Welcome to the 2026 Spring edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we have put together for you on this first day of April:

• 📺 (video of) The FreeSewing talk at FOSDEM 2026 (1-minute read by joost)
• 🏁 FreeSewing's migration away from US-based tech companies is complete (2-minute read by joost)
• 🪪 Age-verification, and sovereign online chat (2-minute read by joost)
• 🚣 FreeSewing backend security audit: Lessons learned (2-minute read by joost)

Let's go.

📺 (video of) The FreeSewing talk at FOSDEM 2026​

As we mentioned in our previous edition of the FreeSewing newsletter:

Held every year in Brussels, FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting ) is a conference entirely dedicated to free and open source software. It's also a non-commercial event run by volunteers, so it has nothing to do with your run-of-the-mill tech conference, it's really something special.

We held a talk about FreeSewing at FOSDEM with the title FreeSewing: How to buy less, create more, and feel great about it.

For those who are interested, audio/video of this talk is available online:

• At the FOSDEM Video Archives (search for freesewing within the page)
• Or on YouTube (for convenience)

🏁 FreeSewing's migration away from US-based tech companies is complete​

We wrote about our migration away from US-based tech companies before, but a limited number of items remained on our todo-list. Specifically:

• Transactional & newsletter emails
• Image hosting

During the first quarter of 2026, we were able to complete those last couple of items, thus marking the completion of a migration that started last year.

Email

Transactional emails are emails sent out as a response to something a user does on the website. These include sign-ups, password resets, and email changes, and so on. These were handled by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Just as the emails that are sent out to deliver this newsletter to your inbox.

A migration to Scaleway's transactional email service has been in the works for a while --- with emails from the FreeSewing forum already being sent out through the EU-based Scaleway --- and now we have completed the migration for all our emails.

While this is mostly an under-the-hood change, we've also used this opportunity to implement some changes to make it easier for people to filter our emails.

Specifically, transactional email is now sent from the no-reply@notifications.freesewing.eu address, whereas (this and future) newsletters are sent from no-reply@newsletter.freesewing.eu.

Note that the reply-to address is set to support@freesewing.eu so you can still just hit reply if you want to reach a human being.

Images

The final service to migrate away from US-based tech companies was our image hosting, which until recently was handled by Cloudflare.

There was no drop-in replacement for Cloudflare’s Image API in the EU, as it is a rather custom setup. So instead, we have decided to take matters into our own hands, and host images ourselves on our backend systems.

User-provided images --- avatars and so on --- are hosted directly from our backend systems on the static.freesewing.eu domain. More commonly served images --- for blog posts, showcases and so on --- are also hosted by our backend systems, but we have deployed a caching layer leveraging Bunny CDN to protect our backend from the incurred bandwidth costs. These images are hosted on the cdn.freesewing.eu domain.

🪪 Age-verification, and sovereign online chat​

There's been a recent push in some countries or jurisdictions to enforce age verification for access to (certain) online services. This has ruffled some feathers in general, but it is the moves by Discord that have caused the most debate in the FreeSewing community, as a number of FreeSewing users use Discord as their communications platform of choice.

This has raised some questions about what FreeSewing is going to do about this, if anything.

First of all, the FreeSewing community exists wherever people will it into existence. Some people are on Facebook, others on Reddit, some are on Discord. Others prefer face-to-face interactions and hands-on experience with FreeSewing, like at De WAR in the Netherlands.

There is no right or wrong way to interact with others, and we are not in the business of telling people what to do, or where to go. You do you.

That being said, a subset of our users like the direct and synchronous communication provided by an online chat platform. Within the FreeSewing community, that functionality is --- at least today --- de facto provided by Discord.

People who like using Discord are free to continue doing so, that's not up for debate. Instead, the discussion is about whether people who merely want some form of online chat to communicate with the FreeSewing community would like to have an option that does not require using Discord.

Within that context, we are currently considering whether or not to run a FreeSewing Matrix homeserver to answer this need.

Of course, for every other service we run, it comes with overheads, costs, work, and so on. So we are trying to figure out what the best choice would be.

Long story short: If you would like to see this become reality, make your voice heard.

🚣 FreeSewing backend security audit: Lessons learned​

In case you missed it, we published a post-disclosure report after a security audit found several issues in the FreeSewing backend code.

While the audit did reveal issues that could have been abused to allow data leakage or privilege escalation, we are unaware of any of these issues being exploited. We are also unaware of any data being leaked, and we have not found any account with a privilege level that was not what it should be.

If you'd like to learn more, we encourage you to read the report. We've done our best to explain everything in detail, so we will not rehash that here. Instead we'd like to focus on the how did this happen question, and the lessons we can learn from it.

Our main take-away is that we are spread too thin. Despite our best efforts, we struggle to keep up with everything that needs doing. This is not really a new development, nor is it unusual for an open source project, but it has only gotten worse in light of our newfound popularity and increased user growth.

There is also a somewhat unbalanced competition for time and resources between what we would like to do and what we have to do. The fact that we lament being spread too thin mere paragraphs after floating the idea of running our own Matrix homeserver illustrates this tension.

We have reached a point where do less is no longer a viable strategy. That's because the things we do, we want to do them right, and for the right reasons.

So instead, we will try to be more. Specifically, be more people. We will make an effort to grow horizontally, and remove or reduce bottle necks in our team of contributors by spreading the workload over more people, building a bigger and stronger team of contributors, and in general try to meet the demands of a growing open source project by simply growing with those demands regarding infrastructure, maturity, and personnel.

In summary: We're going to need a bigger boat.

joost

Welcome to the 2026 Winter edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we have put together for you on this 1st of January:

• 🥹 2025 was one hell of a year (4-minute read by Joost)
• 📣 FreeSewing at FOSDEM 2026 (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🚨 On inequality and optimism (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's go.

🥹 2025 was one hell of a year​

The year 2025 has been something. Not merely for the world in general, but also for FreeSewing specifically. Two things have made this year particularly challenging for us:

• The new US administration
• Our growth rate

The first point has kept us very busy in the first half of the year. Pretty much as soon as it became clear the incoming US administration was going after minorities with wanton cruelty, we started working on a plan to shield our users' data from the US government.
Given that US-based tech companies not only have a legal obligation to hand over user data, but are an active and willing participant in all this, that meant moving our entire tech stack away from big tech.

This took a lot of work, but we did it. Everything is hosted in Europe now, we migrated FreeSewing.org to FreeSewing.eu, from AWS to Scaleway, from Github to Codeberg, and so on. Throughout all this, we strived to ensure that these changes were transparent for users, and we succeeded in doing so.

By the time summer rolled in, everything user-facing was taken care of. However, we still have a backlog of other issues to deal with that are a direct result of this somewhat forced migration. Things like CI (which stands for Continuous Integration -- a way to automate testing of changes to the codebase and new releases) and other automations haven't fully been restored to the pre-migration levels because they typically involve provider-specific tools and APIs, which means migrating as-is is not possible, but requires more work and planning.

We probably would have taken care of it by now, if it wasn't for the second item on our list of challenges this year: our growth rate.

Last year, in this very New Year's edition of our newsletter, we celebrated an important milestone as we had passed the 100.000 users mark. Exactly one year ago, I wrote:

As I'm writing this, our website has 106.734 activated user accounts. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, the growth of the site has caused issues big and small as we needed to scale up and sometimes adapt the way things are handled behind the scenes to deal with the sheer numbers.

Today, that number stands at 335.509 activated user accounts.

In other words, in the previous 12 months, more than twice as many users have signed up for a FreeSewing account than in our entire history preceding 2025 combined. We had 106.734 users, then 228.775 more users joined.
In September alone -- fueled by social media buzz -- we onboarded more than 50.000 people. The bandwidth required for hosting the website passed 8 terabyte that month alone, and that doesn't even include the images.

Are those big numbers? You tell me. Certainly not for the Googles or Facebooks of this world. But for FreeSewing? It's been brutal. And it's not merely a matter of technical challenges, there's a financial aspect too. This year was the first time that I struggled to pay FreeSewing's bills.

It is cause for concern for me not so much because of the acute situation at hand -- as I mentioned, growth is not uniform but rather has big peaks, which translates to our bills also having big peaks -- but rather the way things are trending.

You see, FreeSewing's revenue for 2025 was €10.202,97 which is slightly lower than 2024 (€10.386,63), despite a 3-fold increase in users. It's also marginally less revenue than 2023 (€10.222,07), even though we now have 6 times the amount of users we had in 2023.

So, this is starting to look like a tragedy of the commons. Ever more people discover FreeSewing, but the proportion of people who are willing to support us financially gets increasingly smaller while our costs get increasingly higher. Revenue seems to have plateaued just above the 10K mark, and further growth does somehow not pay any dividends.

I am not certain what to do about this. I know that I can ask you for (more) money, and that doing so will most likely have a positive effect. But that's short-term relief, and not a long-term sustainable solution.

Are we doing it wrong?
Is 10K some sort of glass ceiling?
Is it the economy?

I don't know. I guess you don't know either. But if you have an idea how we can prevent FreeSewing from becoming financially unsustainable, please do tell me about it. You can just hit Reply.

In any case, while I do want to be open and honest about my concerns about the direction things seem to be heading, that does not take away from the fact that we were able to donate €10.202,97 to Médecins Sans Frontières this year.

That is obviously a good thing. A great thing even. Truly magical, and I will reach out to all of you who have contributed to this awesome bit of good news in the coming days.

Regardless of whether you supported us this way or not in 2025. I wish you a happy New Year, and nothing but the very best for 2026.

Stay strong.

📣 FreeSewing at FOSDEM 2026​

Held every year in Brussels, FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting ) is a conference entirely dedicated to free and open source software. It's also a non-commercial event run by volunteers, so it has nothing to do with your run-of-the-mill tech conference, it's really something special.

This year's edition will be held on 31 January & 1 February, and feature keynotes, lightning talks, 65 different devrooms that dive deeper in specific topics, as well as the so-called main track of talks selected by the FOSDEM program committee.

It is on that main track, specifically on Sunday 1 February at 13:00 that you'll see this talk on the schedule: FreeSewing: How to buy less, create more, and feel great about it.

I (joost) will be giving this talk myself, and if I'm being honest, I'm low-key terrified about the whole idea.

So if you're around, come and say hi. It would certainly help me feel at ease.

🚨 On inequality and optimism​

The world is not in a good place right now. There's a lot of stuff coming at us and it seems invariably rather messed up. If I had to pick one thing in an attempt to distill this feeling of unease, it would be the increasing inequality.

A vanishingly small minority of people are appropriating resources and wealth at a rate that would put the greed of Smaug to shame. Furthermore, the amount of pain and suffering that they are willing to inflict on others to trade it all in for just a little more makes for some truly evil outcomes.

We all have our own stuff going on. We live in different places, under different leadership (or lack thereof), with different cultures. I don't know what you're dealing with, or what keeps you up at night. Perhaps I have an idea, or maybe I'm way off.

But I think we can all relate to inequality. It doesn't take a genius to see that if we let this play out, we'll end up in a dystopian future with a small elite who have everything, and the vast majority left to fend for themselves in the water wars or whatever.

There's a reason Luigi is so popular. Or that I see ever more pictures of guillotines in my feed. But I doubt that a violent correction will accomplish lasting change.

I'd like to remain optimistic that we can still fix this, and somehow -- together -- find a better way where we can all share the pursuit of happiness. If anything, I feel it is non-optional to remain optimistic. Because if we hang our heads, those bastards are going to walk right over us and turn this planet into a hellscape.

Let's not let them.

Take care of yourself. And if you can, please take care of others too.

Love,
joost

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.

• Discover this design at /designs/devon.

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

• Discover this design at /designs/jett.

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.

• Discover this design at /designs/sarah.

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.

• Discover this design at /designs/sunny.

🚀 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.

• Discover this design at /designs/percy.

🌞 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

Welcome to the 2025 Summer edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

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

• 🏃‍♀️ Introducing the Sabrina Sports Bra (2-minute read by joost)
• 🚀 FreeSewing v4.1 is out (1-minute read by joost)
• 📖 Improved documentation for the Editor and other components (2-minute read by Joost)
• 🔥 The great purge is coming (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's get to it.

🏃‍♀️ Introducing the Sabrina Sports Bra​

That's right, ever since the v4.1 release -- which happened a few days ago, more on that in a minute -- we have added a sports bra pattern to our growing collection, and it goes by the name Sabrina.

It was designed by Jonathan Haas, who has the following to say about it:

I designed Sabrina as a sports bra pattern. It provides light to medium support, but please note that the fit and compression depend heavily on the fabric used. The default ease is on the low/comfortable side. If you need or prefer more compression, consider increasing the stretch to 20% or more and using a fabric with a higher compression rating.

Sabrina is technically unisex. I made some prototypes using my own (male) body measurements and I like wearing them when I go running. They reduce chafing and chest bounce and provide comfortable compression.

Sabrina was developed from Breanna-based prototypes, but the actual construction is independent and straightforward. Essentially, it’s a rectangle with holes for the arms and head, plus a few darts to shape it to your body and reduce excess fabric. You can view the construction by enabling the ‘Base’ part in the Core settings under ‘Only Include Selected Pattern Parts’.

If you have previously made patterns with curved seams and stretchy fabric such as Shin or Bruce, you should find this bra straightforward to make.

I hope you find this pattern helpful.

Jonathan

As with all garments using negative ease, different fabric with different stretch will give you a different fit. But Sabrina has plenty of options you can tweak to get the fit just the way you like it.

Also note that this pattern includes a so-called snapped percentage option that controls the elastic width. The means that the elastic will size up and down with your measurements, but rather than scaling to an arbitrary value, it will always generate a pattern with an elastic width that you can buy from your favorite haberdashery, or online store.

🚀 FreeSewing v4.1 is out​

Frequent readers of the newsletter know that we roll out new features and improvements on our website as soon as they are available. However, we also release new versions of all our packages. Not only for those who use FreeSewing's code in their own projects, but things like our stand-alone development environment are also based on these versioned releases.

Listing all of the changes that went into this release would get boring real quick, but if you're curious, our changelog is a good place to peruse what we've been busy with.

📖 Improved documentation for the Editor and other components​

Three months ago, when announcing the v4 release, I wrote:

A lot of work went into this new major release, especially in the realm of our frontend code, where we made a huge effort to make it more maintainable.

That edition of the newsletter was rather long already, so I didn't elaborate further. But when I say more maintainable I don't merely mean making my life as a maintainer easier, we also want to make it easier for people to get involved with the project, including contributing to this part of the codebase.

We've made a similar effort before, in particular the v3 release where a lot of effort went into making it easier for people to contributor new designs to FreeSewing. That effort paid off, and we have an ever-growing list of people who have contributed designs to show for it.

However, designs are only part of the puzzle, albeit an important one. There's a lot of other code that goes into making FreeSewing.eu, and this time, we wanted to make this easier for people to get involved with.

That's why I'm happy that we've also finalized documentation for all the React components, React hooks, and React contexts that underpin our website.

In parallel, we've also written new documentation for end users that details all the various ways you can use the FreeSewing editor.

🔥 The great purge is coming​

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that our privacy policy states that we may remove data for accounts that have been inactive for 12 months.

We have so far not enforced this, because at one point we had a discovered a bug in our backend that caused a subset of accounts to not get their last active timestamp updated.

This meant that we could not be 100% certain that an account had been inactive, or that it merely seemed that way. We felt it would be best to keep data for potentially dormant accounts longer, rather than risk removing accounts that had been active, so this is why we haven't made any efforts to clean up old and unused accounts.

However, all that will soon be more than 12 months ago, which means that we may revisit the topic of removing old and unused accounts. And while I do have more pressing matters on my todo list, I felt it best to give a heads-up that the great purge will come sooner or later, when we remove accounts that haven't been used in over 12 months.

Obviously we will not remove any accounts without reaching out beforehand, but I wanted to give ample warning just in case. To ensure you're account is not marked as inactive, all you have to do is use it. As in, log in to the site.

That being said, I have a ton of things on my todo list and this is not super urgent, so it probably won't be anytime soon.

Enjoy the summer ☀️

joost

Welcome to the 2025 Spring edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Grab a drink, because this edition is no filler, all killer:

• 🎉 FreeSewing v4 was released today (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🤓 Announcing the new FreeSewing Studio (1-minute read by Joost)
• 👋 Bye bye Vercel/NextJS (1-minute read by Joost)
• 😟 Putting some distance between our users and the new US administration (2-minute read by Joost)
• 💬 Announcing the FreeSewing Forum (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🔐 FreeSewing as an OIDC provider (1-minute read by Joost)
• ✊ Don't Panic - Organize! (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's go.

🎉 FreeSewing v4 was released today​

The next major version of FreeSewing, version 4, has been in the works for a while, and I really wanted to get it out the door before sending out this newsletter, so that's exactly what I did.

As this is a major version, there are breaking changes, but we've really kept it to a minimum. There's only one real breaking change:

• FreeSewing now requires NodeJS 20 or newer

In other words, we've dropped support for NodeJS 18, which will reach end of life at the end of next month.

A lot of work went into this new major release, especially in the realm of our frontend code, where we made a huge effort to make it more maintainable. This is the kind of thing that mostly happens under the hood, but will allow us to increase the project's volatility and shorten our (non-major) release cycle.

What this means is that everything's changed, and nothing has changed. I've compared it to your favorite restaurant moving across the street. It's a different building, different kitchen, different everything. But your favorite waitress is still there serving that same food you've know and love.

That, in a nutshell, is FreeSewing v4.

🤓 Announcing the new FreeSewing Studio​

We have created a new standalone development environment named FreeSewing Studio. In practical terms, this means that we have replaced @freesewing/new-design with @freesewing/studio.

If you're unfamiliar, this is our development environment that people can use to generate FreeSewing designs. In v3, this development environment only supported a single design, and so new-design made sense.

Now in v4, our development environment not only ships with all FreeSewing designs on board, but you can add your own, and as many as you want.

In addition, it also integrates with the FreeSewing backend, so you do not only have access to all your measurements, you can also store your patterns in our backend, even from your custom designs.

To try it out yourself, run:

npx @freesewing/studio

👋 Bye bye Vercel/NextJS​

We have been using NextJS for several years now for the FreeSewing frontends. However, as I mentioned in an earlier edition of this newsletter, Vercel (the company behind NextJS) has revoked their sponsorship. This was nothing against FreeSewing, they've revoked all open source plans, but without their sponsorships, the cost of hosting our websites on Vercel is rather steep, and it was not sustainable for us to stay with them.

Furthermore, Vercel is also increasingly tying NextJS to their hosted offering, making it harder to just go elsewhere.

Since documentation is a critical (and large) part of both our website for makers and developers, we've decided to migrate to Docusaurus, which is highly optimized for documentation, but flexible enough that we can still do all the more advanced stuff that we need.

To improve maintainability and facilitate code reuse between our websites and new studio, we've abstracted all of our frontend logic into various components in our new @freesewing/react package which now underpins all our frontends.

This was a huge effort, and we are lagging behind with developer documentation, which is something which we'll work on going forward.

Apart from that, I'm certain there will be some rough edges, but things should just work and if not, make sure to let us know.

😟 Putting some distance between our users and the new US administration​

Part of the reason that we were only able to drag v4 over the finish line at the very last minute is that our planning was thrown into turmoil by the need to put distance between our user's data and the US administration.

I will talk about our reasons for doing so at the end of this newsletter. Here, I will instead focus on what we actually did.

Essentially, we have moved everything that is potentially sensitive to brand new infrastructure in Europe, using European companies, rather than US-based companies. Specifically:

• We've moved our backend systems from DigitalOcean in the US to Scaleway in Germany
• We've moved our software repositories from GitHub in the US to Codeberg in Germany
• We've moved our transactional email service from AWS in the US to Scaleway in Germany (ongoing)
• We have put a de-facto freeze on our Instagram account, and recommend you follow our accounts on freesewing.social, our Mastodon instance hosted in Germany.
• We have re-visited our choice to use Discord as the de-facto place for the FreeSewing community, and have instead decided that here too we would step both to safeguard the data of our users, as well as embrace the open web. So we've created a forum for the FreeSewing community (more on that below).
• While freesewing.org will continue to work as expected, we will henceforth use freesewing.eu as our main domain name.

All of these changes are already active, although some need some time to percolate to completion.

None of this will impact you as a user of the site. So, you may find this overkill. But people trust us with their data, and we feel a moral obligation to safeguard that data even from a potential adversarial administration in the US.

💬 Announcing the FreeSewing Forum​

The idea that a good old forum would arguably be a better for for the FreeSewing community than the social network of the day is not new, it's something that has always held true.

However, we were always reluctant to take on the additional burden of operating/maintaining/managing/moderating such a forum, because, well there's only 24 hours in a day.

However, given the efforts we are making to keep our user's data out of the reach of the US administration, it felt like the time was right to do it.

And so we did. The official FreeSewing forum lives at forum.freesewing.eu and you can (and should) use your FreeSewing account for authentication.

It's a bit empty still, so don't be shy and come say hello.

🔐 FreeSewing as an OIDC provider​

This is a bit of a nerdy sidebar, but to allow the forum to work with your FreeSewing account, we needed to adapt our backend and turn FreeSewing into an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider.

This opens the door to sign in with your FreeSewing account functionality on any website, just as on our forum. We do not have any concrete plans for this, or rather, our own needs are met. But if you are interested in letting FreeSewing users sign in with their FreeSewing account (and for example access their measurements) then you can reach out to us to discuss.

✊ Don't Panic - Organize!​

Last but not least, I want to talk about why we moved everything to Europe.

With everything that is going on right now — gestures vaguely in the direction of the current US administration — it's tempting to throw up our hands in despair, spend our days doomscrolling, or just check out somehow.

Unfortunately, that's not going to cut it for we are way into uncharted territory here.

I was born long after the end of the second world war, but still, my entire worldview along with everyone around me was shaped by what happened during and in the aftermath of the great war. The atrocities of the Nazi regime are not up for debate. My grandfather fought the Nazis in the trenches. I grew up mere miles away from the only place in Europe were resistance fighters were able to stop a train full of Jewish people on route to the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. Some real evil stuff happened, and it happened right here where we live, to people who were still around when we grew up.

From their role in defeating the Nazi regime, to the Marshall plan to rebuild post-war Europe, our gratitude, appreciation, and yes admiration of the United States is something that was always there, unquestioned. You can't throw a stone around here without hitting a square named after an American President, a street named in honor of one of its military regiments, and so on. The US could do no wrong. Its status as an ally and the superpower we would be aligned with come what may, was something no sane person would question.

Today, just over two months into the second term of the Trump administration, everything is on the table. Nothing is sacred. Nobody knows how far things will unravel.

It is all very scary, so what do we do?

One of the houses on the street I used to live on had a large banner attached to the back of the house, facing the railroad that passes behind it. The banner protests a planned railroad extension, an extension that calls for the demolition of several houses on the street. I doubt many commuters know the reason that banner is there, because it doesn't explain any of this. Instead, it's a hand-drawn two-panel comic of a big fish chasing some small fish, only for the small fish to assemble in the shape of an even bigger fish in the next panel, and reverse the chase.

Now that I live in Antwerp, I pass that banner every time I commute to work, and I remain impressed by its simple yet effective and timeless message. You see, it's a powerful image on its own, but it really drives the point home with its companion slogan: Niet panikeren - Organiseren which translates as: Don't panic. Organize!

Things are wild right now. I do not know what will happen next, but I do know that I am not comfortable with the idea of having our user's data under the legislative reach of an administration that is increasingly authoritarian with a particular penchant to go after trans people, of which we count many among our users.

A lot of people voted for President Trump. Realistically, several of you did too. I am certain you had your reasons, and those reasons are valid. The vote is sacred. You do you.

But if — like me — you are rather worried about everything that is happening right now, I hope you will not panic, but instead organize.

joost

Welcome to the 2025 Winter edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've cobbled together on this first day of the year:

• 🎉 Happy New Year (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🏆 How did we do in 2024? (2-minute read by Joost)
• ✅ What are we doing in 2025? (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's begin.

🎉 Happy New Year​

I would like to start by wishing you a happy New Year. 2025 is officially here, and it's kind of an exciting year as far as numbers go. For one thing, 2025 is 45 squared (45²), which is rare as far as years go, as 44² happened way back in 1936, and 46² won't be here until 2116.

But there's more, because 2025 is also the sum of the cube of all single digits (1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³), and it also happens to be a Harshad number.

Wikipedia tells me that:

harshad comes from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver

So, my optimistic interpretation is that 2025 announces itself as a year that is supposed to bring joy.

My only wish is that the numbers don't lie and that indeed this year will bring you lots of joy.

🏆 How did we do in 2024?​

FreeSewing passed a non-trivial milestone in 2024, when we passed the 100k activated user accounts on FreeSewing.org. As I'm writing this, our website has 106.734 activated user accounts. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, the growth of the site has caused issues big and small as we needed to scale up and sometimes adapt the way things are handled behind the scenes to deal with the sheer numbers. We've got a good handle on things, and I expect we'll be culling older/dormant accounts throughout the year, so this is not something that has me worried.

2024 was also the first (full) year since we switched to a pay-what-you-want model. Revenue for the year clocked in at €10.386,63 ($10.808), which is slight increase over the year before (1.6% increase over 2023's €10.222,07).

I am happy about that number, but it's also a source of worry because the ever increasing number of users does not translate in any sort of meaningful way to more financial support. In other words, an increasingly smaller percentage of our users are the ones who make it all possible, and that concerns not only because it's a small minority but also because my feeling is that this group skews heavily to users who have been with us for longer.

In other words, I do have some concerns for the longer term future. But I prefer to focus on the positive and more than 10k going to those who need it most is certainly reason to be thankful.

✅ What are we doing in 2025?​

Version 4 of FreeSewing, that's what we're doing. Yes, the next major release is on its way, although it needs more time in the over before it's really to be consumed. (If you're curious, you can keep an eye on this pull request).

The instigator for the new major release is that we'll drop support for NodeJS 18, and expect at least version 20 going forward. We use the so-called LTS release (long term support) which is recommended for production deployments. The end-of-life date for version 18 is the end of April of this year, so by that time we will move to v4 and NodeJS 20, which necessitates a major version bump.

We are of course using the opportunity to make some other (breaking) changes, although those changes will be minimal in our core library and designs.

The majority of the changes will be in how we manage all the other stuff. From the very start, we've focused on making it easy for contributors to create and add their own designs, and that's proven very successful. FreeSewing's collection of designs has grown not only in absolute numbers, but also in the amount of different people who have contributed them.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the other things that keep FreeSewing ticking. Like the various websites, and backend code, and all the many things big and small that make FreeSewing what it is. We have great contributors who are eager to help out, but historically the focus has always been on providing tools, documentation, guidance, and handrails to create designs. When it comes to working on the website or backend code, documentation is often lacking, and it's just a lot harder to get involved with that aspect of the project.

That is of course entirely my fault. For all the work that went into making it easy for people to contribute designs, no similar effort was undertaken for the other aspects of the project.

So, that will be my personal focus in 2025, and the upcoming v4 release will be a big part of that.

Take care of yourself.

joost

Welcome to the 2024 Autumn edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've got for you for our last newsletter of this year:

• 🕵️ Behind the Seams: Vili (7-minute read by Vili & Karen)
• 🛟 Highlights from the Need Help channel on Discord (2-minute read by Ben)
• 🏋️ Six languages weigh more than one (5-minute read buy Joost)

Shall we get started?

🕵️ Behind the Seams: Vili​

We chatted with Vili to learn a little more about their background and journey to becoming a FreeSewing contributor! Vili has consistently wowed us, both with their enthusiasm for tackling bugs, typos, and dead links on FreeSewing, as well as their dedication to a handmade wardrobe. And we mean truly handmade - Vili’s been working their way through a series of Simon’s created entirely without a sewing machine. (Note from Vili: I’ve since come around to the idea of supplementing my hand sewing with a machine.)

The interview below has been edited for length, and any errors, oversights, etc. are entirely the fault of the interviewer.

How did you learn about FreeSewing?​

I started sewing about two years ago, and I had an ebook on things you can do without a pattern. I think it was called Radical Sewing. There were resources at the end that mentioned FreeSewing. Open source, programmatic, parametric patterns? Sold.

How did you become a contributor?​

I’m studying computer science, focusing on networking and system administration. I was interested early in contributing something back to the project, and then noticed a bug where some links to pattern option documentation weren’t showing up. I submitted an issue, and mentioned I could take a stab at it, and Joost being Joost came back with a super detailed list of what was wrong and how to fix it. So I did.

What has been your contributor work so far?​

Mostly I’ve contributed minor quality of life improvements. If there’s a bug in a pattern that’s causing a crash that’s easy to fix, I’ll take a look at it. Also a lot of dead links. My favorite was when there were quite a few dead links on the dev side of things, which went to a 404 page, and the “let us know” link on the 404 page was also a dead link.

How do you spend your time outside of FreeSewing?​

Besides FreeSewing and sewing, I spend my time on a lot of computer stuff. I host a lot of stuff for my own personal use.

What are you currently working on? Finish any projects recently?​

On the FreeSewing side of things, more of the same: fixing bugs, housekeeping, and dead link extermination on the freesewing.org side of the site.

On the sewing side of things… Simons! I took a bit of a break, but am back at it with something that is starting to resemble a shirt. I’m 26.5 hours into making this current Simon. I don’t actually care how long it takes, but I want to know, plus I’m curious if I’m getting faster. My first one took 60 hours, so still plenty of time to come in under that.

Did you make any updates after your last Simon? Do you have plans to sew any other patterns?​

Well, first I retook all my measurements.Surprisingly enough, when your measurements aren’t complete garbage, the patterns come out nicer. When I had measurements that were more (or at all) accurate, all the things that I knew I needed to fix about the pattern kind of fixed themselves in a lot of cases.

Beyond this Simon, I want to sew more Teagans, some Bruces, and I have four more Simons to go (I have the fabric for them).

What sewing/coding project are you most proud of?​

I thought this would be an easy question because you just say “the last Simon I made.” I think it still might be the last Simon I made, and when I get done with this one, it’s gonna be this Simon. I think the pride in a project comes from “we did something cool here,” but the enjoyment… if I learn something new on a project, that’s more enjoyable.

What in your life are you most proud of?​

In general, I try to have an overall positive impact on the people around me. I get a lot out of helping others, and supporting the people around me.

What do you love the most about sewing?​

I think what I love the most is the freedom to just decide for yourself what exactly you’re going to be wearing. If I want a specific garment, I’m not depending on someone else deciding it’s profitable, I can just make the garment I want.

What do you hate the most about sewing?​

Tracing and cutting out pattern pieces – If I could just get my patterns precut from the fabric I want, I think that’d be pretty good. I’m often working with fabrics where the grainline is extremely obvious, and any imperfection is going to show up immediately. I try to pattern match to an extent, the fronts and backs match, and that’s about as far as I will go.

What’s the hardest part of sewing to you?​

Actually, either getting the pattern pieces traced and cut out of fabric, or just getting the patterns to fit. For my second Simon, I didn’t do any fitting, because I could compare the pattern pieces to the first one. I looked at the differences, and felt pretty sure they’d fix the issues I was having. For the first Simon, I went through five or six muslins, cut out the pieces, and did a combination of running stitch and backstitch here and there to lock it in so it didn’t take forever. But it still took a long time.

What would be your advice for starting sewists?​

A lot of it is going to come down to finding your motivation for sewing, and picking a project that is going to motivate you. There’s a lot of beginner friendly projects, but if you’re not interested in it, you’re just going to stop doing it. Find out what you’re interested in, then figure out what skills you need to do it.

My first two garments were hand-sewn Teagans – it was trial and error to figure out what stitches actually worked, and it eventually worked great, but the first one is a lot rougher, I think there are three or four types of stitches on the first Teagan. Eventually something is gonna stick.

Do you sew mostly for yourself, or for others like friends and family?​

I haven’t sewn any garments for anyone else. I did make three burp cloths for my brothers kids baby shower, but that’s the only thing.

Are you a dog person or a cat person?​

More of a dog person, but I will happily pet and cuddle both.

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

Is this a survival situation, or a get-away-from-civilization situation?

For a get-away-from-civilization situation, I think it’s going to be a sewing project. That’s the one thing I do that’s properly unplugged from everything. One of the things I love about sewing by hand, I can just grab the fabric and a very minimal set of things and sew pretty much anywhere.

I recently came up with a super-minimal sewing kit with a friend, and I’m pretty proud of it. A seam ripper, with the cover holding a pin, a needle, and some thread wrapped around the shaft of the seam ripper. Weighs absolutely nothing, takes up no space, has everything I need, you can take it anywhere. And if you do need to cut something, a seam ripper is better than nothing.

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

Any single person you bring with you, you’re gonna hate by the end of a couple of weeks. But going alone, you’re also going to go insane. I’d gravitate most to picking a volunteer out of my friends or family.

Can we find you on social media?​

I’m not on any social media, but you can check out one of my FreeSewing showcases here and stay tuned for some Simon showcases.

🛟 Highlights from the Need Help channel on Discord​

FreeSewing superstar Ben F. pulled together some recent highlights from the #need-help channel on the FreeSewing Discord.

If you've run into trouble with a pattern, your answer might just be one of these. If you've run into an issue, hop on over to the Discord for support and discussion about ways to troubleshoot.

Jaeger sleeve circumference​

A sleeve that doesn't fit because sleeve circumference is smaller than biceps circumference? For v3 FreeSewing designs, it was noted that the "Waist to armpit", "HPS to waist", and "HPS to bust" measurements have become very important. Inaccurate measurements can result in incorrect armseye and sleeve circumferences.

Please help! Messed up Hugo measurements​

Too small sleevecap and armscye? Another issue with v3 FreeSewing sleeves due to an inaccurate "Waist to armpit" measurement. Enabling the "Legacy armhole depth" option to use v2 armholes (instead of using the "Waist to armpit" measurement) is another possible remedy.

My Bruce Pants are... Pants!​

An initial attempt at making Bruce boxer briefs resulted in a too-short garment? The fix was to correctly locate the location of the waist and retake the "Waist to upper leg" measurement.

Uneven shoulder measurements​

How to deal with a medical issue causing the left and right shoulder measurements to be significantly different? Ideas for creating garments to accommodate this issue could include generating separate patterns for left and right sides (using two different measurement sets), making garments with a center separating zipper, and using a diagonal/asymmetrical hem.

Sewing leather on a Singer​

Using a jeans needle successfully pokes holes in the leather, but the thread doesn't seem to be creating stitches? Tips to use a microtex or leather needle and to make sure the leather fabric is feeding properly.

Cross seam measurement:​

How do you measure the cross seam measurement: nude, with tight-fitting underwear, or with good-fitting pants on? Suggestions included measuring while wearing the underwear intended to be worn with the garment, tying a ribbon around the waist and using a second ribbon along the cross seam, and taking the measurement while walking. Also, double-check your vertical measurements if your pattern isn't fitting correctly in the crotch area.

🏋️ Six languages weigh more than one​

Without wanting to alarm anyone, I recently suffered a bit of a crisis feeling completely overwhelmed by all the work that is sitting in my inbox. It's arguably not really new, and I don't think anyone is waiting for yet another open source maintainer apologizing for being busy.

However, this was the first time this feeling crossed over from phew, this is a lot into I can't do this any longer territory.

It's always darkest before dawn, and now that I've acknowledged that there's a problem and came up with a plan to deal with it (which I'll get to in a second) I'm feeling much better already, so no need to worry about me. However, I want to be open and honest about where these changes are coming from and why I'm making them.

What changes? Well, effective immediately, I will work towards making FreeSewing simpler to maintain, and put more strict boundaries and what we do and what we don't do.

I've already ported FreeSewing.dev to Docusaurus, which makes it a lot easier to maintain. There will be more under-the-hood changes like these that make our life easier, without creating a material difference to our users.

Unfortunately, that alone won't cut it, so I also intent to drop support for translation, and only maintain English from now onward. This too will go unnoticed for the vast majority of our users, but obviously not for all of them.

In May 2018, I wrote the following on the subject:

I’ve decided to add a new challenge to the mix: i18n.

In case you’re wondering, i18n is short for internationalization, aka making the site available in different languages.

Yes, May 25th will be here soon, and yes I need more work like I need another hole in my head. But I feel it’s an important project to try and make freesewing.org available to as many people as possible. And for this, we need to get rid of the language barrier.

Six and a half years later, I still believe that removing the language barrier is important to reach as many people as possible. But I also think that it's fair to say that if we are looking to do less then this is the obvious candidate of things to drop.

To put things in perspective: 87.9% of FreeSewing users have selected English as their language of choice and thus will be unaffected by such a move. Of the remaining users, those who prefer French form the largest contingent (7%) followed by Spanish (3.2%), German (1.7%), Dutch (1.1%) and finally Ukrainian (less then 0.1%). I don't have an easy way to extract similar data for our patrons, but I can safely say that if you combine the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia you have covered the vast majority of patrons too.

To those users who are affected, I am sorry that it has come to this. While translation as such does not add too much overhead (although I handle most of the Dutch translation so it's not nothing), the main culprit is the technical complexity that comes from supporting multiple languages. This is also why dropping one or more languages does not make a meaningful difference.

I'm sharing these numbers because they provide context to frame these changes. They are not a justification for these changes. All users matter, and all patrons matter the world to me. Just because one group is smaller than another does not mean we should throw them under the bus. I hope that's something that needs no explaining. That being said, when something's gotta give, I feel dropping translation is the least impactful because in practice, I'm not convinced it matters all that much.

Today's browsers will translate pages on the fly, and I've more than once seen people interact with the site in non-English, not because they opted for a different language, but rather because their browser is in the habit of translating all English content to whatever is their preferred language. Furthermore, despite the great work of our many volunteer translators, a significant amount of FreeSewing content remains machine-translated because there's just a lot of it. Does it really matter all that much whether it's us providing the (machine) translation or the browser? I don't believe it matters all that much.

To come full circle, I feel it's worth pointing out that nobody has ever asked me to add translation to FreeSewing. I decided to add it because I felt that in a perfect world, everyone could access FreeSewing in the language of their choice. With the way machine learning (or AI if you want) is going, that reality is perhaps already upon us.

I apologize to those of you for which this is bad news, and if you are using FreeSewing in your own projects, rest assured that this does not mean we are removing translation support from our core library.

Long story short: I have come to realize I've bitten of more than I can chew, and I am making adjustments to lighten the load. If you have a better idea on how to do that, I'm all ears.

joost

Welcome to the 2024 Summer edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've cobbled together for you on this first day of July:

• 💰 Vercel unilaterally cancelled our open source sponsorship, now what? (2-minute read by joost)
• 🚢 Why FreeSewing 3.3 is delayed, and why you probably don't care (1-minute read by joost)
• 🇨🇭But can you swizzle it? (3-minute read by joost)
• 🤖 No AI was used to create this newsletter (only to translate it) (1-minute read by joost)

Shall we get started?

💰 Vercel unilaterally cancelled our open source sponsorship, now what?​

On the 18th of June, we received the following email:

Hey there,

Your team FreeSewing is currently enrolled in the Vercel sponsorship program.

Your 100% off discount is expiring on June 14. To give you time to handle this transition, we will automatically enroll your team into a $300/mo discount for the next 6 months, starting on June 14 and ending on December 14.

Thank you for partnering together with us.

I should start by stating the obvious here: Vercel has graciously sponsored our hosting and deployments for a while now, and we're obviously very appreciative of that.

That being said, the message is a bit ambiguous to the point of misleading. For starters, we're not the only open source project to have received this email. A little Googling shows others piping up who [received a similar message.

What seems misleading is that Vercel makes it sound like the deal expired. But it seems more than a bit curious that all the reports I find about this are all expiring at the exact same date (14 June).

Given that Vercel no longer offers sponsorship, this feels like they decided to revoke the deal, and offer a 6-month credit to ease the transition.

So while -- once again -- we are appreciative for the free service we've received, the messaging about these changes seems to muddle the waters about their reasons for doing do, as well as create uncertainty about what will happen next.

We are now in the transition period where they will reduce our monthly bill by $300 for the next 6 months. So we didn't have any opportunity to act beforehand, given that the email reached us 4 days after the transition period started.

So we'll keep an eye on things, consider alternatives and our options, but we may very well need to move some things around before December 14 rolls around. How this will impact our finances remains to be seen.

🚢 Why FreeSewing 3.3 is delayed, and why you probably don't care​

FreeSewing 3.3.0 is going to be the biggest release since 3.0. That is, when it will get released because it's been somewhat stuck for a while.

Eagle-eyed FreeSewing users might have noticed that if you generate a pattern on FreeSewing.org today, it carries the version number v3.3.0-rc.1. That rc stands for release candidate, which signals that this is prerelease that we plan to at some point release as 3.3.0, but we're not there yet.

The reasons we're not there yet have everything to do with our efforts to refactor our pattern editor -- more on that lower down this newsletter -- but these changes are being carefully kept isolated so that in the meanwhile we can just continue to offer the latest and greatest of our work on FreeSewing.org.

So, you might continue seeing that v3.3.0-rc.1 version for a while, or you might see a v3.3.0-rc.2 or something, but rest assured that eventually, v3.3.0 is on its way.

But once again, if FreeSewing.org is how you consumer our software, you have nothing to worry about.

🇨🇭 But can you swizzle it?​

As mentioned a few paragraphs up, the reason version 3.3.0 is delayed is because we are refactoring our pattern editor. Our motivation for this is that when we carried version 3 over the finish line, there were so many changes in core, designs, backend, and frontend that it was a mountainous task to tie them all together in a new FreeSewing.org.

That is also why, at that time, we transplanted our previous pattern editor without too many changes. I can honestly say that at the time, I just did not have enough fuel left in the tank to tack that on to the end of the long march towards v3.

We also opted to share code between our different web environments, so not only FreeSewing.org but also FreeSewing.dev and out stand-alone development environment. Sharing code like that makes perfect sense, if you to handle dark and light mode for example -- or different themes altogether -- there's no need to re-implement that logic for each web environment.

Our pattern editor is part of that shared code, but it is of course a good bit more complex than handling themes. In principle the idea is still solid, but the practicalities of how it has been implemented are starting to slow us down.

For one thing, it's easy to make changes to the editor that will break something else. The stand-alone development environment for people looking to develop new patterns being the number one victim of such breakages.

But just because it's easy to break it does not mean its... easy. If anything, it's rather complicated to wrap your head around which creates an enormous hurdle for contributors to overcome, so it's only the most fearless who dare to go there.

If I ever want to retire, we need to make it easier to understand, and easier to change. That was the main driver for creating a feature branch and setting out on the slightly daunting task of re-implementing it.

But there's another reason too. Because we sometimes get questions like can I integrate this in my own website to sell my own patterns? to which the answer is yes, but ... it's not easy. I wanted to make that easy -- or at least easier -- which includes the ability for people to use our pattern editor, but make it their own.

In other words, have something ready to go that you can plug-in, but also have the flexibility to change those parts of it that you'd like to see differently. Which is where swizzling comes in. To swizzle is to change an implementation with something else, typically changing a default implementation with something custom at run time.

Let's say you want to use our pattern editor, but you really don't like the icon use for seam allowance. Well, you can just swizzle that icon by passing in your own version, or of course something more ambitious.

The end goal will be a React component that we publish on NPM that you can just pull in to your project, to then potentially override certain (sub-) components of it.

It's a work-in-progress, but today it already supports swizzling of 143 components (there's a lot that goes in a pattern editor). But you'll be also able to swizzle various hooks, for example the one that handles the editor state. Although it's worth pointing out that we already support 4 state backend: local storage, session storage, URL anchor state, and native React state.

You will also be able to swizzle the various methods we use, like to provide translation, round numbers, and so on.

While that is (should be?) exciting for people looking to build with FreeSewing, the main goal here is to have a foundation that is stable yet flexible enough to build cool stuff on. It's something that I for one are really excited about.

🤖 No AI was used to create this newsletter (only to translate it)​

If you're anything like me, you can't hear anything over the sound of your eyes rolling when people start talking about AI but still, I need to clarify something.

FreeSewing has a team of volunteer translators who do great work to make sure that as many people as possible can enjoy the fruits of our labour. The way it works is that we write everything in English first, and then they go to work to translate it bit by bit. If some parts haven't been translated yet, we just fall back to the English content.

This works great for the website, where the bulk of the material is already translated and when something new gets added, it eventually will get translated too and with a bit of delay everything is OK.

It does not work well for this newsletter, and that is of course like everything else wrong with FreeSewing entirely my fault. You see, I am lazy to a fault and to make matters worse, I tend to work better towards a deadline. Which means that it is now -- checks the clock -- coming up to 17:00 on the day the newsletter has to be sent out, and I'm still writing it.

Suffice to say that this leaves absolutely no time for people to translate my ramblings, so I then tend to revert to using a machine translation instead. I know our translators hate it when I do that because it reflects poorly on all their hard work.

So, if you are reading this as a non-English edition and you find the translation lacking, rest assured it's all my fault and our translators are not to blame.

joost

Welcome to the 2024 Spring edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've got for you today, no joke:

• 👕 FreeSewing 3.2 brings Tristan, Lumina, Lumira, and more (3-minute read by joost)
• 📨 Email just got harder, again (1-minute read by joost)
• 🕸️ Building FreeSewing's web of trust in the wake of the XZ backdoor attempt (5-minute by joost)
• 🤔 How FreeSewing's challenges have shifted over time (2-minute read by joost)

Shall we get started?

👕 FreeSewing 3.2 brings Tristan, Lumina, Lumira, and more​

We released FreeSewing v3.2 earlier during Q1 2024 and it includes 3 new designs, as well as a range of bug fixes and improvements.

Let's have a look at the highlights:

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.

Tristan was design by Natalia who also wrote a blog post about the new Tristan design, so that's a great place to get all the details about this new design.

The Lumina and Lumira Leggings​

I’ll give you a second to scan that title again, but yes there are two different leggings patterns with similar names: the Lumira Leggings and the Lumina Leggings.

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.

Bug fixes and improvements​

Regular readers of the newsletter will know that we continiously roll out improvements on FreeSewing.org and that those are not tied to a new release, but it's a good opportunity to list them so here are some highlights of the bug fixes and improvements that went into the 3.2 release:

• Sandy 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.
• 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. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Our i18n plugin now supports now supports translation of nested arrays of strings, which gives designers more flexibility to concatenate translated parts of strings.

The FreeSewing 3.2 announcement blog post has all the details.

📨 Email just got harder, again​

If you are reading this in your inbox, and not an archived copy on FreeSewing.org, then we were able to deliver this email to you, which is good news.

What you may not realize is that doing so is not exactly trivial, and hasn't been for years. But recently, things have gotten even more complex. Gmail (Google) and Yahoo for example have implemented new restrictions in the first quarter of 2024 which requires additional work on our end to maximize the chances of this email actually landing in your inbox.

Furthermore, so-called bulk email senders are subject to the most stringent checks. If you send 5000 messages a day, you are considered a bulk sender and will be subject to extra scrutiny. As this newsletter has about 14k subscribers, we are being held to the highest possible standards.

Obviously, nobody likes spam, and I am not advocating against these rules. It's just that the amount of time and effort required to make something as seeminly trivial as sending out an email work at scale is ever-increasing as the internet trends towards a de-facto pay-to-play model.

For now, I am still making those efforts, and hopefully they proved sufficient to get this to your inbox. But it's something we may need to revisit at a later time if it becomes an increasing strain on our limited time and resources.

🕸️ Building FreeSewing's web of trust in the wake of the XZ backdoor attempt (5-minute by joost)​

Depending on where you get your news from, you might have heard or read about the backdoor attempt of the xz compression utility.

In a nutshell, a malicious actor attempted to introduce a backdoor in this utility, which ultimately was an attempt to smuggle a gated RCE exploit into SSHd.

Or, in ELI5 terms: Somebody contributed code to a small library that had nefarious intent. It was done in a sneaky way and the ultimate target was not the library itself, but rather another software project that uses this library: The Secure Shell Deamon. A daemon is just a cooler word for a service on a computer, because why not make things cooler. This particular daemon or service, the secure shell daemon is responsible for handling secure shell (SSH) connections. It's the gold standard for remote management of Linux (and unix) systems.

The code smuggled in a gated RCE backdoor. RCE stands for remote code execution, meaning it allows you to do stuff remotely without needing to authenticate or anything. Or to put it differently, it allows one to control a remote computer system they normally should not have access to. The fact that it is gated means that the author of the malicious code took steps to ensure that only they could use the malicious code. Like a backdoor with a key.

It's hard to overstate the gravity of this attempt at backdooring essentially every Linux system on the planet. It's not only the world's most widely used operating system, its dominance of server operating systems is overwhelming. Or as I often say: Anything that matters runs on Linux.

This is an ongoing story and I for one am hoping it will be made into a Netflix mini-series starring David Cross in the role of Andres Freund, but I digress. This is the FreeSewing newsletter, so I wanted to lift something out of this story that I think is relevant to FreeSewing, or really to any open source project out there.

Maintainer burnout and the long con of gaining trust​

One of the fascinating elements of this story is who contributed the changes, and why they were accepted without sufficient scrutiny to reveal the malicious intent of the contribution.

Because the user who made them had been contributing for years to the project and in light of this work had risen in status to a level where there was a lot of implicit trust based on their work, despite knowing next to nothing about who or what goes behind username JiaT75 (in this case). Such a long con is a significant investment of time and effort, so the currently held assumption is that this was a nation-state actor (think NSA or some other country's equivalent). It's also important to note that the xy maintainer was having a hard time dealing with the long tail of responsibilities of maintaining software and was actively looking for help to stave off burnout. It's a scenario that is shockingly common across open source projects and creates a situation where malicious actors can all too easily take advantage of exhausted maintainers desperate to offload some of the work.

Establishing a web of trust​

This problem of who can you trust is of course not new. One way to counter it is by establishing a web of trust. This is how things are done in larger open source software projects involving many volunteers, such as the Debian project.

In practical terms, such a web of trust is built upon relationships between people who know and have verified each other's true identity. For example, there's a number of people in the FreeSewing community that I have met in real life. We've not merely met face to face, but have spent time together, we know where we live, we know each other's partners or family, or have some other tangible way that provides a high level of assurance that this person really is who they claim to be.

Those people, in turn, can have similar connections with others who they know, have met, and trust to a level that goes well beyond the online world. This creates a web of trust where you can trust your friends, and the friends of your friends and so on.

In light of current events, and in acknowledgment of the rapid accelaration of what is possible with generatative artificial intelligence, FreeSewing will henceforth restrict all write access or elevated privileges to community members who are part of FreeSewing's web of trust.

We will of course continue to accept -- or rather review -- contributions from everyone. But permissions that unlock the potential to do harm will be restricted to people for whom trust has been established AFK (away from keyboard).

In order to facilitate building such a web of trust, we will start documenting these connections between people. This will allow people who are looking to take on more responsibilities within FreeSewing to look at its web of trust and see who lives close to them so they can hook in to our web of trust through that person.

I realize that FreeSewing is extremely unlikely to be the target of a backdoor attempt by a nation state actor, but adopting best practices and being transparent about how we do things is a good idea regardless.

So, I will start building and documenting this web of trust over the next couple of weeks, and review all access control and permissions to make sure we are doing everything we can to prevent even the most dedicated actors from poisoning the well.

🤔 How FreeSewing's challenges have shifted over time​

Did you know that FreeSewing v1 was released 7 years and 7 days ago? Since that time we've made many changes big and small, and our core library and plugin system have matured into a reliable -- and certainly opinionated -- way to design parametric sewing patterns.

The challenges that are most interesting from a technical point of view have been more or less solved. What's left is the user-facing side of things, or the user experience (UX) as we like to call it.

FreeSewing can do a lot, so how make all of that functionality available to the users without overwhelming them? Is that even possible on mobile, which is the dominant way in which people go online now. How do you create it an intuitive experience, or guide someone who arrives on FreeSewing.org after a free sewing patterns Google search towards an understanding of what FreeSewing is and does in the handful of seconds that people are likely to give it a chance before moving on to the next link in their search results.

To be clear: I do not know the answer to these questions. But it is increasingly what we spend our time on. The percentage of people out there who use our software directly is insignificant compared to the amount of people who (only) consume our software through our website. For most visitors, FreeSewing is a website and if it is anything else, that is probably not clear to them, or even relevant.

Obviously there is room for improvement, but often there is no one obvious path forward. Perhaps -- or should I say almost certainly -- this is an area where I lack the talent or skill to come up with some sort of grand overarching strategy. But I find myself second-guessing a lot of my own ideas or impulses in this area.

So, I was wondering if we could do a little experiment. An experiment where I ask you -- my dear reader -- a simple question. Are you ready for it? Here is the question:

What is FreeSewing?

I'd love to hear your answer. You can simply hit reply to let me know.