- Tutorials
- Pattern design tutorial
- Part 3: Beyond the basics
- Adding seam allowance
Adding seam allowance
When adding seam allowance to a pattern, there are 3 things that come into play:
- Does the user want seam allowance?
- How much seam allowance does the user want?
- How can we add seam allowance?
Let’s whip up a quick example for a moment to clarify how we will handle this:
As you can see from the source, we can destructure an sa
variable (short for
seam allowance) that will hold either:
false
if the user does not want seam allowance- A value in
mm
indicating how much seam allowance the user wants
To add seam allowance to our path, we just offset
it by sa
and add
some classes to it to style it. But, crucially, only if the user wants
seam allowance:
if (sa) paths.sa = paths.shape
.offset(sa)
.addClass('fabric sa')
To refer back to our three question: Whether the user wants seam allowance, and
if so how much seam allowance is answered by the sa
value passed to our draft
method.
And we add it with the path.offset()
method which will offset the path.
Our bib pattern does not require seam allowance as it will be finished with bias tape. But we can use this same technique to indicate that.
Before we do so though, we should talk about complete
.