Most of what goes wrong with a digital pattern goes wrong at the printer, and has a two-minute answer. The rest reaches a person — the same person who wrote the app.
Nothing stands between you and the first project. The app opens on your projects, with a sample already there to take apart, and offers a tour once: a two-minute quick tour or a ten-minute complete guide. Skip it, and both wait in Settings → Guide. Delete the sample whenever it stops helping.
New project, pick a garment, answer two or three measurements. The pattern is drafted to them and laid out on fabric.
Photograph the piece with a ruler in the shot, import it, drag a calibration line along the ruler, and trace.
An empty canvas, the draw tool, and the command bar when a line has to be an exact length at an exact angle.
Gestures worth knowing on day one. Two fingers tapped undoes, three redoes, four hides the whole interface so you can see the pattern. Two fingers drag to pan, pinch to zoom. If you are left-handed, the tool panel mirrors — it is in Settings.
A pattern printed at 97% looks completely normal and fits nobody. Almost every printing problem is the printer quietly shrinking the page to its own margins. One check catches it before you have taped anything together.
Print the first pattern sheet before the whole set. If the PDF starts with a page map, use the pattern sheet after it for the scale check.
In the print dialog choose 100%, Actual size or Scale: None — never "Fit to page", "Shrink oversized pages" or "Fit to printable area".
Measure the horizontal and vertical scale markers: 5 cm, or 2 inches when exporting in inches. Print at 100% and check both directions before taping the sheets.
Sheets are taped by lining up the registration marks. Paper edges vary between printers; the marks do not.
Check the paper size too. A pattern tiled for A4 and printed on Letter will not line up, nor the reverse. Set the size in the export, and set the same one in the printer.
Work saves continuously as you go, and every project keeps rotating backups behind it. The restore button sits on the project card, in plain sight. The moment you need it is not the moment to hunt through a menu.
Because nothing is stored on our servers, nothing can be recovered by us. That is the same fact as "nobody can read your patterns", seen from the other side. Back up your device.
iPad, from iPadOS 15 upward. The interface is built for the iPad screen, so that is where SewGrader is released; an iPhone version would need a layout of its own. An Apple Pencil is supported and not required.
Not yet, and no date is promised. If you want to be told when that changes, write and say so.
You can draft, grade and work with saved patterns offline. Printing pattern labels in some languages may require a one-time font download; once downloaded, the font can be used offline.
No. SewGrader is free to download and to use with up to five patterns at a time — every garment, grading, printing and the projector included. One optional purchase, the lifetime unlock, lifts the limit and adds SVG and DXF export, project files and iCloud sync. It is paid once, and nothing else is sold inside the app.
In the app's own storage on your device. If you have unlocked the app and turn on iCloud sync, a copy is also kept in your own iCloud Drive — your storage, not ours. There is no account and no server of ours for them to travel to. The privacy policy sets that out in full.
Yes. Everything you draft is yours, and we claim nothing over it — see section 3 of the terms. What you may not do is redistribute somebody else's commercial pattern because you traced it; that is between you and whoever published it.
Yes, three ways out — the tiled PDF in the free app, SVG and DXF with the unlock:
This matters more than it sounds: it means the day you stop using SewGrader, your work still opens.
Projector mode displays the pattern at 1:1 after calibration. Adjust the corners and scale to your setup, then check a known measurement on the cutting surface. Recheck after moving the projector or changing its image settings.
By default, SewGrader follows your device language. You can choose another language in the app’s Settings, under Language, including English (UK) and English (US). Units, paper format and size charts are separate choices.
Refunds are handled by Apple, not by us — we have no way to issue one. Request it at reportaproblem.apple.com. If the reason is something broken, write to us as well so it gets fixed.
Say so. Tell us what you were trying to make, and where the app stopped being useful. That is worth more than a feature name — the feature name is usually the second-best solution to the real problem.
The app does not send automatic reports about your activity. To investigate a problem, we need you to tell us what happened. A few lines are enough:
If a specific project misbehaves and you are willing to send it, export it and attach the file. It is yours and it stays yours; it is used to reproduce the bug and then deleted.
One address, read by a person. Write in whichever of the app's eighteen languages you prefer — an answer will come back in English if that is the only way to be precise.
Email:
developer@virtalia.cz
Web:
sewgrader.com
For App Store purchases, billing and refunds, Apple is the only party who can act — please go to Apple Support first.