Projector Sewing

In summer 2024 I got back to sewing after a bit of a break. My least favourite bit of sewing is printing patterns and sticking them together. I seem to be locked in a constant battle with my printer and I try to avoid having to use it. Sticking together 70 A4 pages is just torture to me as I don't enjoy that sort of paper craft at all. I usually get pdf patterns printed but this has it's issues too. They are printed on stiff A0 paper which isn't as good as the light paper you get with a traditional sewing pattern. I'm in Ireland and maybe in other places it's a quicker process but here they usually take a while to arrive. So you can't make a new pattern on a whim. And lastly it is expensive to print so your pattern ends up costing a lot in the end. It was because of these frustrations that I decided I needed to learn about projector sewing. 

I found a few very helpful websites such as Projector Sewing, Dailey Sews And Stuff and Sasha Sewist as well as the projectors for sewing facebook group who have a wealth of knowledge. You use a projector to project your pattern onto your cutting table. You need to calibrate the projector so that the PDF is projected at the right scale. From what I'd read the calibration seemed to be the trickiest part but once you had that figured out it looked like it was very doable. I waited for a sale and bought a fairly cheap mini projector from Amazon. Here's a link to a very similar model from the same company. It is one that the projector sewing website recommended. I also bought a ceiling bracket.

We mounted the projector on the ceiling above my sewing table. I sew in my downstairs room, it's a multipurpose room so the table is used for lots of different things. The projector being on the roof suits as it's out of the way. There is enough room between ceiling and cutting mat on the table to give a nice big image. The projector links to my ipad using screen mirroring so there was no problem getting it connected. I have Affinity Designer and first of all I used that to open my PDFs. I changed the zoom until the calibration grid I had downloaded matched my cutting mat. Then I was able to open a pattern and there it was projected onto my cutting mat.

Now this worked ok but I ended up not projecting my patterns this way because it was then that I discovered Pattern Projector. To quote the website 'Pattern projector is a free and open source web app that quickly calibrates projectors for sewing patterns. It also has tools for stitching together multiple page patterns, changing line thickness, inverting colors, flipping/rotating patterns, and more.' Pattern projector worked perfectly with my ipad and I have used it ever since.

I find it very easy to calbrate my image using pattern projector. I check it regularly but it doesn't usually change. I usually thicken the lines a little bit depending on the pattern. I change the projected image to have a dark background with green lines. I select the layer for the size I want to project. I scroll around to find the pattern pieces I want to cut. I use a rotary cutter and a cutting mat on the table. If I need to adjust a pattern piece I will trace it off and make the adjustments that way. It is possible to digitally adjust patterns in Affinity Designer or Inkscape but I haven't learned how to do this yet. This set up has been working so well for me. I can buy a pattern and be set up to cut it out really quickly, no waiting a week or more for an A0 pattern print out to arrive. It's taken the pain out of a part of sewing I didn't really enjoy. I definitely recommend projector sewing. Here's a photo of the set up.