Help

Everything below is written for somebody who has not done this before. If you have, skip to whichever heading names your problem — and if none of them does, the last section is how to reach a person.

What this actually does

You photograph a paper pattern piece on a printed mat. The app gives it back to you as exact geometry in millimetres: every edge, every curve, every notch, measured at the seam line. From there you can change it — adjust a waist, add ease, move a dart — and the lines that depend on what you changed are redrawn.

The point is that a scanned pattern becomes adjustable rather than merely copied. A photocopier gives you the same pattern again. This gives you the pattern you actually want.

Words in this paragraph you do not recognise — seam line, notch, ease, dart — are all in the glossary, with the rest of the vocabulary the app assumes.

Scanning a piece

Print the calibration mat and lay the piece flat on it, well inside the four corner markers. Press out folds first: a crease reads as a curve, and the app has no way to know it was not drafted that way.

Tap the + button and follow the guided sequence. It asks for four photographs from slightly different angles, and it asks for four on purpose. One photograph is enough to make the plane metric — the markers are a known size, which is what converts pixels into millimetres. What the extra views buy is the ability to tell a real feature from an optical one: a wiggle that sits in the same place in every shot is cut into the paper, while a wiggle that moves between shots is the lens. No single photograph can distinguish those, because lens distortion is smooth and looks exactly like a gently drafted curve.

Hold the phone flat above the piece and keep all four markers in frame. A shot missing a marker has no scale and cannot be used.

Even light helps more than bright light. A hard shadow across an edge is the most common reason a scan comes back with an outline that wanders where the paper does not.

Reading what comes back

A finished scan shows two outlines on top of one another, and the difference between them is deliberate. The thin line is what was actually measured from your photographs. The bold line is the app’s reading of what the edge was meant to be — cutting wobble taken out, edges believed straight snapped onto true lines. That reading is called idealisation, and the app tells you how many edges it changed and by how far.

Both stay visible because the comparison is the point. The measured line is the evidence and the idealised line is the claim, and showing them together is what lets you see exactly what was assumed away. If the bold line has smoothed out a curve you drafted on purpose, that is the moment to notice it.

Changing a pattern

Open a piece to work on it alone, or the drafting table to see every piece at once. Some acts belong to one piece and are offered only there — folding it into a three-dimensional preview, for instance, since that is a fact about one piece rather than the whole pattern.

Parameters are the named measurements a pattern is drafted from: a waist, a length, an amount of ease. Change one and every line that depends on it is redrawn. This is the part that makes the pattern yours.

Tap an edge to open a dart there; tap a dart to select it and set its intake. Place notches along an edge, add seam allowances from the seams sheet, and set the grainline with the grain tool, which snaps to the straight grain, the cross grain and the true bias when you come close to one, and otherwise leaves the angle exactly where you put it.

Nothing you do here is unrecoverable. Every change is recorded as a version you can return to, from the history icon.

Before you cut cloth

Check the measurements that matter against the physical piece. What the app reports is a careful estimate produced by software from photographs, not a guarantee, and its accuracy depends on things it cannot see: how flat the piece lay, how even the light was, and the optics of your particular phone.

Walk any seam you are unsure of — step one edge along the other a span at a time and confirm they are the same length and that their notches meet. Then sew a toile in cheap cloth. Both of those turn a measurement error into a lost afternoon rather than three metres of ruined silk.

When something goes wrong

The scan will not finish. Almost always a marker out of frame, or the piece overlapping one. All four corners of the mat must be visible in every shot.

An edge came back wavy where the paper is straight. Either a shadow, a fold in the paper, or a genuinely wobbly cut. Look at the idealised line: if it has already straightened the edge, the app agreed with you and there is nothing to fix.

The measurements are close but consistently out. Check that the mat printed at actual size rather than scaled to fit the page, which is the default in most print dialogues and silently changes every measurement the app takes.

A pattern I bought is not in my account. Digital patterns appear as soon as payment clears. If it has been longer than a few minutes, write to us with the order number.

Your photographs and your patterns

They are yours. They are stored so the app can show them back to you, and the shapes and measurements derived from them — separated from your account — are used to make the measuring better, which is how each scan comes back more accurate than the last. They are not published, not sold, and not used to work out who you are. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is kept, for how long, and who else sees it.

You can delete your account, and everything in it, from Account in the app. It erases the photographs themselves along with everything drafted from them.

Asking a person

If the answer is not here, write to us. There is no ticket queue and no bot: hello@feminizetheworld.com reaches a person, and so does the contact page. Tell us what you were doing and what happened instead, and if it concerns a specific pattern or order, say which — it saves a round trip.