be another kind of warm cyber.
Yeah. So, okay, so there's a few things here. First, going from paper to digital, you can just scan the pattern, right? So let's assume we have a PDF.
The problem is that you have basically a binary, you know, and you have to figure out, well, what are they thinking when they made this pattern? Why is this line like this?
It's not that obvious. You need people who are very good at pattern design to sort of figure that out, and knowing those people, they will probably be like, show me the finished garment that I'll just make it from scratch.
So, I think it's very difficult to do this in an automated way. I also want to mention, like you said, site stepping the intellectual property issues, but I actually think it's worth talking about, because it's 100% okay to take a garment and reverse engineered that into a pattern.
That's how the garment industry works, that's tradition, there's no problem there, right?
But when we're talking about a pattern, you know, you're sort of like, like, people who sell patterns for a living, if you then copy that pattern, you're like taking bread and with their pocket, you know, so I'm like, I'm not cool with that.
But of course, if you make a book with drafting instructions that's teaching people how to create a pattern, then okay, that's cool, you can take what you learn and implement that in code, that's cool for me.
I'm not saying that, you know, everybody does what they will, but what it's about, can I contribute a pattern to free sewing?
And I'm like, not if you're making it harder for somebody who makes a living selling the comparable thing, then we do not do that.
Hello, thank you for your talk. I have a question because I'm like, you are about the sewing machine to do repairs and do you have any tips for that?
Because I'm finding it very hard to repair stuff, it looks horrible.
Here's my number one tip for sewing machines. The very best sewing machine is the one you have access to, right?
Because after that, I think the general sort of understanding is that you try to buy something that is more sturdy, mechanical and less plastic in computer, right?
And if you have the room for it, consider looking into an industrial machine because they're big and loud, but they're fantastic.
The problem with industrial is that they typically do wanting and do it incredibly well, whereas if you're just starting out, you want a machine that can do many different things.
So, you know, you start with a regular machine, and then later you have the slippery slope of collecting industrial machines, I speak for experience.
Hello. So, this is really cool, by the way. For those of us who have a lot more experience to computers, kind of follows on from this previous question.
Where should we start? If we've never made a gum before, but we want to get into it, obviously start with free sewing, but like any tips for like getting going.
And in addition to that, how much time and investment will you expect before we've got something we could wear?
Okay, so when you say where do we start? You mean where do we start with sewing, right?
Okay, so my advice there actually differs from what you will find if you take a sewing class, where they will start with something simple.
I'm like, pick the thing that would really, you'd be so happy if you could make that and then just go for it.
And try to find, I mean, you know, within reason maybe, but like trousers are arguably not easy. Like it would be much easier to start with a t-shirt or even a shirt is easier than trousers.
I started with trousers because I was like, that's going to be cool. And I got this sort of like high from it, even though they were not great, they really carried me through those initial moments of words going to be difficult.
So I would say pick the thing, pick the achievements that you want to be like, oh man, if I could do that, I would feel so great about that.
And then just go for it. And if you go online, you will find that the sewing community is like a super lot coming and helpful bunch.
Really awesome people, there's plenty of people out there who will help you. You can also come to free sewing, there's a lot we have a discord, where people will answer all your questions and help you.
Yeah, I think we'll have time for tomorrow.
So what?
Yeah, a really interesting thing, as someone who's actually in the intersection of doing both, it's really cool to see how you're kind of actually pulling it together because there's so much potential there.
You mentioned that you really have set up so you can really combine the different things and everything.
How do you, for example, with adjusting arms, how do you, for example, make sure that you're actually making pieces that fit together.
Like you're changing the scope of the neckline for example.
Yeah, I think if I understand the question correctly, you're like, how do you make sure the arm fits the body?
Yeah, all right. So if we go, maybe it should just quickly cycle back.
So we have the sort of like store, right?
And this store allows us to share data between here at the top, that green box.
So how that happens is we draft, for example, the front, and we store the length of the arm side seam in the store.
And then we draft the back and we store the length there.
And then when we have the, we draft the sleeve, we know exactly how long the sleeve cap seam needs to be because it's in the store.
And then we iterate until it's perfect, right?
But this also means that we need to control the order in which parts drafted.
And this is also like, I didn't go into all of it here, but like we take care of all of that.
Yeah, so that's how we do it.
And there's no magical way because we use cubic bezzakers and there's no closed form solution to calculate the arc of a bezzaker.
So we try and then we see our for a reoff and then we tweak some parameters.
And we do that a couple of times until it's within one millimeter, right?
And so when I move that slider on the website, but that is happening, but it's just fast.
So another passion of mine is cooking.
When you scale cooking from eight to hundred, spices don't work.
You cannot scale linearly, you have to scale them in a different way.
And I see the same problem with grading.
And do you have kind of some insight to make it work algorithmically?
Because often I get the picture of somebody that's say, okay, size S, but actually is not.
Or well, not everywhere.
So.
Yeah, so we don't really have the problem with grading because we just think the measurements is input.
The people who use grading, what you will see is that brands that have a large size range will typically draft to individual patterns.
One of the largest end of the spectrum and one on the smaller.
So that the grading doesn't need to deviate too far from the base because it's a bit like a game of telephone, you know.
The further you get away, the further it gets light, you know.
So then if the size range is big, like some some brands, the pattern I threw up is from Kashmirat, which is a well respected.
So in pattern brands for curvy ladies, or should we just say normal ladies.
And they have a white size range and I know for a fact that they actually draft two individual blocks and I grade between them to avoid this sort of like things starting to fall apart a bit when you go further and further into the grading.
Did that answer your question?
You can say no.
And I just misunderstood.
Magic formula, right.
I haven't found it yet.
I'll let you know.
So thank you very much for this talk.
Thank you.