Hello! And welcome to the first post on my blog!
I’ve tried writing different blogs on and off over the years since I was a teenager. And frankly the all fizzled out due to one core reason: I just didn’t want to write about what I made the blog for. That sounds silly, but they would all be related to my work, but far enough from my work to be able to discuss topics openly. And that is effectively double the effort — coming up with small toy problems that are adjacent to your work but not quite is… draining to say the least.
In graduate school I thought I would get on by simply producing excellent research. To a large extent that is where I focused the majority of my effort — and it did pay off, I certainly got recognition for it. However, moving to San Francisco and experiencing silicon valley culture made me realize the importance of sharing my work. Sales and marketing are (at the horror of engineers) unfortunately an extremely important part of life. The solution is to really just document anything I’m doing, not needing to stick to a particular niche, hence this blog of just what I feel like posting. I’m also currently in the middle of writing my PhD thesis though, so you’d probably be right to say I made all this to avoid writing it…
I am an irritatingly particular person. This manifests in all aspects of my life, including my sewing, but also my choice of platform. Everything out there seemed far too clunky for what I really needed — a markdown editor, and the ability to add some pictures. In the past I would go through and actively go and make the required web applications myself, but now it’s so much faster. The advent of LLMs has made it so that you can get off the ground much faster and finish the uninteresting boilerplate extraordinarily quickly, leaving you to implement the details you care most about. It’s been about a decade since I’ve done any web development jobs, and getting up to speed with what’s new is constant churn, given no web dev framework really lasts longer than a fart in the wind. Hence, ChatGPT and Claude have been used extensively in this blog platform I wrote called Spoingo. ChatGPT certainly has chops but Claude 3.7 Sonnet is an incredible designer.
I’m aiming to write primarily about longform technical sewing content here. Since this is mostly visual content I added a few custom rules so I could add nicely aligned images and galleries here, which you should see soon. I think I approach fashion design just like I do engineering, which means I approach it quite differently from how it’s commonly taught. This often means I’m constantly stuck on figuring out why a technique is used rather than just using it, which seems to be different from the heuristic way that many fashion design books and courses are taught. There have been many different blogs from the 2010s onward that have helped me a lot with my technical sewing journey, and that’s somewhat why I was motivated to focus mine on the same topic. Many of these old blogs are inactive now, and the authors likely have no idea of the impact they have on the wider sewing community. Here are some of my favorite!
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HandmadePhD — this blog taught me how to draft pants properly, and control aspects such as when pants twist, or bow in or out from a pattern. I think she thinks similarly to me and is unsatisfied by learning purely heuristically and develops her own hypotheses and experiments to back them up. This often means sewing 3, 5, maybe more muslins for testing a single variable — extremely high effort! I use a modified version of her drape line approach to pants fitting and it truly is a nice unified theory of pants fitting.
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JuliaBobbin — Julia probably has some of the best tailoring content on the internet. I am constantly in awe at her technical expertise. She is wonderful at documenting her own learning and steps and shares lots of tips and resources. I find that a lot of tailoring content on the internet is pretty opaque. Perhaps because professional tailors learn through many years being an apprentice and don’t feel any need to share it. Tailoring has many different options and styles, but Julia’s blog and her recommended books gave me an idea of the options that are available — for example, couture v.s. machine-sewn, tradeoffs on which internal structuring to use, etc, which is a great springboard to start figuring out exactly what you want to use for your tailored pieces.
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Making and Candor — Emilia posts a lot about technical tailoring content like Julia, but I believe they are tailoring apprentices. Lots of focus hence on specific tailoring techniques like pad stitching and very in-depth. Beyond that they also publish a lot of great technical knitting content, but I leave knitting to my fiancée so I can’t really comment :)
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The Shapes of Fbric — I absolutely love this blog for its mix of experimental pattern making such as experimenting with geometric shapes, as well as for its well written and explained basics. Minna goes through all the effort here to effectively diagram a lot of her tutorials, which helps so much. It’s hard to overstate how helpful this is for learning how to draft patterns.
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Fashion-Incubator — I think this blog has been inactive since the pandemic. It focuses on more production sewing tips and techniques which can certainly aid home sewers, so it’s a shame it’s inactive. One of the most important tidbits of information I learned from here was about how often fusible interfacing is used in ready-to-wear garments. And since they want to save every dollar they can, it really highlights how truly essential interfacing is. Something I was willing to be lazy about until a little further into my sewing journey.
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The Social Fabric — Nisan posts lots of different long-form write-ups about her makes. I appreciate this blog a lot because of her thoughtful attention to detail especially in colors and photography. I have certainly tried to take inspiration from her photography but undoubtedly I’m not there yet! No doubt
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ikat bag — This blog has so many posts going all the way back to 2008. So many different technical gems. One of my favorites is her post on the subtleties in drafting sleeves filled with wonderful explanatory pictures. To be honest there is so much varied content here that I think I have no hope of truly capturing it, but there is so much useful information for everybody.
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J Stern Designs — J Stern’s niche seems to be fitting pants, which is notoriously hard. She is extremely consistent at posting videos and what ever issue I have with fitting pants it’s likely she has one, or more likely multiple videos that help. They go into so much detail into such granular topics in pants drafting and fitting, just wonderful.
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Cornelius Quiring — Cornelius has an incredibly interesting story where an accident caused his right half of his body to be substantially different from his left, motivating him to learn to sew for his unique body. I absolutely love his little tricks in pattern drafting — I find the small details in pattern drafting truly the part that makes the most difference. Great at explaining complicated topics such as pants fitting using dynamic props, also.
That’s about it for this post. Thanks to everyone who has posted their sewing on the internet before. It’s wonderful how much you can just casually learn now. I hope to follow up on this post soon with long form technical content on my makes. I started being much more methodical and slow about my sewing last year, so I’ll go back and do some nice write-ups of those first. Hope the information I share can help someone!