Skip to main content

newsletter:2026 Summer edition

· 9 min read

Welcome to the 2026 Summer edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

As the calendar ticks over to July, here's the roundup of last quarter:

  • 🤔 Why did you join FreeSewing? (1-minute read by joost)
  • 👕 Ashley, Hannah, Polly, Tina and Toni: Our five latest designs (2-minute read by joost)
  • 🪂 Wired lists FreeSewing as an example of All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology (1-minute read by joost)
  • 🏗️ Infrastructure as (open source) code (2-minute read by joost)
  • 🎨 The ongoing rewrite of FreeSewing.eu (2-minute read by joost)
  • 🤝 The FreeSewing fellowship (3-minute read by joost)

Let's go.

 

 

🤔 Why did you join FreeSewing?​

I've been working on our website a bit (see below) and as I was fixing some positioning issues on the Reasons to join section, I realized that all these reasons are written from our vantage point. But people probably have their own reasons, and those are just as valid, if not more so.

So, we've added space for an additional reason that is randomly picked from a list of reasons submitted by our users. Obviously, that makes most sense when we have a diverse list of reasons, so that's where you come in.

We'd like to hear why you decided to join FreeSewing, or in retrospect, why do you think it’s a good idea for others to do so?

You can share your input on our forum, or just hit reply, that works too.

 

 

👕 Ashley, Hannah, Polly, Tina and Toni: Our five latest designs​

Over the last 3 months, we've seen 3 minor releases of FreeSewing: versions 4.8, 4.9, and 4.10. Together, they combine for 5 new designs:

  • Ashley A-Line Shorts by Gawain:

    Ashley extends the Titan block. Much of its code is directly lifted from Percy, for cutting the legs short, drafting the pockets, and automatically setting a curve for the waistband (though Ashley adds a more dramatic curve to the back waistband only instead of curving all the waistband pieces). The fly pieces and belt loops are pilfered from Charlie. The big new thing Ashley does is add a yoke to the back pieces for some extra shaping at your butt. This is a common detail on jeans.

  • Hannah Hoodie by Jonathan:

    Hannah is a relatively fitted hoodie pattern with optional support for fitting curvy bodies and larger busts, bums and bellies and different sleeve style options. > Hannah is based on Toni Top and the hood from Hugo and Yuri.

  • Polly Plush by Gawain:

    Polly is a base to make simple humanoid or anthropomorphic fabric dolls. It has many options to change the size and proportions of the doll, and a couple of alternate heads and legs to allow for more animal-like characters

  • Toni Top by Jonathan:

    Toni is a configurable t-shirt or top design that supports different sleeve styles. It has basic support for fitting large busts, bellies and bums. These special adjustments are only enabled if you provide the related optional measurements.

  • Tina Top by Jonathan:

    Tina is a simple overlap/faux wrap top based on the Toni top.

 

 

🪂 Wired lists FreeSewing as an example of All the Ways Europe Is Ditching American Technology​

Wired published an article about all the ways Europe is moving away from US tech:

As a flanking resource to go along with the article, they have compiled a chronological timeline of migrations which includes -- as its very second entry -- the migration of FreeSewing from US tech providers to EU-based alternatives.

It is of course not a surprise to us that we did that migration, but it was a surprise to have been included on this list. So thanks for the shout-out, Wired.

🏗️ Infrastructure as (open source) code​

If sewing or sewing pattern is all you care about, then I guess you can stop reading here, for the remainder of this newsletter will be dedicated to the questions raised in our previous edition, and in particular, what steps we've taken in the mean time.

As a reminder, in our previous edition of this newsletter, I talked about being spread too thin, and how we wanted to grow the project horizontally to ensure that we cannot merely cope, but continue to thrive, offer more designs, a better service, and so on.

As part of that endeavor, in May we have open-sourced FreeSewing's infrastructure. The configuration of various servers and the services running on them, how the systems are set up, Ansible playbooks to manage them, and so on.

At a time when other people and organizations are actively closing off repositories because of the threat of vulnerability discoveries by AI models, this is perhaps counter-intuitive, if not ill-advised.

However, our aim here is clear: We want to get more people actively involved. So this is why we are dragging more of what goes on behind the scenes into the sunlight, in the hopes that it attracts contributors who have an interest in that behind-the-scenes stuff.

If you are one of those people who are interested in learning by doing, then please keep reading, there's more to come.

 

 

🎨 The ongoing rewrite of FreeSewing.eu​

Another area where we need to find more help is in maintaining our website. To facilitate that, we have embarked on a refactor to port our website from Docusaurus/webpack to Vite in an effort to slash build times and memory consumption. This should make it easier for people to dip their toes in, since currently even getting the website's development environment to run is something that simply won't work for some contributors due to memory constraints.

We're not there yet, but we've got most of the functionality up and running, and the results are rather satisfying.

On the build infrastructure, which gives us a good comparison for total build time (prebuild + build), here's the speed-up:

  • develop branch (Docusaurus): 814 seconds (13:34)
  • eusite branch (Vite): 44 seconds

There's one big catch though: We (currently) do not generate SSR output for the vite site. This is something we might add later, although these days I'm not certain that it's all that important. I mean, it's important for SEO but to what extent is that relevant in the age of LLMs. Even people who use Google are not seeing traditional search results.

As I mentioned, this is a work-in-progress. There's an open pull request for it, and perhaps more importantly, we publish preview builds at preview.freesewing.eu.

So feel free to check it out and kick the tires, even though we know there are still sharp edges, we appreciate the feedback. Oh, and some of you will be happy to hear that we've brought back themes, including the hax0r theme, which was a fan favorite.

 

 

🤝 The FreeSewing Fellowship​

There is, in the academic, professional, or vocational contexts, this concept of a fellowship. It's basically an exchange where one party wants to learn, and the other could use some help. And so they make a deal that benefits them both. For example, if you wanted to learn to be a blacksmith, you would try to find a blacksmith who would take you under their wing and learn the trade, in return for you helping out.

In the same way, we would like to launch a FreeSewing fellowship. The idea being that if you are somebody -- or know somebody -- who is interested in what we do, then please step forward. We will teach you everything we know in exchange for your help.

Here's some food for thought:

  • This FreeSewing newsletter goes out to over 63K subscribers. Have you ever sent an email to 63K people, or tried to? How would you do that? And how much would it cost?
  • Our backend database holds just over 520K user accounts. Are you involved in a project that has half a million user accounts? What database would you use? How would you structure it?
  • Our main website consumes about 7 to 9 terabytes of traffic every month. Does that seem like a lot? Where would you host it? And what sort of bill can you expect for that amount of traffic?
  • The editor on our preview site is currently broken due to an issue that is known as the temporal dead zone in JavaScript. Have you ever heard of it? Does it sound kinda intriguing? Or rather boring?
  • Our editor is called as a single React component, but under the hood there's plenty of prop-drilling which tends to trigger frequent re-renders. Would a React context be better, or should we switch to something like Zustand for state management? Maybe we should be glad it works at all and not touch it?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. Chances are, these are not even questions that you find particularly interesting. And that's fine. You're here for the sewing patterns, right?

I am including these questions for the people who do find (some of) them interesting. Because those are the people we are hoping will want to consider our fellowship.

To be clear, it would be great to have people step forward who know the answers to all of these questions. But that is probably not very realistic.

So instead, we're looking for people who do not know (all) the answers, but do find the questions interesting, and would like to learn more.

Fellowships that are unpaid are typically seen as a bad thing because it's understood that only people with wealth (or wealthy parents) can undertake such a fellowship.

FreeSewing does not have the financial means to offer a paid fellowship. But, we also do not expect the kind of time commitment of a (full-time) job. Rather, this is something you would do on the side, as a hobby or learning track.

In summary, this is the deal: We'll teach you everything we know, in return for your help.

  • If you're interested, please hit reply and let us know.
  • If you know somebody who could be interested, feel free to forward this open invitation.

Thank you for considering it.

joost