I’m a costume maker and I wind up drafting many unique patterns for my commissioned projects.
I’d love to offer them for other folks to use and contribute to the patterns on FreeSewing - if that is allowed of course.
Currently my biggest hurdle is that I do not know how to grade patterns. Is there a a good resource that is recommended for proper pattern grading?
and / or
Is there a place to offer patterns up for approval? No sense cleaning everything up / vectorizing if the admins don’t think the pattern will be useful.
Basically I’m just looking to contribute my costume patterns to a wider audience, since I think others could have fun with them too!
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Some thoughts.
If the patterns are commissioned, can you still offer them to others? All of our designs are published under the MIT license, so available to everyone.
If you drafted the patterns, you must have done this from a set of measurements (which may not be identical to how FreeSewing defines certain measurements). Can you not use your methodology to draft the pattern with a different measurement? That would be the basis for grading, I presume.
A list of types of patterns, or photos of them, would be nice to see how much demand there is for a certain pattern. But we’re not that picky (see ‘gozer’).
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Thanks for the comment!
Yup! Most of my costumes are made in parts, and I’ll use the same pattern for different clients (with modifications based on their measurements, of course). I retain the rights to all the patterns I draft. Basically, I just wanted my creations to be useful to people beyond me and my customers.
Yes, I do draft based on measurements (my own or my clients). Right now I re-draft each pattern with updated measurements as needed. My hope was to skip the step of re-drafting every time by learning how to properly grade up or down.
By my understanding patterns are graded up or down using standardized formulas and methods, right? I’d imagine mass-produced clothes patterns are scaled proportionally from small to 3xl. That’s the kind of grading I was hoping to learn - applying formulas to a ‘neutral’ pattern to make it bigger or smaller.
And sure thing! I make creature costumes, props and the like. Website is here, if interested in gallery photos, but I’ll do my best to gather all the patterns I’d like to share and see if there is interest.
I have in-progress patterns for animal inspired clothes (like a bird wing cardigan) that are not pictured on the website, but I think could be a good fit here.
Freesewing does not use any type of traditional grading. All the the designs you see here are custom made (generated) to the measurements someone has entered. So if you’re short and wide, you get something that works for that body type. And if your tall and narrow, you get something for that. This is why we ask for all of those measurements when you want to generate a pattern. All of the patterns are made-to-measure.
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Thank you for explaining that! I knew the patterns were made via input measurements, but I had assumed (in error) that the original ‘source’ pattern had to be a neutral size in order to be scaled by the program properly.
Great! That saves me a bunch of extra processing!
I’ll take photos of my patterns and upload them to this thread so we can gauge interest.
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