How's Your Sewing? Investigating Metrics to Automatically Assess Sewing Expertise

Abstract

Makers must regularly assess their expertise when planning projects or selecting tutorials. However, personal bias makes this assessment prone to error, potentially leading to frustration, loss of materials, and discouragement. Additionally, hobbyists have limited feedback possibilities to refine their skills, unlike, for example, apprentice artisans who receive continuous instructor feedback. To address these issues, automated expertise assessment systems could help makers assess their skills and progress. However, such systems require assessment metrics, which have been studied little in the maker context so far.We derived such metrics for sewing from semistructured interviews with ten sewing-related instructors about their evaluation process. Additionally, we showed them a sewn object and asked them to assess the creator's expertise. From our findings, we derive criteria to use in future automated sewing expertise assessment systems. For one criterion, seam allowance, we present a functional demonstrator that automatically assesses related measurements.