Adding measurements

FreeSewing is all about bespoke sewing patterns -- or parametric design to use a more generic term.

That means that when drafting our pattern, I will take the measurements provided by the user into account.

Which begs the question, which measurements?

As the pattern designers, you get to decide which measurements are used to draft the pattern. For this bib, I am going to use the head circumference. So let's add it as a required measurement.

Adding required measurements

In our src/bib.mjs file, we will add a measurements property to the bib object. This property will be an Array (a list) holding all required measurements for this part.

I am using the official name of the measurement here. For head circumference, that name is head.

[FIXME]

The design/src/bib.mjs "language" title on the code snippets is out of date. It is used in the tutorial from this point forward to maintain syntax-highlight not yet available for the src/bib.mjs title, but should be replaced with src/bib.mjs.

function draftBib({ part }) {
  return part
}

export const bib = {
  name: 'fromscratch.bib',
  draft: draftBib,
  measurements: [ 'head' ],
}

From now on, this part requires the head measurement.

This change will also get picked up by the development environment, which will now complain that it is missing some measurements. Since it's just one measurement, I will simply enter a value by hand. For example 38 as 38 cm is a realistic head circumference measurement for a baby.

tip

Why using standard measurements names matters

In principle, I can use any name I want for our measurements. The FreeSewing core library does not care.

However, if everybody uses their own (names for) measurements, then people aren't able to re-use their measurements across designs.

So if you have any intention at all to play nice with the FreeSewing ecosystem, please make sure to re-use the names of existing measurements, rather than invent your own.

See the best practices on this topic for details.