newsletter:2025 Summer edition
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