Sewing, Repairing and Reducing Waste

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A place to share ideas, knowledge and creations with textiles. The focus is on reducing waste, whether that be sewing from the scraps left from other projects, using the end of rolls and remnants, or repairing and remaking finished pieces.

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How do FOSS enthusiasts sew? What hardware do they buy? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2890733

I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot.

Some sewing machines have a fixed number of stitches they can do. Would it make sense to get an embroidery machine and use #inkStitch (an Inkscape variant)? I’m not sure if that’s strictly for embroidery -- or does that give the ability to do a variety of stitches using FOSS?

The inkstitch.org website steers people toward taking a basic sewing machine and modifying it using 3d printed parts. That’s too ambitious for me. I don’t want a hardware project. I just want to buy hardware that’s ready to go and use free software to control it. Is that possible with things that exist already?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's important to note that embroidery (and the machines that do it) is fundamentally different from sewing. Whereas a regular sewing machine or a serger/overlocker will pull the fabric through the machine in a single direction and not allow the fabric to move from side to side, an embroidery machine is designed for the fabric to move freely in both axes (forward, backward, and sideways). (Note that on a sewing machine the zigzag etc. stitches are made by moving the needle from side to side, not the fabric. On an embroidery machine, either the needle or the fabric may move under computer control, or the needle will remain centered while the fabric is moved by hand.)

There are machines that are designed to do both sewing and embroidery, which allow the mechanism that pulls the fabric to be retracted and disabled to allow the fabric to be moved freely by hand. Even a simple machine that does not have this feature can be used for embroidery by putting a cover plate over the feed mechanism (there are generic covers available for many popular machines or these can be 3D printed) and setting the machine to the straight stitch setting (which leaves the needle centered). Of course, these require the fabric to be moved by hand to create the desired design.

You would need additional components to automatically move the fabric and start and stop the needle at the correct time under computer control, which will allow automatic embroiding of a vector graphic. This is what the more expensive dedicated embroidery machines do, and what the open source projects that you have come across are attempting to recreate using a regular sewing machine plus additional hardware. This has no relation to the different "stitch patterns" that you can find on a regular sewing machine, which simply involve moving the needle from side to side as the machine pulls the fabric in a straight line.