November has been busy around here. While lot of the work has been happening behind the scenes -- more on that in December -- there's also a list of things that are already rolled out.
 First up: a new pattern. The Benjamin Bow tie is [now available](/patterns/benjamin) in beta.
That's because it's the first ever pattern to have been contributed by the community. More specifically, it was [Wouter](/users/xdpug) who designed and programmed the pattern.
So shout-out to him for being the first person to contribute a pattern. And if you [hang around in the freesewing chat room](https://discord.freesewing.org/), you know that he's already started working on his next pattern.
All of these settings are available in [your account](/account), but people frequently don't realize that. With the new sign-up flow, that should no longer be the case.

For a bow tie, the current standard seam allowance (1cm for metric, 5/8" for imperial) is too large. So Wouter wanted some way to change the standard seam allowance.
So, that's what we implemented. Going forward, patterns can set the standard seam allowance (for both metric and imperial). If they don't, we revert to 1cm|5/8" as before.
If you clicked the link to the welcome page, or if you check out the settings in [your profile](/profile) you'll see that you can now enter your username for a few other sites:
No need to worry, [your privacy is in good hands here](/blog/privacy-choices/). I am not interested in collecting your data, and the only reason this is here is because people [asked for it](https://github.com/freesewing/site/issues/184).
We've added a bunch of new [showcases](/showcase) this month. Every maker that has one or more showcases here on the site has their own page that lists all their showcases.
This month, we've updated those pages with links to the blog and/or social media accounts of these makers. The idea is that people who feel you've made a cool thing can find out a bit more about you.
This means that if you run Google analytics -- or some other website statistics tool -- on your blog or website, you won't see traffic from freesewing.org.
That doesn't mean that people aren't clicking links to your blog, but we simply block the referrer header from being set, so Google has no idea where people come from.
You can also download the SVG source code to make further changes to the patterns. But once you have made those changes, there's no easy way for you to get it as a printable PDF.
Well now there is. We've added [an on-demand tiler](/tools/tiler) to the site that does just that. Upload your SVG, pick the format of your choice, and we'll tile it for you.
I had hoped to release my winter coat pattern during November, but alas that didn't work out. I'm actually still making it, and when it's ready there will be a few tweaks required to the pattern before I can release it.
But that news will have to play second fiddle to our wrap up of the year (traditionally on December 10th here). It's not just about what happened over the last 12 months, we'll also be rolling out some changes to safeguard the future of this project.