Pol(l)ymorphic

Last-minute edit: due to a family illness, it is possible that this blog may abruptly go on hiatus in the next few days. At the moment I am not quite sure what is happening, but if the blog does suddenly disappear it will be back later.

Anyone who sews at all has probably, at some point, made a rag doll. I can definitely remember making one, and I think I may have made more than one; but I drafted my own pattern, because it's not difficult to do that. Pretty much anyone can run up a pattern that will work for the general shape, especially since you are going to put clothes on it anyway so it doesn't have to be especially accurate.

But what if you want to make, say, a Snoopy? Or a Yoda? Or your D&D character? Or, if you're that way inclined, your fursona? This is where the generic self-drafted pattern isn't much help, and tweaking it becomes difficult. It's not too hard to do Yoda's ears, but Snoopy's snout is another thing altogether.

Well, help is at hand, courtesy of the wonderful folks at Freesewing.eu, since quite a lot of them do also play D&D. I don't know exactly how Polly the Dolly first came into being, but my working hypothesis is that someone wanted to make a plushie of their (non-human) character and decided that something had to be done about that. And so Polly was designed to be as tweakable as possible, so that you could use the same pattern to make anything that is basically anthropomorphic. The version you see in the feature photo shows the default upper body, but the legs are more animal-like and there's a tail; I reckon this one is probably a cuddly satyr. The head and upper body, however, are also fully tweakable, so, for instance, you can give it a snout. You can also alter the proportions to give different figure types; so, while you can't change the width, you can vary all the lengths, plus you can make the figure any size up to a rather alarming 162 cm (that's slightly taller than d'Artagnan). This means you can get the same effect, because the width changes proportional to the size. So for your D&D party you should have no problem making the big hulking half-orc, the standard-sized human, the very slim elf, the stocky dwarf, and the tiny halfling... all from exactly the same free pattern. It is not out yet, but rest assured I shall be linking it as soon as it is.

This isn't the only pattern currently in development. I've already mentioned my Dutch friend who is known online as Joke. She's also, as it turns out, heavily involved with Freesewing, and she has her own pet project which I think is going to turn out to be really useful for a small but significant minority of people: mastectomy prostheses.

Joke's mother has had a radical mastectomy on one side and a lumpectomy on the other, poor woman. And the problem is that mastectomy bras are not especially supportive, for very good reasons. More than anything else they need to be exceptionally comfortable, especially immediately post-surgery; and since to give good support the band needs to be quite tight, and there's a limit to how tight one can comfortably have it in such circumstances, the support is usually a bit ho-hum. However, as Joke points out, mastectomy prostheses in general appear to have been designed using a 20-year-old in a push-up bra as a model. So if the natural boob is inclined to sag and the bra is not capable of supporting it very well, then the prosthesis is not going to match the natural boob even if it's theoretically the same size. The apex of the prosthesis will end up several centimetres higher than the apex of the natural one, and that looks weird... which defeats the entire point of wearing the prosthesis in the first place.

There are two possible ways round this, which are not mutually exclusive. One is to find a way to improve the support from mastectomy bras without compromising on comfort, and Joke is trying to do this by tweaking an existing sports bra for her mother. And the other one is to design some way of enabling a person to input a set of highly asymmetric measurements and output a pattern to create a prosthesis that actually matches the natural boob as closely as possible. Since this kind of thing is exactly what Freesewing does - there's a design, you input your measurements, and out comes a pattern that works for you - Freesewing was the obvious place for her to take this one. Normally with a Freesewing pattern the default assumption is that you are (at least more or less) symmetrical; but this is all done with computer code, so it is a reasonably simple matter to adjust for input parameters that are significantly different on the two sides of the body.

I should probably also mention the third pattern that is on the design board at the moment. It is an anti-binder. I had no idea what that was, so I went and looked; and it turns out that it is a thing I could very much have done with while cosplaying Mr Wooster. (I used an actual binder for that, or at least an improvised one; it was made from old nylon tights and it was quite effective, but it was also incredibly uncomfortable, and I ended up resolving that if I ever cosplayed any more male characters people were just going to have to suspend disbelief.) A binder works by squashing you down. The anti-binder, however, works by bringing out the natural waist and filling in the space, so you still get the more masculine-looking figure but without any of the discomfort. I wasn't at all surprised to discover it had been designed by a trans man, who has had top surgery and therefore no longer needs it, but presumably also found regular binders very uncomfortable and designed this thing out of a desire that nobody else should feel they had to wear them if they didn't want to. I don't know if I'll ever do any more cosplay; but if I do, I do generally tend to like doing male characters, and so I shall probably make one of these ingenious things. Suspension of disbelief notwithstanding, it's a little difficult to be Kerr Avon or Ardsley Wooster when you're built a lot more like Dolly Parton.

I'm not (yet) able to do the coding required to bring ideas like this into reality, though I am very interested in learning; perhaps in six months, when I finish this course module and will have a gap till next October, I'll start delving into it. I'm particularly interested in stoma adaptations, as you might expect. But, in the meantime, it's great fun seeing what is in the pipeline, and some of the discussions that go on are hilariously insane, like the one we had the other night about the 5-metre cuddly shark (why, yes, you really can make it up to that size... though exactly where you put it when you've done so is anyone's guess). By the time someone suggested filling it with helium and turning it into a small dirigible, I realised that if I didn't go to bed soon I'd be up all night...

...laughing.