Dr. Amelia McNamara | Making a tidy dress | RStudio (2020)
After at least a year of dreaming about it, I finally produced the #rstats / #Tidyverse dress of my dreams. This involved designing fabric, getting it custom printed, making a pattern from an existing garment, and sewing the dress. I learned a lot of useful lessons during this project, including "do unit tests" (make a practice dress) and "document your work" (get your BFF to take pictures of you)
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi, folks. Thank you. So I'm Amelia McNamara. I tweet at AmeliaMN and I just tweeted out a link to these slides if you want to follow along. There's lots of references and links there. So the most important thing that you need to get away from my talk is that the dress has pockets. But I had a few other things that I wanted to say about how I thought this project sort of related to open source development. So I have some lessons learned.
Build on existing resources
So one is to build on existing resources. I used hex stickers from RStudio mainly. These are licensed with the CC0 license. So I was able to use them and I found hexes from a few other sources. And here's the list. It was sort of arbitrarily chosen. And then you need to use your skills. So once I had the hex stickers, I needed to array them in such a way that it made a pattern that I could have printed on fabric. And you may not know this about me, but I went to design school for a year. So I know how to use Adobe Illustrator. And so I spent lots of time painstakingly moving these images around so that the left hand side lined up perfectly with the right hand side and the top with the bottom. And then I was able to upload this image to the website Spoonflower and get some custom fabric sewn.
And then the other skill that I used is that I know how to sew. And if you don't sew, you might not know that there's a difference between two kinds of fabric. There's woven fabric and knit fabric. Woven fabric is what like a regular button down shirt would be made out of. It's not stretchy. It's not as comfortable. And you can sew it on a regular sewing machine. Knit fabric is what they make T-shirts out of. It's stretchy. It's comfy. It feels like you're wearing pajamas. But you need some special tools or skills to sew it. So if you're going to work with woven material, you probably want to use a regular sewing machine, which has one thing of thread and a single needle. If you are going to work with knit fabric, you probably need a serger or an overlock machine.
Data wrangling and sewing
And then I found that this quote, which I can't find the source for, but I remember Hadley Wickham saying something like, once you have the data in the right format, the visualization is trivial. I found that once I had the pieces of the dress cut out, sewing the dress was trivial. So getting everything so that it was right side up and was going to line up nicely, that was the hardest part. And then I was able to just put it together.
once you have the data in the right format, the visualization is trivial. I found that once I had the pieces of the dress cut out, sewing the dress was trivial.
If you're using a serger, you use that to make seams. And if you look at the inside of a T-shirt, like the RStudio Conf T-shirt, it looks like a nice bound edge. And then I've got a picture of the seam from my dress there as well. The reason why it looks so nice is the serger has a knife as part of it. So as you run the material through, it cuts off the excess and then it binds it all together. This works for the inside seams and to put pieces together, but it does not work for hems. So if you look at a professionally made knit garment, like the RStudio Conf T-shirt, it has been used, they've used a cover stitch machine or a cover hem machine to put it together. I don't have access to a cover hem machine, so I had to do the hems on my regular sewing machine with twin needles. It didn't turn out as nice as I would have liked.
Document and share your work
And the next lesson is to document your work. I tweeted about this project once I had done it and I was glad to have some beautiful photos taken by my best friend, who calls herself my Instagram husband. Then I also blogged about this project. So if you want to know more about how I did it, you can go find that on my blog. And then you need to also share your work. So I put the Adobe Illustrator file up on GitHub as well as the JPEG. So if you want to download it, modify it, upload it to Spoonflower and make your own creation, you can.
You can also just go to Spoonflower and I sell the material there. You could get it printed on a woven fabric, like a cotton or a canvas, and many people have done this. So I started a thread on Twitter, which is a bunch of people who have made things. Some of these people are here and I think they are amazing. If you're not as crafty, but you want some stuff like this for your own home, you could go on Spoonflower and they sell like a bedspread with the hexes all over it and a tablecloth. And again, people have purchased some of these things. You could go to Redbubble, they have some clothes, although not as nice as my custom dress, obviously. Zazzle has things like tote bags and sneakers. Someone bought the sneakers. I get like a dollar kickback when you buy something like this. So there's links in the slideshow.
Leverage your community
And then the last lesson is that you should leverage your community. So I just wanted to give a shout out to Danny Kaplan. He was the one who told me that I shouldn't make all the hexes at full opacity, that it would be more interesting if many of them were lighter colored. My mom, who taught me how to sew, let me use her serger and also reminded me about pockets on dresses. And then my best friend, Alex, who took all the beautiful photos. Thanks.
