Sew Liberated Frequently Asked Questions
Can I make items to sell using your sewing patterns? Our patterns are licensed for home and personal use only. However, we are excited to announce our Cottage Industry Partners program, which will allow home-based sewists to partner with us to offer ready-made versions of our pattern designs. In particular, we hope this program will help craftivists, WAHMs (work-at-home moms), students, and anyone interested in using their creativity and mad sewing skills to make ends meet. You can get more information at our Cottage Licenses page. If you would like to buy a finished product from one of our licensed partners, please visit our Buy Ready Made page.
Can I modify the Emmeline Apron for larger sizes? Absolutely – it’s really easy. Check out the discussion at the Flickr group for instructions.
I don’t sew – can you make me a custom Emmeline Apron? We can't. But one of our quality Cottage Industry Partners might be able to! You can get a list of licensed sewists of our patterns at our Buy Ready Made page.
Where can I find errata/corrections for the patterns? Any pattern corrections can be found at Updates and Corrections page. You can also find tips from other sewists at our Flickr group page.
Do you offer your patterns for wholesale purchase? Yes! See our Wholesale page for more information.
I have made something from one of your patterns and would like to share pictures. How can I do this? Great! First, you will need to get a Flickr account. Then, head on over to the pattern creations group and click on “Join This Group.” Head back to the picture you want to share and click on it so you are seeing the larger version. Click on the gray “Send to Group” button on the top of the photo and add it to the group.
Where do you sell your patterns? Our patterns are available through this website at our Patterns page, through our Etsy shop, and through many online and local retailers nationally and internationally. For an ever-growing list of online and local retailers that carry my patterns, see our Where to Buy page.
Where can I find the fabric requirements for your patterns? On the Patterns page, you are able to see the backs of the patterns with all of the requirements by clicking on caption beneath the large photos of the pattern fronts. At Etsy, each listing includes a photo of the pattern back as well.
I have a pattern design and I would like to get it published. How do I go about doing that? Yay for you! I would say that you need to start with purchasing and learning how to work with Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. Once I have worked out a design with muslin and have the pattern pieces cut out in newsprint, I then make the same shapes in Illustrator and input them into InDesign. The pattern instruction sheets are laid out exclusively in InDesign. I then send PDFs of my pattern sheets/instructions/color fronts to the printer. I use Tri-State Printing Co. in Steubenville, OH. 1000 is the smallest quantity that the printers can run at one time. This is pretty standard - so it's a substantial financial commitment up front. I sold a few patterns as downloadable PDF files first to help defray some of the cost.