(Untitled)

[_tove]

bblum was at my house the other day, and asked a question about a sewing project I was working on. I said "It's a dart. It's a way of controlling fullness. Wait, that's jargony and not helpful to you..." and then explained in a (hopefully) more enlightening way. But it occurred to me last night that the fuller explanation is not actually that

Comments

[aleffert]

Subscribe, newsletter, etc.

[physics_dude]

Math nerd observation: the fabric still needs to deform to make any shape with a region of nonzero gaussian curvature.

[escargonaut]

Doubling down on that: the darts are finite changes to the distance metric on the fabric, allowing it (in accordance with the Gauss-Bonnet theorem) to more closely match a Gaussian-curved surface.

[bubblingbeebles]

dart fractals

[_tove]

Well sure, but fabric does deform. One of the things I didn't mention above is that darts can be even better when they are positioned strategically relative to the grain of the fabric (as in, the stretchiness is in the right place to help smooth things out).

[simrob]

(generally agreed)

[_tove]

Oh sure. I just default to friendslocking, though there's not particularly any good reason in this case.

I have in the past considered doing a "professional" blog (more like your research blog, really) with my actual name involved, since that seems to be a thing that people I admire on the internet do. This was sort of an attempt at posts in that direction, so if I do that, I guess I'd just copy this post over then re-friendslock it.

[lindseykuper]

You should! I'd read it!

Even though I don't sew or have much interest in starting a business, I used to get a huge kick out of reading the Fashion-Incubator blog.

I say "used to" because there was this unfortunate incident a few years ago where I was following the LJ syndicated journal that someone (not me!) had created from the (public!) Fashion-Incubator RSS feed, and so the content was appearing on my friends page -- but the author found it, thought that I was stealing her content, and got very upset with me. Even though we eventually cleared things up, that sort of soured me on continuing to read her blog. Maybe I'm over it now, though.

[redglasses]

I would also like to hear more about pattern drafting! It is something I would like eventually to learn (though that is not exactly a small catergory in general...)