 Here we have Morgan Lemmer-Weber who led the Hack and Craft Social. She's here to talk about free software. Here's Morgan, take it away. Hello. Today I am here to talk about free software, which is a term that we workshopped in the Foss and Crafts IRC channel to refer to textile patterns that are created under Creative Commons or other open licenses. So to start off with, Foss and Crafts is the podcast that I co-host with my wife Christine Lemmer-Weber. It is broadly a podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together. So we're looking at this kind of interdisciplinary intersection between the kind of philosophy of free software and free culture and the way that we can collaboratively work together and kind of peer-teach and things like that. So there's a lot of over-secting elements between free and open-source software and also craft movements and the way that we kind of transmit craft education as well that we cover a lot in the podcast. And one of our listeners mentioned in the IRC channel just, you know, what do you call a sewing pattern that's released under a free culture license? And we workshopped it for a little bit and then Cat Walsh popped up with the term free software that we just kind of loved and stuck with and rolled with. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So I started making patterns that I release on my blog under free software. I do CC by SA 4.0. Other people do other things. The first time I really thought about how sewing patterns were released was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a pattern for a respirator style face mask that my friend Dan made, which was released under CC by SA. And we realized that for masks, especially in a time when we kind of didn't really know what was happening, the open license on this was kind of crucial because then different people could make it and make changes and improve it both as we got more information and as people with different different experiences started working on them. And I have one of mine here. You can see it's slightly different than the pattern because I did ear loops instead of behind the head. And I actually showed Dan how to do the ear loops within the between the lining and the fabric. So that's something that was workshopped collaboratively. And then the listener who brought up the question of free culture licensed sewing patterns is Eleanor Vahala, who on her blog for a long time, not just since we've been talking about it on the podcast, has been creating and releasing sewing patterns under a CC by NCND license. And you can see she's got this whole list of patterns at the side there. After we started talking about this on the podcast, several people pointed out to me that there is this great community around around this site free sewing, which does free culture sewing patterns in a slightly different way than either what Dan or Vahala or myself are doing, which is basically using parametric design. So this is a whole site with a whole community around it, and they are great and wonderful. And you can see they've got a lot of different patterns on there and a lot of different styles for a lot of different people. And the way that the parametric designs work is one, they're sewing patterns made to your measurements, which means that they are highly adaptable. And what parametric design means is that you give it parameters, and then it generates a pattern that's just for you. So theoretically, it should fit. Right. So you can see here, this is a screenshot of one of the shirts that is available on there. And it's got this whole list of different measurements you enter. And then this is just a very clipped off part of the options that you can tweak so that they can be more or less customized. And this is great if you like working from specifically patterns, kind of the tried and true method of making clothing. However, there's still some limitations to this. As you can see, the number of measurements here would be really difficult to take if you don't have an extra set of hands, and specifically a set of hands that knows where to measure for these things. Like there's not an easy way for someone to measure their own shoulder slope without a second pair of hands. What I'm doing is somewhat more the way that you would do kind of a software tutorial, but for sewing instead. So I am dyslexic and dyscalculic. So one, I do not enjoy following patterns because my brain transposes numbers and I get confused and I do one thing slightly often, nothing fits. And the other thing is this way, you can have a lot more leeway without specifically telling people how to make those changes so people can get a lot more creative with the changes that they want to make. So these are the first two patterns that I released on my website. And that was because I was teaching my wife, Christine, how to sew. And the first pattern that I show anyone that I'm teaching how to sew is a dice bag because it's simple. It's just a few seams and then a hem and then a drawstring. And it's done. So it's a great way to learn how to use a sewing machine or hand stitching. The second one is a really, really basic skirt that's basically just a tube with an elastic waist. So it's a seam, a hem, another hem, and then an elastic waistband. But you can also do much more complex patterns. So this is a pattern for RSI gloves that I made. Here are a different completed pair with a different style. So you can be a lot more adaptable if you're making things yourself. The reason that I needed to make my own RSI gloves is because I am allergic to synthetic fabrics and it is impossible to find a commercially available set of RSI gloves that do not have any sort of synthetic fabrics that will touch your skin. So this pattern that I made, I made two different, well, two or four different versions of it depending on what you, the way you look at it. One is with a single piece, which gives you more compression because basically you're just using high performance spandex on both the outside and the lining. So you've got two layers of that compression. The second one is the one that I made for myself, which has a 100% cotton lining that'll touch my skin. And then the high performance spandex that will be on the outside for compression. And then there's two types of padding. So on the image in the slide, you see there's two horizontal lines of, or I guess vertical lines of padding that go across over the heel of your palm and up towards your fingers. And that is ideal if you are typing, because it takes the stress off of your wrists. The other one is the one I have here, which has a pattern, a padding that is kind of crescent shaped that goes on the heel of your palm, which is better if you are driving because then the steering wheel fits in that groove. So with this, you can make it to the exact size of your wrists, because I have smaller wrists than a lot of RSI gloves that you can get commercially available go. You can make other things to customize it to yourself. And you can find the style you like, because a lot of the RSI gloves that you find commercially available are for specifically carpal tunnel or they've got metal in them that is good if you sprained your wrist, but not good if you're typing, etc. So you can fit it suit your own needs. So in conclusion, I think that there's a lot of space here that we can work and improve on this. One, we can make way more patterns than it already exists. Two, I feel like this fits within like long standing historical trends of the commons of information for specifically craft patterns, which historically have been traded and passed along largely female social and domestic groups. And in the modern era, that's largely been taken over by things like blogs and Ravelry and other kind of centralized and often commercialized sites. So I think that if we release these things under licenses, which allow for more experimentation and reuse and adaptation, then we can get a similar feeling to those historical social groups. But with the kind of larger, more broader audience that the internet affords us. So I would now like to open it to you questions and discussions. Thank you. First question is get or your preferred version control system useful for free software? Or does iteration on sewing patterns not work that way? I think it definitely would be so far the only get that I have my free software patterns in is the get for my own personal blog. I think that it would be way more useful if we had something like a get repository that could be added to by different people with like their own individual blogs, and therefore, we could have more community interaction with it. That is just not something that I have had the time to curate myself. But I think that it would be very useful in the same way that it is for the traditional free software as opposed to the free software. So I think if people have ideas on how we could do that without having a single person have to shepherd the entire thing, that would be great as well. So question, how about the fabric fabric patterns? Are there open source open source sources of fabric? The best open source source of fabric that I can think of, like almost anything else in this modern world is just making it yourself. This behind me is a loom that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. And with anything like anything else that you are trying to do kind of ethically and sustainably, your options are often either put in a lot of effort that limits what you can do because you have to do all of the other iterations before you can get to your final product or kind of bend on where you get it. So where I am locally, my options are either big box stores like Joanne Fabrics, or there is a textile thrift store near here where people can bring their like old stash of fabrics that they never used and basically bring them there to be repurposed, which I think is wonderful because the textile waste industry in the US is terrible and the amount of textiles that end up in landfills. But I can't think of any places that are available online that are specifically open source in that like you can upload your own fabric patterns. I can think there's a place called Spoonflower where you can and probably other sites where you can upload patterns and they will make you fabric based off of that. But I don't believe that you can do that with an open license or without having to use proprietary software. If anyone knows differently, please let me know because that would be wonderful. So question. In my view, the patterns in clothing are somewhat similar to the graphic design products. Someone may make a similar pattern to another one either intentionally or unintentionally. Has this ever happened and how was this resolved? For example, when you make a pattern that turns out to be similar to a copyrighted pattern while you have released your pattern in a free license. I personally have not run into this issue. If we get into kind of the history of copyrighted fabric patterns, this has absolutely been a thing that I do not have documentation or citations in front of me to cite. But there's been a lot of issues and we actually discussed this a little bit in the hack and craft previous to this where for a lot of ways that you create textiles, so for example, crocheting or knitting, there's only so many stitches you can do, right? So it's pretty easy to come up with your own pattern. And it turns out that's something that someone has already copyrighted, which is why a lot of blogs and stuff like that will have a lot of content similar to the way that recipes are, where there will be a lot of content around the actual recipe. And that's copyrighted, but you can't copyright the recipe itself. So similarly, I think for sewing patterns, you can't copyright that you're doing, you know, K2P3SSK or whatever, because there's only so many combinations of those things that you can do. But it can definitely switch into some kind of scary copyright issues. And we also talked in the hack and craft about the issue of, say, making a crochet pattern. The example brought up in the hack and craft was of Baby Yoda. And then Disney comes after you, because even though you completely created the crochet pattern yourself, you're basing it off of a copyrighted franchise. So those things exist. I do not have a body of resources in front of me to directly cite. Oh, question for newbies to sewing, what would you recommend as a starting place? Tutorials, books, sewing machine, etc. So my very basic thing that I would suggest, because this is literally what I use to teach people, you can go to this link. And it has my two favorite basic sewing patterns. You can see the worst place you can possibly make a typo in your blog is in this log, which I did. But basically start with simple fabrics. So I like to start with cotton and typically a pretty, pretty sturdy cotton, because then you don't have to worry about like dealing with things like silks, tearing or something like that. And start with a pattern that's got almost entirely straight lines. Because then you can focus on actually learning the techniques of sewing. And I've used the dice pattern, at least to teach both hand sewing and machine sewing. I'm a fan of learning hand sewing first, and then learning on a machine, because if you can get the basics with hand sewing, which is a slower process, then it's a lot easier to jump into sewing with the machine, even if you never hand so after that. As far as books, I was taught by my mother and my grandmother. And I think that the best way to learn sewing is in a social environment, if you can. If you can't, honestly, the next best thing in my opinion is videos. And I know we're talking about proprietary stuff again here, but there's a lot of sewing tutorials on YouTube that you can follow. And since they are up on YouTube, you can access those without having to have an account to something the way that you would need for something like Ravelry, or something like that. And then as far as sewing machines, it honestly doesn't matter which one you have as long as it works. I learned how to sew on a sewing machine that was probably about 20 years older than I am. And then, which was my mom's old one. And then when my mom got a new one after that, I got her old one that was as old as I am. And then it took until like 2015 for me to actually get a new sewing machine. So the technology doesn't necessarily matter as long as it's something that is functional until you're getting into things like embroidered patterns and stuff like that. We're at about time. So if you have any more ideas on this stuff, you can feel free to reach out to me. I'm, I'm lemweb at octodon.social. And if you are interested in the intersection of boss and crafts, please check out our podcast. And thank you for joining me today.