Welcome to the New Closet Core Site!!

Whoa la! Closet Core Patterns just had a MAJOR Queer Eye-level makeover and I'm so excited for you to see our new look! While we've had a few cosmetic changes since we changed our brand name a few years ago, this is definitely the biggest aesthetic and functional transformation we've undergone in some time, and I'm a bit delirious with happiness after all the behind the scenes level madness and sleepless nights that happened to pull this off. Since the site looks and feels SO different, today I want to outline some of the new features and changes we made to make your experience on our site a much more enjoyable one.

Structurally our old site was starting to fall apart - as coding and themes age, things just start to break, and it felt like I was putting out web fires every day. We are also gearing up for a BIG EXCITING new project next year that necessitated a much more modern and robust web infrastructure, so we pulled the web equivalent of gutting a house right down to the studs and starting all over again. With over 700 blog posts and 50 products, it was a massive amount of work to get everything looking fresh and clean, so a big big big shout out to team members Monserratt, Amy, Ama, and Cassie for helping me update everything from our tagging system, to blog post photos and all manner of unsexy thing that make a website fun and easy to navigate! It's truly been a massive team effort and I'm hoping you'll feel that as you poke around. 

Changes to the Blog

If you've spent any time on our blog, our new design is a major upgrade! We wanted to make it easy to find things and catch up with new content, in addition to making it fun to browse older content. We've tried to do that with two new features. 

First up is our new "quick browse" menu, to the right of our header image when you land, or scrollable on mobile. Here you can quickly get to a few great pages:

• Learn to Sew - an intro to sewing page we hope to continue building out, which includes our favourite patterns, tutorials, skills and classes for new sewists.
• Sewing Tutorials - an easy one-stop shop for all our sewing tutorials, which you can further break down by subcategory.
• Free Patterns - where you can find all the links to blog posts with free patterns and resources. You will still need to visit our Sewing Resource Library to download the files (we give you the password when you sign up for our newsletter!)
• Sew Our Patterns - if you are sewing a particular pattern and want to see what tutorials, videos, or content we've created for it, here's where you'll want to go! 
• Inspiring Projects - here's where you can see all the things the team and I have made over the years.

Next up is our new filtering feature, where you can browse projects by skill, season, time, and project type.

This was a really fun feature for us to develop! With such a massive catalog of blog posts, it's an interactive way to browse our content, whether you're looking for tutorials, projects, or garment ideas. You can access it at the bottom of the page and in our sidebar - play around and tell us what you think!

Changes to Our Online Shop

Fun fact - our blog and shop are on two different platforms (Shopify and WordPress respectively). This is why you can't find blog posts when you search our shop, or patterns for sale when you search our blog. 😉

For the overhaul of our shop, my biggest priority was making it easier to find the specific information you're looking for when you're using or buying one of our patterns. Sewing patterns have a lot of technical information, so if you're out shopping for fabric and want to know how much yardage to get, we made that info super easy and intuitive to find without having to sift through huge blocks of text. Now all that information is rearranged in helpful tabs, with information grouped logically, and expanding sections for things like yardage by size and width (shout out to Shopify meta fields for making this tech advance possible, lol).

You'll also find it much easier to find finished garment measurements and digital file details like page counts, understand project difficulty, and learn whether a file is layered or comes in a projector format. Below is a quick video showing you how this information is organized on our product pages. My hope is that this will make choosing, preparing for and sewing your projects that much easier!

I could go on and on about our new site but I'd prefer you just go poke around and tell us what you think! While we've audited everything a zillion times, there are always bugs that emerge with a huge redesign like this so please don't be shy about letting us know if anything isn't working or looks weird, either on your computer or your phone.

We hope you love our new design as much as we do!