Waste less paper by editing your patterns in Gimp

Author's note: This post was not sponsored by and is not associated with Mood Sewciety, I am just a simp.

I'm a huge fan of printable patterns (especially free ones). They're not as hard to use as conventional patterns, at least for me, and if you mess up one of the pattern pieces or decide you want it in a different size, you can reprint that piece without having to print the whole pattern again (or buy a whole new pattern like you may need to with a storebought one!). They also, generally, save waste because they're printed on demand rather than in bulk by a corporation that generates tons of waste and makes more patterns than will ever be used.

Lately I've been using some printable patterns from Mood Sewciety; I especially love them because not only is the blog populated with cute and easily customizable designs, but the patterns are free (and royalty-free!) and much more size-inclusive than a lot of patterns. That's actually how I found them, because I was trying to find ways to get more inclusive patterns and a plus-sized sewist on YouTube (unfortunately I can't remember who, although I'm pretty sure there were actually multiple) recommended Mood.

However, it's the option for the clothes to be made larger that I appreciate. Currently I'm not really sewing to sell, the only other people in my life I often sew for are a skinny adult and a literal infant, and I'm technically "obese" but I'm also short as all get out so clothes I sew for myself never need to be larger than a 2X (and seldom that). While I 100% support Mood going up to a 32 (5X) and would be fully behind them serving larger sizes than that as well, I've noticed that for those of us sewing smaller sizes, it's a huge waste of paper to print the whole pattern with all sizes (and large gaps between pattern pieces, presumably to make cutting easier/less risky). And that's coming from someone who's slightly large of center in most of their size charts--imagine if you were sewing for a size 00!

So, in order to cultivate an environment where we can have the best of both worlds--size inclusivity without the economic and ecological waste of printing for much larger sizes than we need to sew--I decided that I need to figure out how to change the way my patterns are printed when I know what size I need. In this tutorial, I'm using a pattern that I have unfortunately already printed, because it's one that I have downloaded already and that's not particularly huge. The bigger the pattern, the more it'll help to do this, of course, but for the sake of just figuring it out I figured I should save myself some time.

Onward: here's a step-by-step guide to edit your patterns in Gimp to create a more economical PDF to print! You'll need a PDF sewing pattern, Gimp, and the knowledge of what size you want to be sewing. I recommend taking measurements so you're less likely to need to redo it. This tutorial has a lot of steps, but you don't necessarily need to know Gimp first--I literally only learned how to use it for this!

Part one: import into Gimp

I had initially tried to do this in my usual art program, MediBang Paint, but I ended up needing more space than 7500 pixels, so I finally installed Gimp. Because I was preparing to do it in MediBang, I went to a PDF-to-PNG converter online, but I later learned this step is unnecessary if you're using Gimp. Because I used the online converter, I was able to just check a box to make the images transparent, which I definitely think is a plus for aligning the pieces of the original PDF.

Step one: create a new Gimp project.

If you're unsure of how big to make it, use a formula such as this one with the DPI you want to use and how many sheets of paper wide and heigh the output print would be if you taped it together as per the original instructions: width = dpi*8.5*sheetsWide; height = dpi*11*sheetsTall. If you know the margin that was used on the paper for taping, you can remove it from the width and height of the sheets of paper (e.g. a quarter inch on each side? use 8 and 10.5), but it's okay if you don't. Too big is okay; you just need to make sure it's big enough to fit all the pieces. I'd also like to note that my DPI of 300 was entirely unnecessary and I probably should've downsized it. The automatic DPI Gimp uses to import PDFs is 100, so unless you want to change the settings while you import (which, to be fair, is not hard to do), I'd recommend a DPI of 100 for those importing PDFs. I can't guarantee how well it'll print because I'm using a 300 DPI, but if you can zoom in to real size and it still looks mostly fine, you should be in the clear.

Step two: import the PDF

If your pattern is one like the Adenia bodysuit I'm using here, where the borders of the pages have matching elements that are supposed to overlap, you may want to take an extra step and convert your PDF to transparent images. I used [link] and converted it to a zip file of PNGs. If it has no margin, or if the margin is only one two sides of the paper (for example, when I printed out the Cypress Dress pattern, it had no margins on the top and left, and on the right and bottom it had black lines for the other sheets' edges to line up with. this is how we'll be making our final PDFs in this tutorial, but it's probably not hard to change if you want another line-up method on the margins), a white background will be fine.

In order to actually import the PDF or images you converted it to, click File > Open as layers. Click the PDF, or click the first image of the actual pattern pieces and shift-click the last. Press import.

If you clicked to import the PDF directly, here's where you need to pay attention: Make sure you're only importing sheets you need to edit (the ones with pattern pieces on them) and make sure that the dimensions of each sheet are the dimensions of a sheet of paper. Usually this will be 8.5 inches horizontally and 11 inches vertically, although some patterns may be designed for different sizes of paper. It's important to take note of that if it's the case--this process, or printing it directly, may have undesired results if you're printing on and/or working with the wrong sheet size. If the pattern is designed for a different sheet size than you want to or can print, that's another problem that this tutorial can solve.

Step three: place each page (keeping them as different layers!) as you would if you were taping the printed papers together.

In my case, the circles and dotted lines on the margins of each page were designed to overlap. This was much easier to do in Gimp (with transparent layers) than it was to do with real paper. If you have raw edges to line up to black lines, this will also probably be easier to do in Gimp than with real paper, but the overlapping circles and dotted lines method was harder to do in real life than the raw edges--they told me to cut up to the dotted lines, but when I did that I didn't have enough overlap to properly attach the sheets to each other.

Make sure your sheets are arranged exactly how the pattern says to arrange them (and if your pattern doesn't have arrangement instructions, yikes, but just make sure all pattern pieces are in one piece once you've added all the sheets together).

Step four: merge the layers

Starting with the top layer selected, press the "Merge down" button <img> until all layers but the background have been merged into one.

Part two: edit the image

Step one (optional but highly recommended): trace each piece

On a layer separate from all of your PDF page layers, use a saturated bright color (or at least one you can easily distinguish from both black and the background) to trace the lines indicated for your size on all pattern pieces you're using.*2? It doesn't have to be very good, because you'll be deleting it later. I would recommend an opacity that isn't 100% but isn't incredibly transparent either.

Use a visible color like bright red or blue to trace the pattern in the size you want to sew.

Step two: erase unneeded sizes/pieces

If you have any pattern pieces you've decided not to use--for example, in this pattern, you only need one of the sets of pieces for the bra cups--delete it now. It can probably be selected with the lasso.

On each pattern piece, use the lasso or eraser (or some combination of the two) to remove all the lines outside of the size you need. This is where those colorful lines come in handy--you can get a go at it while it's zoomed out based on those, without having to find the actual line of your size in the same color as all of the other lines. If you're a perfectionist like me, you might want to erase closer in as well, but you can at least get big chunks this way.

Optional step two and a half: you can also erase any lines or lettering that you believe will confuse or annoy you when you print out the pattern. For me, this was the edge-matching helpers on the margins (at least outside of the pattern pieces).

Step three (optional but recommended, optional timing): add a grid

On a new layer(important!), go to `Filters > Render > Pattern > Grid`. Unfortunately, you'll have to give the dimensions in pixels. These will be your paper dimensions in inches, minus your margin (I used half an inch), multiplied by your DPI. I went with 15 pixels (at 300dpi, so 1/20 of an inch) and black, but something lighter in either sense of the word will probably save you some ink (although my main tip with regards to saving money on ink is just to print in black and white). Make sure you use the dimensions you'll be printing onto, even if they weren't the dimensions of the original pattern PDF.

Step four: move the pieces closer together

If you don't know how to do this (I had to ask someone who uses GIMP), you'll start by selecting the piece you want to move with the lasso tool. Before you move it, copy and paste it. This will make it its own temporary layer. Now use the move tool and/or the rotate tool to put it into place. Then right click the temporary layer it's on and, if you're sure this is where you want it, you can click "anchor layer." If you're not sure or just prefer the leniency, click "to new layer" instead. This way you'll be able to move just this piece again without reselecting it (and without risk of getting it and another piece intertwined). Note: if you imported transparent images or made their backgrounds transparent, the accuracy of your selection doesn't matter as long as it gets all of the pattern piece and doesn't get any of the other pattern pieces. A couple of times I even used rectangles! If you have a white background on this layer, you'll need to get as close to the line as you can without clipping into it, so you can get the pattern pieces closer together without any lines being covered by background.

If you can see a more paper-efficient way to arrange the pieces, feel free to rearrange them, but it's already cutting costs and generating less waste if you just smoosh them closer together. It's more likely that rearranging will be highly advantageous if you've removed pieces, like in my case. Feel free to rotate items if it saves space--this is only how it goes on the paper, after all!

And, while this doesn't necessarily save paper or ink, I advise keeping each pattern piece on as few sheets of paper as possible. Some of the pattern pieces I've cut out have had tiny bits that go over corners, or been across more pieces of paper than is necessary while other pattern pieces are on all of its sides, so I needed to connect them *all* together, requiring a lot more space had that one pattern piece been attached to 2 sheets rather than 6. This is why I recommended adding the grid earlier, so you can see how many pieces of paper will need to be attached to each other and minimize it--actually, now that I think about it, this does save you some glue and/or tape, and potentially some paper if you need to reprint specific pieces! But the biggest impact it will have is in morale.

In my case, I was able to only ever attach two columns at a time and five total pieces of paper at a time, as well as fitting the whole pattern I needed on 9 pages instead of 15!

This would be an appropriate time to resize the image, to the size of however many pieces of paper you'll actually have to print now that you've minimized it. It will help you properly split the pages apart in the next part.

Step five (optional): relabel pages

Some patterns, such as the Adenia bodysuit's, have labels on each sheet of paper so you can identify where it should be placed in relation to the others. If you found this as helpful as I did, you may want to recreate that (it was probably messed up by moving the pieces). Just add text for each page with a letter for the row and a number for the column it's in. I had to increase the text size to about 640 pt font.

Part three: export as a PDF

Step one: split the pages

In order to use pages on a Gimp PDF export, you need them to be on separate layers. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to do this (I tried to implement a [tutorial I saw](link) with a plugin script, but it didn't work and I didn't have enough electricity to ask the internet for advice or search what could be wrong) in Gimp. Fortunately, creating only (/s) a dozen or few new files to delete, there is a way to split them into different images, so I ended up doing that and then copy and pasting them back into the document as layers (although I wish now that I had pasted them into one of the new smaller files generated by this process).

To split the pages into different images, first add a guide on each line in the grid (`Image > Guides > New guide`). Then go to `Image > Split by guides` (in the section with the crop functions). This will generate a new gimp project for each page, but they open in GIMP. Simply go to each page image, copy/cut it, and paste it in whatever project you want to export your pdf from. Make sure you get each needed image before you get rid of the files they're in!

If there are any blank pages, don't copy and paste them! This is the easiest stage to get rid of them, and if you leave them in, you or anyone you share the file with may accidentally print a blank page! Obviously this wouldn't matter much in an at-home print, where no ink was used and no paper was wasted because it can just go straight back in the paper tray, but if you have to print your patterns in public places that charge (or want your revision to be accessible to those who do), it'll be a waste of money (and probably also the paper, because the public place probably has closed access to the paper tray).

Step two: resize document

First, make sure all pages are on the top left corner of the project. Then you can go to `Image/Canvas` and set the dimensions to the size of one sheet of the paper you're using. Make sure it's the size of the whole piece of paper, including the margins. It would probably still print right if you just cropped the canvas to the layers, but I'd rather not take any chances.

Step three: export PDF

This is the easiest part. Just go to `File > Export as` and change the name of the file so that the extension is `.pdf`. Gimp will do the rest for you!