Dear Reader: Our goal is to build community and make everyone feel welcome. We support crafting as an inclusive and welcoming space for people of all ages, abilities, ethnicities, genders, orientations and sizes. Regarding sewing challenge themes, we ask that you take each challenge as you see it fitting in your life, and express your involvement how you like, at the given time. Our challenges are for the pure enjoyment of participation and the love of community. Extended Mission Page Here.
Grade My Size Survey
Dear Reader: Our goal is to build community and make everyone feel welcome. We support crafting as an inclusive and welcoming space for people of all ages, abilities, ethnicities, genders, orientations and sizes. Regarding sewing challenge themes, we ask that you take each challenge as you see it fitting in your life, and express your involvement how you like, at the given time. Our challenges are for the pure enjoyment of participation and the love of community. Extended Mission Page Here.
Why are Arabic letters showing up on your survey?
Oh goodness! I’m not seeing that – can you tell us a little more about what you are seeing and where? Are you looking at it on a phone or computer? (Not sure why that would affect things, but more info always helps with troubleshooting!) Thanks!
It’s a standard font in a Google form. I created in in Safari and had zero font issues. Perhaps try Chrome or maybe there’s an update you’re missing?
Talking about inclusion, are you aware that the only countries still not using the metric system are the U.S, Myanmar and Liberia?
Yes, and as an American (which in itself is ridiculous… United Statesian?), I make fun of that all the time. It’s silly we use Fahrenheit and Imperial. I made a decision to use Imperial because most patterns are in Imperial, I talked to our international Editors group and they’re used to Imperial. A choice had to be made for the ease of compiling data.
I’m seriously considering boycotting companies that only give measurements, seam allowances etc in inches and yards. And I’m definitely not taking part in a survey if it means taking out my calculator. In my book such a survey is aimed at US audience only (and perhaps Liberian and Myanmarian) leaving the majority of us sewists outside.
As somebody who lives in the US but buys fabrics and patterns mostly from other countries, I don’t find it that hard to find out my metric measurements. You simply google cm to inch, etc. Why boycott over such a small thing. We, people who sew in the US and create patterns in the US, can’t help it if our government is stupid.
I think it’s about the ease with which I fill out such a survey (or determine what size to pick). I know my most important measurements by heart in centimeters, so if I have to get out the calculator the number of actions increases tremendously.
I think it’s just stupid that each of us has to do the extra work instead of a pattern designer doing it once. The most incomprehensible example here are dear and doe patterns, who provide metric in their French instructions but only inches in the English instructions, and for a pdf pattern you need to choose before you buy.
As for the survey: these are not measurements I know by heart but I do have them written down somewhere. So again, transforming them would be a lot of work. I am not sure about the amount of work it would be to have a second survey and automatically transform one of the outcomes (would be easy in spss but spreadsheet programs can be a beast), but I would very much like to know if you have even explored the option. If you have and found it would be risky or too much work I can understand, and knowing that you did put in that effort would also motivate me to put in the effort to transform them myself.
Hello! We did consider a bunch of options, and time really is the limiting factor. We are all volunteers here, and we already but over 40 hours per week as a team into the website content and social media. Making the survey was an addition challenge we took on because we believe that one way we could help designers make better patterns is to give them better info! Making one survey, testing it with industry experts, tweaking it and later crunching the data is already tens of hours of work (probably 50-60 total?) and so we really appreciate all the people helping us out by converting their measurements! Thank you for understanding that having you do some conversions really helps us out! 😊
Hi Gillian and team!
I may or may not have been super clear in my last comment – typing on your phone does not leave a lot of room for editing for clarity, and my comment became cloudy with related-but-not-relevant frustrations, so I’m sorry I did not take an effort to type on my actual computer.
What I meant to say is that I think this type of large scale conversion work should not be done by humans but by computers. If right now the survey is open to both systems, but the conversion would be made by humans on your end rather than by me, I’d prefer filling it out in the system you plan on aggregating the data in because I wouldn’t want to simply transfer the labor to another human being! (I assume it’s inches?)
The other thing I wanted to say is if you consider redoing such a survey in a couple of years I’d be happy to help making a few simple tweaks to the survey design that make it easier to automatically transform answers, and making something that actually does the transformations. I’m not a statistician or a data scientist or whatever they call it nowadays, but I am in social science so I do know my way quantitative data a bit.
hi, I started answring the survey but got discouraged by the lack of indications for measurement equivalences in metrics.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We had to pick a unit of measurement to compile data, and having your measurements in Imperial will help with a fitting series we will have up soon as well. Here’s a link to a quick conversion page if you’d like: https://www.metric-conversions.org/length/centimeters-to-inches.htm
I’d love to take that survey but inches are just too weird. International units are all metrics. I have no idea of my measurements in this unit.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We had to pick a unit of measurement to compile data, and having your measurements in Imperial will help with a fitting series we will have up soon as well. Here’s a link to a quick conversion page if you’d like: https://www.metric-conversions.org/length/centimeters-to-inches.htm
tbh I’m hoping this survey shows there a re a lot of smaller sized women who are being sized out of patterns. I have to start with the smallest size and try/fail to adjust the above bust area, this deters/prevents me from sewing but there are a lot of women smaller than me, what do they do?
That’s an excellent point. We are definitely in an era of more niche pattern companies. Now would be a time for a company to focus on the smaller end of the spectrum.
What a great idea! Thanks for doing this, and for the effort and time you’ve clearly put into it.
Thank you! I appreciate that!
Great survey, I really enjoy taking it, and am looking forward to the tally and follow-up!
thank you so much!
I was glad to see that you plan on revisiting this in future years. I’d take it, but I’m at the end of a first trimester and I think I lost my waist already, so I don’t want to skew the data. 😂
😂 that’s hilarious! Thank you for the laugh! An August baby? One of mine is…the ankle swelling in August is brutal, but the September walks with a newborn are priceless. ❤️
My due date is early September, so August isn’t out of the question! Though both of my boys ran past their date, so…
I’ve just taken the survey, I’m in Australia but self taught using vintage sewing books so am used to inches rather than cms so it was easy for me. I do think consideration in future should be given to the system used by the majority of people. Using inches would likely have put off a lot of non-U.S. Americans from taking the survey which will surely skew your results. Unless I’m mistaken and the majority of sewcialists are in the U.S.?
Hello! You are right – the clear majority of our readers are in North America. (I’m Canadian, for example, but we sew in inches here even though we measure in metric!) Good point about considering who may or may not be answering! We are all volunteers trying to do this as a public service in hopes that better data leads to better patterns – we certainly aren’t perfect.
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