Ulla-Maaria Mutanen
Linkages
Ulla-Maaria Mutanen is CEO of Social Objects, Ltd., founder of Thinglink ( thinglink.org), and author of the HobbyPrincess blog ( hobbyprincess.com). ulla@hobbyprincess.com
Have you ever heard of cosplay? Combining the words costume and play, cosplay is a subculture that originated in Japan. (Check out our article on page 54.)
Cosplayers dress up as characters from comics and video games. I got the opportunity to attend my first cosplay party not too long ago. Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, I mingled among the hundreds of Super Dollfies, Elegant Gothic Aristocrats, and Loli-Goths, all wearing wonderful self-made or self-designed costumes. Trailing the global success of manga comics and anime cartoons, cosplay has made crafting costumes a growing trend worldwide.
Because more people are making their own clothes and accessories, the demand for useful blueprints and recipes is on the rise. Crafters, if anyone, should know that good patterns are valuable because they require hours of careful planning and design to create. Not everyone can express a complicated model in a simple way; those who excel at it can become celebrities. When Toronto-based crafter Jordy Lucier published an illustrated how-to for making a purse on craftster.org, the response was awe-inspiring. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed the instructions, and the post generated more than 100 pages of comments.
Virtual worlds, blogs, online communities, and discussion forums offer new channels for crowd-sourcing patterns and recipes. They are changing the way patterns are sought out and distributed. For example, if you are a fan of the fantasy role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot looking for the sewing pattern of a Sepiroth jacket, you’ll be happy to know one can be found on forums.cosplay.com. Thus, not only is the pattern itself valuable, but so is the knowledge of where to find it.
A freely editable pattern invites us to play and contribute. Patterns can be a puzzle. For example, showstudio.com has a neat downloads section where it publishes the patterns of legendary but
extremely complicated fashion items, like the Alexander McQueen kimono jacket. In exchange for giving out the pattern for free, ShowStudio asks those who succeed in making the garment to send in photos of the result for publication.
The distribution of patterns in magazines has traditionally been a profitable business. But if that’s the case, then why is Nicola Enrico Stäubli, a Swiss-based architect, giving away the patterns for his Foldschool cardboard furniture on the web for free?
One answer is that sharing free patterns generates goodwill. In a world where everybody wants to earn a nickel, giving out something for free makes you stand out from the crowd.
Good patterns are sometimes referred to as the “source code” of great crafting. BurdaStyle, a spin-off project of Hubert Burda Media, pushes the software vocabulary even further. Burda has launched the concept of open source sewing, and offers a free pattern database for crafters around the world. A pattern can be freely downloaded and used as the base for other designs. During its first four months, Burda reports the database had more than 60,000 downloads in the United States.
Not all software programmers want to share their code. Likewise, many crafters consider good patterns their business secrets. Still, there are a growing number who believe that sharing patterns for free will eventually benefit the distributor and, in one way or another, generate a return on the investment. This makes sense. Who wouldn’t like to have a passionate community promoting one’s core business? ×
References:
Archives