I feel like i've done a lot of blogging recently about failing to do things with proprietary software. That's annoying.
This post is about something i made successfully with free software (and
some non-software crafting): I made a Woolly Mammoth for my
nephew!
I documented the pattern (with pictures!) that i came up with using Inkscape (and used markdown, pandoc, emacs, pdftk, and other free software in the process). i've also published the source for the pattern via git if you want to modify it:
git clone git://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/woolly
Writing up the documentation makes me realize that i don't know of any software tools designed specifically for facilitating fabric/craft construction. Some interesting software ideas:
- Make 3-D models showing the partly assembled pieces, derived from the flat pattern. Maybe something like blender would be good for this?
- Take a 3D-modeled form and produce some candidate patterns for cutting and sewing? This seems like it is an interesting theoretical problem: given a set of (marked?) 3D surfaces and a set of approximation constraints, have the tool come up with a reasonable set of 2D patterns that could be cut and assembled using a set of standard operations into something close to the 3D shape.
- a "pattern lint checker" (maybe an inkscape extension?) that would let you mark certain segments of an SVG as related to other segments (i.e. the two sides of a seam), and could give you warnings when one side was longer than the other (within some level of tolerance)
Anyone have any ideas?
Tags: brainstorming, crafting, inkscape