 It is no secret that I love having my my indie patterns printed at a large format printer. I never tape them together myself and I always send them off and I probably will continue to do that for the rest of time. I have talked about this before on the channel to which I got a lot of comments from you guys saying oh I find the taping together process to be so peaceful and so relaxing and honestly good for you. But I wanted to address seven additional reasons other than just the the taping together process of why you should be using a large format printer. If you are new here I am Lindsay. Hello and welcome. This is my sewing YouTube channel where I can just nerd out about all things sewing. I post videos about three times a week and share my thoughts on everything from large format printers like today to pattern reviews and first impression videos on pattern collections. Before we jump into this video will you please give me a thumbs up so YouTube will show this video to other people and they'll be able to find it. Subscribe and click the notification bell if you want to be notified whenever I post a new video. All right so let's jump right into it. The very first one that I have is storage. So I am a big stickler when it comes to organization and when I was taping together patterns I always found it super difficult to store the patterns after I had cut them up and used them mostly because the paper is like you know regular printer paper and then you add all that tape to it and I was like do I fold these do I roll these like what do I do they become so so so bulky. My go-to large format printer is Sublime Graphics because they print on tissue paper. So again the idea of like folding up a pattern when you're done just like whenever you use big four and sticking it in like I don't know some regular office supply envelope and storing it away is super super simple to do. It's not bulky you know the there's no tape to prevent any of the folds from you know being nice and crisp and you can store it away and it's nice and neat and the next time you go use it you're not having to try and iron out folds in tape. Like I could never figure out how to do that. Am I gonna melt this onto my iron? Am I gonna melt it onto my ironing board? Like no no tape with crinkles for me please. The second reason is for you know a lot of us fitting patterns is our biggest thing. The biggest thing we are we come into contention with. I think after a while we learn how to the sewing skills we learn how to use our machines and all of that. The fitting is one of those things that's just going to be like nirvana like we're always going to be reaching for perfection there and whenever it comes to fitting I do have my fast fit guide which allows me and you to get pretty close. There are a few little tweaks and things that are really hard to assess on flat pattern pieces so I like to tissue fit whether I'm doing that on my body or on my dino form. Tissue fitting is really really difficult with patterns that you've printed at home again because we are dealing with tape. We are dealing with sheets of paper that maybe there isn't tape along every single seam so things are pulling apart and you know every little millimeter adds up whenever it comes to sewing and fitting and so I'm just not able to tissue fit accurately. You know the copy shop paper does not bend and mold to the body like a tissue would and again all of that tape is adding weight and preventing things from laying as close to they would if they were made out of fabric. Obviously tissue paper is not fabric either at least whenever you have it printed at a large format printer on tissue paper you're getting as close to an experience of making a muslin as you can without actually going through that process. Number three let's talk about accuracy and accuracy whenever it comes to actually printing your pattern at home. Every single indie pattern company is different. The way that they have their patterns set up is different. The way that they have you print your patterns is different. In addition to that there are two main types of operating systems there's the mac and then the pcs and then in addition to that there are dozens of different types of home printers getting all three of those elements to work together to print your patterns in a way that is accurate is a lot for some of us. I mean some of us are not super technologically savvy and even if you are and you can figure out how to print your patterns at the correct scale then it comes to okay is this a pattern where the pattern company the pattern designer has set it up to where the pages are trimmed off or the pages not trimmed do you butt the pages up to each other do you overlap them if you overlap them how much do you it's so much to think about and again if you're if you're sewing many different um patterns from different pattern companies that's something you have to take into consideration every single time you print something when i send my patterns off to um to sublime graphics obviously for the most part i'm sending over large format print files but even if they don't have those uh even the pattern designer hasn't provided those and they only have the at home print you know they have by 11 sublime graphics has this proprietary software that basically digitally tapes your patterns together for you and then puts it onto one large format sheet of paper so i don't have to worry about the borders and the trimming if that's even necessary i don't have to worry about you know the scale of the pattern they worry about all of that for me and it's all included in the price of the pattern it's like no upcharge for that at all um so it's just like taking that worry and giving me that piece of mind knowing my pattern is going to be printed accurately for me by someone who knows what they're doing for free like for no additional cost i mean come on that's really like a no-brainer okay i've been coming across a lot of um patterns that are printed in color where like the sizes are notated both by like the dashes and stuff like the different lengths of dashes and dots and all that but they're also done by color as well and i've also come across pattern companies that instead of using a number sizing system they are using a color system so like you know your color red blue green purple you know that's how you are assigned a size is by a color and not by a number if you are printing at home obviously color ink is more expensive right and the quality of the color printing that you were going to get at home is going to be way less than the quality that you're going to get from using a large format printer at sublime graphics they use the same software that is used for like blueprints like CAD software the difference between a light blue and a regular blue are going to be a lot different than whenever you're printing at home it's just a matter of having like the high quality equipment which we just don't have at home and that sort of brings me to the concept of isolating sizes or isolating lakers so pattern companies increasingly have made it more common for you to be able to isolate one size or a few sizes so you're not printing their entire size range um when you print your patterns but you're just printing like your size and maybe whatever you need to grate out to one above and one below or whatever which is great in theory but again going back to technology and knowing how to do these things and having the software on your at home computer in order to do this not everybody has all of those things and isolating layers is one of those things again that sublime graphics can do no upcharge for it whatsoever included in the price of your patterns and for them it's like wham bam thank you ma'am click click click click click and they do it for us it's like okay i've got to stop and concentrate and think and none none and all of these things that are way more difficult for us are just like second nature to them so again why am i going to stress myself out about figuring out how to do this layer isolation thing when i can just send it off to someone else and say hey i want sizes blue green and purple and those are the sizes that are sent to me and i don't have to think about it at all i just say the words and then the thing comes to me it's absolutely perfect right um the very last reason that i have for you guys is the environmental impact and how printing at home of any kind impacts the environment and how using a large format printer is a little bit kinder to the environment first of all i want to say that i just found out this week that sublime graphics printing studio is run on solar power the whole thing i mean you can't say that about akinkos or fedex or a you know engineering printer or any of the other large format printers that you can do online um so i didn't know that was super cool in addition to that to print at home so when a pattern is formatted to be printed at home you know it's done in a way where you tape it all together lobby dog uh and that takes however many eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper that it takes when a pattern is formatted to be printed large format they know that they have you know 36 inches wide by however many inches long um so they know that they have that amount of space to work with and so they arrange the pattern pieces in a way where they maximize that space they're not having to worry about oh is this one little line going to be one that is overlapped from having to tape it together so we're going to spread these apart a little bit and create more room between them so that the at home printer can take them together and not get confused they don't have to worry about that they can butt things up as close as they want so you're utilizing less paper um and whenever you go to print on a paper that is lighter weight obviously you're using less material to make that paper to begin with in addition the amount of ink and the ink cartridges themselves being made from plastics um you go through them a lot quicker whenever you are printing at home so you're using more of the plastics to make the cartridges but also the ink itself at a large print printer they're using much much much larger ink cartridges so less plastic is made to use them and one cartridge goes a lot further than the smaller ones that we use at home so hopefully this allows you guys to kind of rethink um sort of the idea that the only good thing about large format printers is that they take the taping situation um out of the equation but it's really not there really are so many other benefits as well so I have um as I have had all year long a um coupon code to Sublime Rapids if you want to try out their tissue paper um I highly recommend it I love it but they also have a tracing paper which is like a mid-weight paper um which is really nice too so I usually get the um the tissue paper for lightweight fabrics and I get the uh tracing paper for mid-weight to heavyweight fabrics that's just how I like to do it but they'll also send you some samples so if you um are just curious about the weight to the paper and how they look just reach out to them and they'll send you samples as well so check the description box I'll have a link down there um that'll take you straight to Sublime Graphics they kind of spell their name a little bit funky so um if that's confusing to you I have a link um in the description box that you can use a couple of months ago I posted a video kind of demonstrating the differences between the tracing paper and the tissue paper um showing them and then audibly describing them I've linked that here in the end slate I've also put it in the description box for you guys so be sure to check that out as well but that is gonna do it for me today y'all thank you so much for watching and I will see you all very soon bye