Hi total newly to Digital pattern making here… I’ve drafted and sewn up my bodice block, which is great…
over the years i’ve bought some PDF patterns that i’ve printed and altered to fit me, mainly FBA and length adjustment. is it possible to import the pdf as a back ground or image to trace off the pattern and then make the adjustments…
The reason I’m asking this is I have gone over to projecting my patterns, which I am having great success with and wondered if there was a way I could use Seamly to recreate the pattern with my alterations …
Just so happens we will have a background image import feature working soon. It’s being implemented in a 2 step process… a basic ver with import and size and rotation manipulation and an advanced ver with saving and scaling to real size.
I was just wondering if importing existing digital patterns was possible and how one would need to get it seamly 2D ready to be able to manipulate the fit. I currently have a catalogue of digital patterns in PDF and Projector format that I’d like to adjust for fit, and would love to use seamly’s adjustment function to make this easier for me.
Seamly is unable to import other formats do to the nature of the way the application works. It’s based on parametric formulas that are embedded in the pattern file so any other format is meaningless to Seamly. Part of the formulas are measurement variables which are set when a measurement file is loaded.
For ex: In the pic below it shows the properties for the point tool A3, where it’s a line drawn from point A2 to point A3 with an angle of 0 deg and a length of half the waist_arc_f plus a 1/4".
where waist_arc_f is the front half of ther waist measurement variable found in the measurement file: It has a value of 16… so half of 16 plus 1/4 inch is 8.25".
If we load a different measurement file, that’s where the pattern adapts to the size. Without these formulas Seamly does not work… and any other pattern / vector format is not going to have the formulas.
To add to what @Douglas has said… You can load up an image of the pattern pieces and draft over them, but then you’ll need to know a little about patternmaking and still load in a measurements file to use so that you can alter the measurements afterwards.
My preferred way is to load an image into my basic pattern and then go about designing my garment.
Thank you @Grace and @Douglas. I’m currently learning how to draft patterns in Illustrator. I am able to trace over a PDF pattern imported into the programe if it does not allow me to turn layers off. Would I essentially be doing the same thing in seamly?
You can do that in Seamly but that will only be drawing points, lines and curves. The drafting will look the same as the pattern which is copied, but the real magic happens when those lines are drafted using actual measurements from a measurement file, created in SeamlyME, so that when you change your measurement file, the pattern will automatically resize to another person’s measurements.
When you install Seamly, you have 2 icons on your desktop… Seamly2D which is used to draft the pattern and SeamlyME which is used to record the measurement areas and measurements that you use. In SeamlyME, you have the option to either create an individual measurement file or a multisize measurement file - your choice.
When you start a new pattern, you load up your measurement file so that the measurement areas are available to be used while drafting.
Once your pattern is drafted, you can change the measurements of a multisize file or you can upload a different individual measurement file. The pattern will automatically adjust to the size of the measurement file uploaded.
We have a very nice Wiki (the link is at the top of the page) which will explain all the tools to you. In the Wiki is a very easy pattern that I suggest you quickly work through. It will answer a lot of your questions and give you a better idea of how Seamly works.
