Hello! We couldn’t be more excited today, because Maternity Sewing is now live! We’ve been working for over a year to make this happen, and we’re thrilled to reach this point! Below we’ll tell you more about what you can expect from us.
In one sentence, our purpose is to provide an easy to browse catalogue of sewing patterns suitable for women who are pregnant, nursing or in the postpartum phase. Because, as you might have noticed, these are hard to find! We have scoured the internet for indie pattern designers that have suitable patterns, and fortunately, we have found a lot. Our first focus was to include patterns that are specifically designed for maternity and nursing. Then we’ve selected patterns that are not designed for maternity, but would work through at least the second trimester, without modifications. This last part was important to us, because many patterns can be hacked to be suitable, but our goal was to make the sewing process as easy as possible for you. Not everyone is comfortable hacking a pattern, and now you won’t have to!
We are passionate about contributing to the sewing community and you can expect to find us sharing a lot of great tutorials and inspiration for pregnant and nursing sewists on our blog. But we also wanted to contribute in a broader sense. We know that we have been lucky to have had access to excellent maternal care during and after our pregnancy. And we know that many mothers around the world are not that fortunate. We have found a charity whose mission is to improve medical care for pregnant women all over the world – a mission we wholeheartedly support. That’s why we pledge to donate 5% of our profits to Every Mother Counts. You can read more about EMC here.
We’ve gotten an overwhelmingly positive response from designers so far, which has been very encouraging. Even before launching and proving ourselves, many were excited to sell their patterns with us because they understood our mission and wanted to be a part of it!
We have also designed new maternity patterns exclusively for Maternity Sewing. You can only find those patterns here, and we’ll keep releasing new ones! It has been a nice challenge to design for maternity, and there are so many possibilities not yet explored. We aim to create original designs that go way beyond the ‘ruched side seam’ models. Check out our collection here.
If there is a designer or pattern that you think we should have in our shop but we don’t, there are a few different reasons this might be.
The designer doesn’t wholesale .pdfs. There are quite a few designers who only sell their PDF patterns on their own website. We hope to expand our offerings to include print patterns in the future and look forward to carrying their patterns then.
We haven’t finalized paperwork with a designer. We can’t tell you who else we have in the pipeline, but we know more designers will be added soon!
We don’t know of the designer or pattern. If there’s a designer that we might not have heard of or a pattern you love for maternity/nursing that we might have overlooked, let us know. We’ve done our best to learn about all the indie designers and their catalogs out there but there are so many designers with so many offerings that we’d love your help in finding more.
A designer isn’t interested in working with us. We understand and respect that a designer may not be interested in selling their patterns with a third party that is just getting started, like us. If you know of a designer that we don’t carry, along with telling us about them, you can help us by dropping the designer a note and letting them know that you’d like to see their patterns on MaternitySewing.com.
In our shop you’re able to easily find the pattern you’re looking for by using our extensive search options. We have search filters that range from expected to unique including garment type, size range, and cup size as well as maternity specific options like trimester suitability, nursing, or whether the waistline on a pattern falls under or over the belly. Read all about our search options here.
On our blog you’ll find weekly posts of interest to pregnant and nursing mothers (as well as their friends who sew) including pattern hacks, maternity and nursing styling inspiration, simple project tutorials, postpartum body image boosters, and designer interviews.
We also have a newsletter that we send out bi-weekly where we showcase new patterns, share the highlights of our blog and social media, and offer exclusive deals. You can subscribe here.
We’re Erin and Lisa, independent pattern designers who met through the online sewing community. We had been following each other for a few years and gotten a pretty good sense of who the other person was through blog posts and later also emails. We both have daughters who are just 3 months apart. And it was over our pregnancy and becoming a mother that we bonded and came up with the idea for Maternity Sewing. We both noted the difficulty of finding fun and original maternity sewing patterns and decided to do something about that! You can read more about us on this page.