Off to see the Wizard

New sewing patterns <Pinguïn> & <Walvis> Accessory bag / Novelty bag

New 2 patterns are just released from Waffle Patterns. Meet the Accessory bags <Pinguïn> and <Walvis> sewing patterns. Fun and playful penguin and whale-shaped novelty bags. And they have pockets! My shop mainly designs functional garments, but why not just have fun? I always wanted to design vibrant and whimsical items, too.

I hope you enjoy and have fun by making those as well. They will be your special pieces for your special occasions or fun unexpected presents. They can be made with relatively small amount of fabrics. It is nice to use up your leftover fabrics from your stash, too.

<design>

-Pinguïn Lovely penguin-shaped novelty bag. You can store small things like candies or coin purse from the center back zipper opening. The opening width is about 15cm, the height is about 27cm. It has a small patch pocket on the front bodice, too. Use a hand strap as a pouch or clutch, or a long strap for a shoulder/crossbody bag.

-Walvis Whale shaped accessory bag. The bag opening is on the center top and you can store small things like a mobile phone. The opening width is 18cm and the body length is about 55cm. It has a zipper pocket on the side and a front patch pocket on the mouth part. The zipper pocket is about id-card size. It has handles, but can be skipped. The yellow sample in the photos is without handles design. The strap can be attached as a side type (on the center top) or a shoulder type (both sides on the body) .

Both Pinguïn and Walvis are shaped with fiber fill stuffing. The inside bags are small, so not suitable for serious luggage. Also, they are not designed for children's toys.

<fabric recommendation>

<Shell> The patterns are drafted for woven fabrics. Mid-heavy weight woven fabrics are suitable, like duck, twill, denim, canvas, or décor weight fabric, etc. I normally like to recommend functional fabrics, but they are fun accessory items, so please use your imagination and play with the design. Choosing lovely looking fabric as your design intention will be the best.

Depending on your fabric, please consider using additional interfacing on the whole bag panels for adding extra strength or body.

<Lining> Lining fabrics are used for the inside of the bags and the pockets. Plain cotton or linen will be suitable and reasonable.

<Sample fabrics in the photos> Here is a fabric list I used for the samples. I used only my old leftovers from my past projects. So I could not list the shops which I bought from.

- Yellow and White samples Shell ; Both faux leather. The white one is the leftover of Kaneel rider's jacket. I think both fabrics were originally intended for decor/interior purposes. Both cannot be interfaced nor ironed, so I skipped interfacing, but used thin ribbon on the zipper places for adding some extra support. I really love the looks/textures of the faux leathers, but those are a bit difficult to handle. Pins or rippers cannot be used for these materials, so I used clips or scotch tape instead.

Lining ; plain cotton. The colours are matched with the zipper tape colours.

- Smoky pink samples Shell ; mixed twill. Leftover of Kanoko bags. Like Kanoko bags, I used woven mid weight interfacing on the whole body to add strength and body. Lining ; plain cotton. The colours are matched with the zipper colours.

- Red plaid samples Wool coating fully interfaced with mid weight woven type. The lining is plain cotton. This one is also the leftover of the Kanoko bag.

<Other materials>

The bags use various webbings or tapes for the handles and straps or other details. If you cannot find the perfect colour or width, making those with the same or contrast fabrics are an option.

The small parts like the flippers or fin are supported with a light stabilizer. Fusible fleece or thin quilt batting will be suitable. I used fusible fleece for all the samples.

Please choose suitable interfacing/parts for your design and shell fabrics. I strongly recommend checking actual material samples as much as possible and experimenting with your fabrics before starting the project. If you cannot choose some details, please remember making actual samples with actual fabrics is the best way to confirm.

<Other>

Although the bags can store only small things, the bags themself are about shoulder bag size. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, I think printing the pattern pieces with scale will work. But you need to adjust the seam allowances or other details.

I used the shoulder strap from readymade bags, but you can make them by yourself, too.

Please check the listing pages for more details. > Pinguïn bag. Walvis bag

********************* The sewing patterns include the fully illustrated instructions (Pinguïn 9 pages, Walvis 10pages) and all the sewing processes are described with detailed pics. The pattern files are available for both home printers (A4 or US letter) and copyshop(A1 or A2 format).

You can check other photos of these models on my Flickr page.

The Accessory bag <PinguÏn> , and <Walvis> PDF sewing patterns are available here. Also in the Etsy shop.

Special discount price until 9th Apr. 2025 (CEST) with other popular patterns. No discount code is needed! The sale page is here.

Happy sewing!

(Japanese post here 日本語ポストはこちら).

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generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.

saddest thing that can happen is a cat so delicately and cozy putting their small apple head on your leg like a pillow to sleep while fully unaware that in like five minutes you're going to get up to go eat because they don't know human language or how time works

Me, having been immobile for three hours: hmm I should get up and pee

The world’s tiniest angel: time for snomgol my mommi :)

Happy International Bat Appreciation Day!!

A spoon's only objective in life is to make soup go upwards, and it knows this. That's why when you put one under a running tap it blasts the water way high. The spoon thinks there's suddenly TONS of soup to deal with and it freaks out.

OP I want you to know I think of this post every single time I have to wash a spoon.

[x]

Oh. Oh. Oh I love this

alla mingalёva

If you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard - wait until you see the result of not having them.

Real,

You, yes, you reading this. have that conversation or it will fall apart.

attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you

I was commissioned to make an art quilt inspired by a photo of the HMS Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's antarctic exploration vessel.

Here are my reference photo (taken by Frank Hurley on August 27, 1915) and some process pictures!

I printed a scale copy of the image, then used it to create an applique pattern and to trace the rigging onto water soluble fabric so I could free motion quilt over all the lines. (FMQ is essentially freehand sketching with your sewing machine by manually moving the quilt under your needle in whatever patterns you want to create with thread.)

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

Nature valentines.

Thanks to my Patrons for your support.

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm

[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']