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newsletter:2025 Autumn edition

· 10 min read
joost
joost
FreeSewing Maintainer

Welcome to the 2025 Autumn edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've got in store for you:

  • 🚀 FreeSewing v4.2 was released (in August), and brings 4 new designs (3-minute read by joost)
  • 🚀 FreeSewing v4.3 was released (in September), adds another new design (1-minute read by joost)
  • 🌞 FreeSewing goes outside: Notes from hacker camp WHY2025 (2-minute read by Lexander)
  • 💸 Everything counts in large amounts (2-minute read by joost)

Let's get to it.

 

 

🚀 FreeSewing v4.2 was released, and brings 4 new designs​

In August, we rolled out a new v4.2 release of FreeSewing, which added no less than 4 new designs to our collection:

Devon Denim Jacket​

Designed by Wouter -- his 14th FreeSewing design for those keeping count -- Devon is denim jacket pattern. Obviously, you can make it in other fabrics too, when we say denim jacket here, it's more about the style of the garment.

Wouter has the following to say about it:

I Designed Devon because I had a nice denim jacket that I wanted to make available to others.

Devon is based on the Bent body block. Being a jacket, it has a considerable amount of ease added.

The design is inspired by denim jackets my partner has, and some patterns I’ve seen. Most denim jackets do not have set in sleeves, but since this is based on Bent, it does. It makes top stitching the armscye a little more challenging.

Jett (Bomber) Jacket​

Next up is Jett jacket, another jacket pattern in a timeless style, this time the so-called bomber jacket, or depending on the choice of fabrics and styles, it can also be a varsity aka letterman jacket.

Jett was designed and coded by Gawain, they had the following to say about it:

It’s highly recommended to take another jacket you like and compare the shoulder-to-shoulder and waist- to-armpit measurements against it before you start cutting.

This pattern is intended to fit the widest possible range of bodies, so it comes with a couple optional adjustments under the Fit options.

The bust dart/full bust adjustment is intended for people with breasts. There are two implementations available, one based on horizontal and vertical shifts, one based on rotations like a full bust adjustment for a paper pattern. The rotation-based one is better and you should probably use it.

The full belly adjustment operates under the assumption that the waist measurement is taken around the fullest part of your belly. If the fullest part of your belly is below the place you took the waist measurement, don’t worry about changing the rest of the vertical measurements to account for it - Jett makes the adjustment all the way down to the hem.

_The full belly adjustment only takes effect if your waist measurement + the given waist ease is wider than the ease the pattern is already generating around your stomach. If you turn it on, but don’t see anything change, it’s

Sarah Skirt block​

Sarah is a skirt block based on the Aldrich drafting method. It was contributed by tduehr, the first design by their hand, but not the last (keep reading).

Here's what they had to say about it:

Sarah is the natural waist skirt block from W. Aldrich’s Metric Pattern Cutting for Women’s Wear, 6th Edition.

Blocks like this are used as the basic shape of garment designs. This can be sewn as is for a pencil skirt. Though, there are more options available in the Penelope pencil skirt.

*This is the first pattern I drafted for myself in different software as part of a collective attempt to learn CAD pattern drafting at my local maker space. (it’s the first in the book… probably not a coincidence). Several of the dimensions being magic and the curves being what ever looks good frustrated me intensely because they wouldn’t scale and the software does not contain a constraint solver to make up for that.

Sunny Skirt​

And finally (we're going alphabetic here), we have a new skirt design named Sunny. This is a design that was discussed on our Discord server. The design is credited to halbmoki whereas tduehr wrote the code for it, in that casual I could, so I did fashion:

Sunny is an 18th century split side skirt. This came up in Discord and I thought it would be easy to code, so I did. This type of skirt was usually used as a petticoat. It can also be used as a skirt on its own. The side splits allow access for a pocket like Lucy.

 

 

🚀 FreeSewing v4.3 was released, adds the Percy design​

As September wrapped up, we've published FreeSewing v4.3 which brings the Percy puffy pants design. Designed by Gawain, it is a FreeSewing pattern for fall-front puffy shorts, and Garwain had the following to say about it:

I wanted a pair of shorts that had a fall front with a double row of buttons, a front pleat, and a flared bottom edge gathered down into a cuff. So I made one!

The front construction is a simplified, not-especially-accurate rendition of the fall front breeches common in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Most modern interpretations of this style have ornamental buttons and an elastic waistband or a hidden side zipper, but I wanted these ones to be real.

This pattern can be short or long, flared or unflared, and cuffed or uncuffed, so you can produce quite a wide variety of different pants. Only the fall front construction and the pockets are non-optional.

 

 

🌞 FreeSewing goes outside: Notes from hacker camp WHY2025​

FreeSewing goes outside again, this time at hacker camp WHY2025!

"WHY" being, "What Hackers Yearn for", this year's edition of the quadrennial Dutch hacker camp(/conference/festival). I (Lexander) have been to these camps with my family since I was young, and at the previous edition I represented FreeSewing there for the first time, and fortunately they liked it enough to welcome FreeSewing back on stage this year as well! :) You can watch it back on their website.

I did my best to introduce people to FreeSewing from the ground up, from what a sewing pattern even is, to the important role FreeSewing plays in the process.

But that's not all! Our friends from De War (the place that organizes bi-weekly FreeSewing nights) were also at the camp with their ship Serendiep. FreeSewing was part of the program alongside their labyrinth, open Fablab hours and talks. We had planned to do the type of workshop we normally do: people come in and we help them sew their own Lucy, and that we would help people take measurements if they wanted to. We had four sewing machines, and normally that is plenty... However, on both days we did the workshop, there were so many people that we had to change our plans and instead do a live demo of the FreeSewing website (showing some of the pattern code also), while four people made Lucies during it. Absolutely no complaints, though :)

I met a lot of amazing people, both those new to FreeSewing, and people who were already in the community. Thank you to everyone who showed up, and thanks also for the help ;) Needless to say, it was a success, and I hope to bring FreeSewing outside again in the future!

 

 

💸 Everything counts in large amounts​

Recently, we passed the milestone of 200.000 registered FreeSewing accounts. We've come a long way since my first steps on this journey back in 2011, and we can all be very proud of the progress we've made.

On the flip side of the coin, we've grown to a scale that puts a lot strain on different aspects of the project. From the increasing amount of time that goes into merely keeping everything running or supporting users who report issues or need support, to paying the bills for a website at this scale.

In August, FreeSewing's bill for extra bandwidth alone (bandwidth consumed beyond the 1TB included in our hosting package) was 220 Euro (258 US dollar). For the month September, total bandwidth clocked in at 8.3TB (≈8500 Gigabyte) so it will be higher still, but I won't know for sure until the bill lands in my inbox.

Since the first of October (which is today) we've migrated to host the website on our backend server, for which we're also paying obviously. This may or may not lead to other capacity problems, we'll see how it goes.

There are, of course, much cheaper options. The tech-savvy crowd might point towards Cloudflare pages. It's free! But Cloudflare insists you hand over control of (the DNS servers of) your domain to them, and I am not comfortable handing the keys of the kingdom to a US tech company. Especially one that is suspected of being in cahoots with US intelligence (ask yourself: why is it free?).

Tinfoil hats aside, it's obvious that there is a real and tangible cost to doing the right thing rather than paying with user's data, and while that cost might be manageable for 1000 true fans it is not sustainable for hundreds of thousands of users.

It has always been my own choice to pay for these expenses out of pocket, rather than from the contributions made by our patrons. But amid all the consumed bandwidth, we're on track to raise less money in this year than back in 2020 when we had about 15% of the users we have today. If we take into account that inflation over the last 5 years is 20% or so, it's obvious that more users is not better for FreeSewing, but seems to be actively making things worse.

Without wanting to be alarmist, we seem to be heading for a classical tragedy of the commons situation. I don't know yet what to do about this, apart from the obvious solution which is to block access for non-patrons.

It may come to that, it may also not. I'm sharing my concerns, and I'm open to your ideas insofar that they are workable -- that means no ads, respect for privacy, no selling our user's data and so on. If you have any, feel free to reply to this email.

And, if you are one of those people supporting FreeSewing financially, then thank you very much for being part of the solution.

joost