Hello Sini, I now know of two users in Finland - and there might be a few more coming soon. I plan to do an introduction for Seamly2D in October, in Finland. For a person like me, who is/was uneducated on pattern making, it has been a tedious path beginning with Valentina. The team with a vision and comunity around Seamly2D is doing an excellent job!
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Hi @Wetdesign, Thanks for your plans to conduct a Seamly2D introduction in Finland. Will this be a workshop or a presentation? Let us know about your Seamly2D event and we’ll publish it on the Facebook page. When it happens please share photos with us. Best of luck with your plans – onnea suunnitelmiin!
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It will be a presentation combined with a small workshop at an education institution. I do not have an exact date yet.
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Hi, @Wetdesign! Nice to know, that as a Finn, I’m not alone here. I’m living in Hki. Would you be willing to tell me the whereabouts of the institution where you’re giving the presentation and, maybe, also your living place?
I’m a professional in the field of apparel manufacture, a teacher in fact, even though I’m not acting as one at the moment. If you need help with the knowledge pattern making is based upon, I’d be glad to give you a hand.
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100km west of Helsinki. If you are a professional in apparel, maybe soon there will be a few more who have the skills to use Seamly. I would love to share the experience, there may and must be a lot that I am totally unaware of. Untacking is what I do most 
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I suppose I should introduce myself…
I’m Steven, just a regular dude who knows how to sew (though not the best). My mum taught me and my siblings how when we were young (she made all of our clothes) and I don’t mind it. For me, it’s a creative outlet and no different to metal fabrication or woodwork (which I also do). You still need to be accurate in measurements, and draw twice, cut once.
I downloaded seamly because I’m currently injured and needed something to keep me mentally occupied while I’m unable to get out and about. It’s also a problem solving exercise, as if you are using a book (Armstrong, Aldrich, etc) to create blocks, you have to think about ways you can convert the process into a computer drawing.
Maybe one day I’ll actually be able to finish a project and can share it.
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Hello,
I am a 62 year old dude from Belgium.
Being retired I knew I had to do something to get myself mentally and physically happy. So, I thought I follow some evening classes, you know, nice company, you learn something, and so on, and so on… But my wife what not against the fact that I was going to do something, but she insisted that it had to be something that she could benefit from. So learning Italian of Spanish was out, as was everything IT (I’ve been an IT-guy for over more than 35 years and running Linux at home).
When I was young I used to do quite a lot of miniature shipbuilding in wood and plastics and my wife said: Why don’t you start sewing (implied but not said - "for me’ 
) . Think needles and threads instead of glue, patterns instead of plans, sewing machines instead of mini lathes, cotton, and other garments instead of wood or plastic. Well, when I looked at it that way, sewing was a possibility.
That was 5 years ago.
Since then I followed quite a few sewing courses, two years pattern drawing, bought some sewing machines, … the usual stuff.
Those pattern courses I liked them. I think that today I feel confident enough to draw my own, sorry, her patterns and the sewing dexterity is growing also, so all in all a nice hobby which makes my wife happy.
Seamly is my first experience with CAD and I’m just starting.
Still trying to find my way, reading the wiki and other online info/tutos, but I am confident that in the end, I’ll be happy with the result.
So just you know I live in Brugge (or Bruges), speak Dutch, French, English and understands German.
My thanks go out to all the devs for their time spent in making, testing and offering us another super FOSS package.
A.J.
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Hi & welcome, @eijie. What an amazing story I really and truly admire you for ‘choosing’ to learn how to sew and make your own sewing patterns.
Please don’t hesitate to ask if you get stuck on anything. We’re all here to learn from each other and to help where we can. 
Welcome,
Nice to see a fellow Belgian on the forums! Did you follow courses at Syntra west or somewhere else?
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@AVI,
I follow(ed) courses in the SNT. Did 2 years ‘patroontekenen’ system Roose. I am just a hobbyist and I sew mostly for my wife.
Just discovered Seamly2D because I was looking for an Open Source pattern drawing software that could run on Linux.
Groetjes uit Brugge
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Hi! I suppose I ought to introduce myself since I plan to hang around here for a while I’m a native of Texas, but currently live in Kansas. Growing up, Mom sewed a hefty proportion of us boys’ clothes, & made sure that we all knew the basics of the art. I have haltingly pursued the art further, but generally find numbers too confusing to enjoy mathing out the alteration of a pattern.
In an effort to find a pattern set that would self-adjust for different measurements, work on my Mac, be a reasonable price, (or better,) & hopefully be customizable I eventually discovered Valentina. It was amazing, awesome, & leagues over my head. I kept it more for the sake of “maybe someday” than anything else. I probably tried being an author again, but words & I don’t get along very well either. & I did continue to look for activities that would help my understanding of topography grow -without tossing me off the high-dive.
That computer eventually succumbed to chaos. I soon turned to Linux because all the programs I used were Linux-native anyway, & a decent number of them had to be installed via the Terminal. It wasn’t much of a jump, I’ve actually had less need to play with the Terminal than I did on the old Mac. At some point in there I was unable to find Valentina again, but was eventually able to discover that it had changed to Seamly2d for some weird reason, (it took a bit of looking to assure myself that it wasn’t a phishing scheme, or worse.)
In addition to my dream of being able to use Seamly for personal projects, I have more recently conceived of the idea of selling custom patterns pre-printed onto the fabric meant to be used, (maybe even pre-cut, for those wannabe seamsters who are afraid of accidentally chopping it into mince-meat.) That’s going to require something more powerful than multi-size patterns. Of course commercial use is well beyond the ability of someone who hasn’t figured out enough to use it for personal use!
To get to a reasonable use level I’ve been watching paper-drafting type YouTubers, & playing with Seamly on my Ubuntu Linux box, & on my Chromebook with Linux (Virtual Machine?) but I went to what was probably a lot of useless messy trouble trying to get it on the Chromebook, so I’m getting ready to factory reset it, & try again, & write a tutorial, (or at least a dry step-by-step,) for anyone else who is interested, but is more afraid of making a horrible mistake than even I am! 
Now I’ve probably rambled on too long. Whatever of my dreams come to pass, I intend to stick around & help out the community in some way! Except for that questionnaire at the top right now. I have no idea how to answer over half the questions, & some of them I’m not even sure what they’re about! All this is still pretty far over my head. 
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Why did I come here?
Well, over the last few years I’d accumulated a few shirts with collars that had become worn, but I was too attached to them to throw them out. I dimly remembered that once or twice my mother turned worn collars inside-out, and I wondered whether this was an easy job. I decided to have a go. This was about May this year. As I had never sewn anything in my life I didn’t even contemplate doing this by hand and had no intention of buying a sewing machine either. I wondered whether there might be something in between these two extremes and discovered that there was: handheld sewing machines, which looked like monster staplers and did not inspire confidence, and mini sewing machines, about the size of a dinner plate, which looked promising. I ordered one of these from Hong Kong and it arrived a few days later ($29 including delivery). I unpicked a few collars, turned them around and sewed them back in with this little machine. It was crude, but it worked well enough to make the shirts wearable again. The unforeseen side effect, though, was that while working on collars I started to get interested in the construction of shirts, and began to wonder how hard it would be to design and create my own. I took my own measurements, did some googling and youtubing, used a folded paper cut-out to solve the mind-bending problem of sleeve plackets and then, in Inkscape, drew my first pattern. The resultant shirt was not bad, though the stitching was rough. I wore it for a few days before taking it apart and figuring out how to make it better. After switching to Valentina (alias Seamly2D) and refining my pattern over and over again, learning to sew better each time (having also invested in a Brother NS15), I am now at the point where the end result is well tailored and comfortable to wear: flat-felled seams, interfaced collar and cuffs and symmetrical pleats all present and correct.
So that’s my tale so far: a seven-month journey from nowhere to making my own shirts.
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Oh, wow! @Mako, I must say, you are amazing 
I keep wishing my husband will take up sewing, because if he brings me just one more collar that I must replace, I think I’m going to beat him with the sewing machine 
I swear he has teeth at the back of his neck.
@Grace, Your post made me laugh. I wonder if removable collars will ever come back into vogue. They seem like a neater way to deal with the problem of abrasive male necks.
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I would love to see removable (attached with lacing) sleeves as well. The human shoulder seems to be so variable that most mass produced sizes do an abysmal job of fitting through the sleeve to shoulder area. This is a pet peeve of mine and I am currently seam picking and remaking a best loved top for a friend who surprise, surprise does not exactly fit a single size of premade garment
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I’m a guy, internet alias Seeker5528, real name Don Mills.
I am just beginning my sewing journey.
The beginning of the chain of events the led me to want to sew was a combination of most of my shirts being black or grey and second I stopped buying briefs 5 or 6 years ago and am down to 3 or 4 pairs.
I’ve been buying boxer briefs at American Eagle for the last 5 or 6 years and they have a variety of colors and patterns so they are not a problem.
Not interested in buying briefs again so I thought I would give the bikini’s and thongs a shot. The stuff on Amazon is more than I want to pay, or functional but not the colors and patters I’m looking for, or colors and patterns I would like, but they don’t look like something I would want to wear for running or other active stuff.
While I was searching some women’s bikinis and thongs were coming up in my searches that were more the colors and patterns I was looking for and pretty similar to the guy bikinis and thongs except for not being pouched, so I found some cheap women’s thongs to try and a guys thong for comparison and a good fitting women’s thong is just as comfortable as the one that is made for a guy, so then I tried some bikinis and hipsters. The problem with the women’s stuff for a guy is the sizing is a little more hit and miss, gusset may be too narrow, leg band not tight enough.
Shorts is another thing I am not happy with. For running I would prefer something less baggy than the basketball type of shorts that do not have the mesh lining. For general wear there is some stuff with pockets I like and no mesh lining, but I’m not a fan of earth tones.
And then there is the beach wear/swim/activewear shorts that have colors I like, may or may not have a pocket on one or both legs. If they have a back pocket that you feel comfortable that your wallet won’t fall out of not having a pocket on the leg isn’t a big deal, but all of those types of shorts seem to have the mesh lining, which is not a deal breaker, but I would prefer to not have the mesh lining.
Half of my button down shirts I was not wearing, so I donated them to Value Village. Kept a couple of white shirts for the dressy occasions, kept the flannel ones, but at the moment I am not looking for new flannel partly because those are not the color patterns I’m looking for and partly because I am looking for button down shirts the have shorter sleeves. So far the ones I like have been a little hard to find. I have had better luck at the thrift shops than at the department stores or Amazon.
I did find button down shirts on Amazon that have a mandarin collar that are different shades of blue. I like the mandarin collar but not a big color selection with those kind of shirts.
By this time I been looking up a bunch of fabric stuff on the internet, what is elastane, what is modal, looked at the labels on stuff at the store to try to get some idea of how much of this or that is needed for something to be “stretchy” and how stretchy is it. And for the colors I started watching tie dye videos, videos about using freezer paper as a stencil, then I started thinking, underwear doesn’t take that much fabric. So I started looking into the sewing videos.
I didn’t have a sewing machine so my first project was to create a band for my Fitbit by cutting up an old phone arm band and some fabric from an old t-shirt and bought some elastic to use for the around the wrist part of the band and across the ends of the Fitbit on the back side of the band.
Got a sewing machine for Christmas, so then I started looking more seriously at the underwear videos, not a lot of videos or patterns for guys bikinis or thongs, but I did find one or two patterns that have the pouched front so I can have a couple different things printed or traced to compare to while creating a pattern.
So I installed Seamly2d and Valentina and here I am.
Currently I have followed the Timelace Studio drafting tutorial up to the point where the front of a pair of panties is drafted, still need to go back and do the rest of it.
Figured I would start with the underwear, do some kind of shorts, work my way up to doing a button down shirt with a mandarin collar.
I expect it to take a while to get to the whole mandarin shirt thing, probably with multiple trips to the Goodwill Outlet as a cheap way to get some fabric for the trial runs.
That got a little longer winded than I intended and I normally don’t talk much, so signing off now.
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Hi & welcome, @Seeker5528
LOL, yes, it’s so exciting to be able to make your own clothes in the fabrics and designs of your choice. And yes, underwear is one of those things that no one really sees and also never look or fit like one would really like them to, but can make a huge difference to ones self-confidence.
Please don’t hesitate to ask if there’s anything you need help with and have fun. It’s a really exciting journey
@Grace Thanks. I’m sure I will have questions at some point.
I went through the rest of the tutorial and reorganized some stuff to give me a place to set up the sewing machine.
Now I have to think about what kinds of lines and points I want for visual reference of some minimums and maximums at the start of a design.
I did wonder if Seamly2d was still alive or not. Doesn’t look like there has been anything significant in the git repo for a while and it looks like the security certificate for seamly.cloud expired.
Might want to have a sticky note for new users indicating that seemly.cloud is my-pattern.cloud now, it took me a while before I saw a post that mentioned uploading something to my-pattern.cloud.
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Ciao a tutti, sono Loredana e scrivo dall’Italia. Sto utilizzando questo programma con molta soddisfazione. Con i vostri consigli spero di utilizzarlo al meglio.
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