Reflections on training

I completed training in early May along with Test Cutter KaeLeah Spallin. Gerber provided a 7 day online course with 5 hours of instruction per day. Our instructor was kind, experienced, and encouraging. It was a different experience for her to be providing training to Costume specific Cutters as most of her experience lays in the fashion world.

One thing I found very interesting was learning how to communicate with the software. It is capable of such complex tasks that the way you interact with it has to be very specific. Different mouse clicks, different types of points, different saved settings on your file all influence the actions you're able to make in your pattern design. Once you have a handle on this it affords you a lot of control, however when you are starting out it can feel frustrating because you're following all the correct steps and not getting the result you want simply, because buried in the background you've not ticked the correct box. Luckily we have a great manual, lots of resources, and access to our instructor if we need any help troubleshooting these issues.

I can't help thinking how great it would be to see a similar product developed specifically for costuming, I think that a lot of the background requirments used in fashion manufacturing could be elimated to create a cleaner more functional work space for bespoke and costume specific production. Hopefully once we are done testing we will be able to help interested users assess what sorts of digitial tools are the most useful and worthwhile investing in. 

So far my favorite function might just be 'walking a pattern', it's strangely satisfying and very accurate! See the little video below, this blouse is from a training exercise so ignore any wonkiness in the pattern, haha
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Cathleen Sbrizzi
Research Coordinator CCRDI
Cathleen.Design