Anna, I just spent a fair amount of time with a put-together printed pattern making sure ALL of the cutting lines were the same distance from the seam lines. I'm sure you've noticed this, too. It's almost to the point that it would be faster to print patterns without the cutting lines, then draw them all on by hand. Are there any plans to correct this?

Barb,

In my experience, the seam allowance on straighter seams are pretty accurate, almost exactly what I set the seam allowance to. The SA on curved seams is another matter . Those deviate quite a bit from the specified SA width. Maybe it's an artifact of rounding errors when floating point calculations are done for the SA width of these curved seams. Maybe it's a bug in the Dress Shop drafting engine.

In any case, I'm afraid we cannot do anything to fix that as we do not have the rights nor access to the drafting engine; we cannot fix or modify it.

I never print SAs. I have an "arm" on my rotary cutter that I can position the SA width I want. That's good because I make different SAs depending on where they are.

I, too, have one of those rotary cutters with the 'arm' that attaches to a post on the cutter, that allows you to space it the distance you want from the cutting blade. It works beatifully for getting a consistent SA cut on your patterns. However, Olfa no longer makes these. I have checked all over the Internet and I even sent a request to Olfa to PLEASE bring these back. Maybe if we would all send them requests for these they would finally realize there is a potentially large market for these by all kinds of sewists.

Even if you had access to the code you might not be able to fix this problem. The original programmers knew about it and they were able to make some improvements but, because of the way the program drafts the patterns, they were unable to solve the problem.

Most tape measures are 5/8" wide so you can lay one next to the stitching line and get an accurate cutting line. Personally, I eye-ball it, using either 5/8" or 3/8" depending on how I want to sew that part of the garment. I'm not into precision as much as quilters are, so it works for me.

I took a quilting class once and the teacher told me my 1/4" foot was "off" by the width of a thread and that my entire quilt would be off by a lot by the time I sewed all the pieces together. I ignored her. As long as I was consistent it worked for me. To each his/her own...

You're right. I wanted to replace my broken one and found out olfa doesn't make it anymore. I think there is a british company that does. I used crazy glue and it's holding for now. I did send a request to Olfa.

quote:

Originally posted by Carolyn:
Even if you had access to the code you might not be able to fix this problem. The original programmers knew about it and they were able to make some improvements but, because of the way the program drafts the patterns, they were unable to solve the problem.

Thanks for the bit of Dress Shop history, Carolyn!

quote:

Most tape measures are 5/8" wide so you can lay one next to the stitching line and get an accurate cutting line.

Good tip!

Rotary cutters with a "фкь" are quite useful for achieving a consistent SA cut on your designs. I discovered requests to return them as well.

I'd want to see the option to rotate the darts, too. Although we have a very basic version in the dart tool area, it does not allow it. It'd be more convenient to have patterns in the collections to be alphabetized or at the very least grouped with the main menu patterns.

quote:

Originally posted by Maiyadi:
I'd want to see the option to rotate the darts, too. Although we have a very basic version in the dart tool area, it does not allow it.

Dart rotation is beyond the capability of Dress Shop's current drafting engine.

quote:

It'd be more convenient to have patterns in the collections to be alphabetized or at the very least grouped with the main menu patterns.

I agree. The way the patterns are organized currently rely on Windows' files & folders facility and is suboptimal in getting to and finding patterns.