Valhalla's Things

Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so.

I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing! yay! And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was needed, I had time to do it (it didn’t, it started to rain soon afterwards, but still, YAY snow!).

Then I had breakfast, with the fruit rye bread I had baked yesterday, and I treated myself to some of the strong Irish tea I have left, instead of the milder ones I want to finish before buying more of the Irish.

And then, I bought myself a fancy new expensive fountain pen. One that costs 16€! more than three times as much as my usual ones! I hope it will work as well, but I’m quite confident it should. I’ll find out when it arrives from Germany (together with a few ink samples that will result in a future blog post with some SCIENCE).

I decided to try and use bank transfers instead of my visa debit card when buying from online shops that give the option to do so: it’s a tiny bit more effort, but it means I’m paying 0.25€ to my bank¹ rather than the seller having to pay some unknown amount to an US based payment provider. Unluckily, the fountain pen website offered a huge number of payment methods, but not bank transfers. sigh.

And then, I could start working a bit on the connecting wires for the LED strips for our living room: I soldered two pieces, six wires each (it’s one RGB strip, 4 pins, and a warm white one requiring two more), then did a bit of tests, including writing some micropython code to add a test mode that lights up each colour in sequence, and the morning was almost gone. For some reason this project, as simple as it is, is taking forever. But it is showing progress.

There was a break, when the postman delivered a package of chemicals ² for a future project or two. There will be blog posts!

After lunch I spent some time finishing eyelets on the outfit I wanted to wear this evening, as I had not been able to finish it during fosdem. This one will result in two blog posts!

Meanwhile, in the morning I didn’t remember the name of the program I used to load software on micropython boards such as the one that will control the LED strips (that’s thonny), and while searching for it in the documentation, I found that there is also a command line program I can use, mpremote, and that’s a much better fit for my preferences!

I mentioned it in an xmpp room full of nerds, and one of them mentioned that he could try it on his Inkplate, when he had time, and I was nerd-sniped into trying it on mine, which had been sitting unused showing the temperatures in our old house on the last day it spent there and needs to be updated for the sensors in the new house.

And that lead to the writing of some notes on how to set it up from the command line (good), and to the opening on one upstream issue (bad), because I have an old model, and the board-specific library isn’t working. at all.

And that’s when I realized that it was 17:00, I still had to cook the bread I had been working on since yesterday evening (ciabatta, one of my favourites, but it needs almost one hour in the oven), the outfit I wanted to wear in the evening was still not wearable, the table needed cleaning and some panicking was due. Thankfully, my mother was cooking dinner, so I didn’t have to do that too.

I turned the oven on, sewed the shoulder seams of the bodice while spraying water on the bread every 5 minutes, and then while it was cooking on its own, started to attach a closure to the skirt, decided that a safety pin was a perfectly reasonable closure for the first day an outfit is worn, took care of the table, took care of the bread, used some twine to close the bodice, because I still haven’t worked out what to use for laces, realized my bodkin is still misplaced, used a long and sharp and big needle meant for sewing mattresses instead of a bodkin, managed not to stab myself, and less than half an hour late we could have dinner.

There was bread, there was Swedish crispbread, there were spreads (tuna, and beans), and vegetables, and then there was the cake that caused my mother to panic when she added her last honey to the milk and it curdled (my SO and I tried it, it had no odd taste, we decided it could be used) and it was good, although I had to get a second slice just to be 100% sure of it.

And now I’m exhausted, and I’ve only done half of the things I had planned to do, but I’d still say I’ve had quite a good day.

A lot of the youtube channels I follow tend to involve somebody making things, so of course one of the videos my SO and I watched a few days ago was about walking around San Francisco Bay, and that recalled my desire to go to places by foot. Now, for health-related reasons doing it properly would be problematic, and thus I’ve never trained for that, but during this Christmas holiday-heavy time I suggested my very patient SO the next best thing: instead of our usual 1.5 hours uphill walk in the woods, a 2 hours and a bit mostly flat walk on paved streets, plus some train, to a nearby town: Porto Ceresio, on the Italian side of Lake Lugano.

I started to prepare for it on the day before, by deciding it was a good time to upgrade my PinePhone, and wait, I’m still on Trixie? I could try Forky, what could possibly go wrong? And well, the phone was no longer able to boot, and reinstalling from the latest weekly had a system where the on-screen keyboard didn’t appear, and I didn’t want to bother finding out why, so re-installed another time from the 13.0 image, and between that, and distracting myself with widelands while waiting for the downloads and uploads and reboots etc., well, all of the afternoon and the best part of the evening disappeared.

So, in a hurry, between the evening and the next morning I prepared a nice healthy lunch, full of all the important nutrients such as sugar, salt, mercury and arsenic. Tuna (mercury) soboro (sugar and salt) on rice and since I was in a hurry I didn’t prepare any vegetables, but used pickles (more salt) and shio kombu (arsenic and various heavy metals, sugar and salt). Plus a green tea mochi for dessert, in case we felt low on sugar. :D

Then on the day of the walk we woke up a bit later than usual, and then my body decided it was a good day for my belly to not exactly hurt, but not not-hurt either, and there I took an executive decision to wear a corset, because if something feels like it wants to burst open, wrapping it in a steel reinforced cage will make it stop. (I’m not joking. It does. At least in those specific circumstances.)

This was followed by hurrying through the things I had to do before leaving the house, having a brief anxiety attack and feeling feverish (it wasn’t fever), and finally being able to leave the house just half an hour late.

And then, 10 minutes after we had left, realizing that I had written down the password for the train website, since it was no longer saved on the phone, but i had forgotten the bit of paper at home. We could have gone back to take it, but decided not to bother, as we could also hopefully buy paper-ish tickets at the train station (we could).

Later on, I also realized I had also forgotten my GPS tracker, so I have no record of where we went exactly (but it’s not hard to recognize it on a map) nor on what the temperature was. It’s a shame, but by that point it was way too late to go back.

Anyway, that probably was when Murphy felt we had paid our respects, and from then on everything went lovingly well!

Routing had been done on the OpenStreetMap website, with OSRM, and it looked pretty easy to follow, but we also had access to an Android phone, so we used OSMAnd to check that we were still on track. It tried to lead us to the Statale (i.e. most important and most trafficked road) a few times, but we ignored it, and after a few turns and a few changes of the precise destination point we managed to get it to cooperate.

At one point a helpful person asked us if we needed help, having seen us looking at the phone, and gave us indication for the next fork (that way to Cuasso al Piano, that way to Porto Ceresio), but it was pretty easy, since the way was clearly marked also for cars.

Then we started to notice red and white markings on poles and other places, and on the next fork there was a signpost for hiking routes with our destination and we decided to follow it instead of the sign for cars. I knew that from our starting point to or destination there was also a hiking route, uphill both ways :) , through the hills, about 5 or 6 hours instead of two, but the sign was pointing downhill and we were past the point where we would expect too long of a detour.

And indeed, after a short while the paved road ended, but the path continued on a wide and flat track, and was a welcome detour through what looked like water works to prevent flood damage from a stream. In a warmer season, with longer grass and ticks maybe the fact that I was wearing a long skirt may have been an issue, but in winter it was just fine.

And soon afterwards, we were in Porto Ceresio. I think I have been there as a child, but I had no memory of it. On the other hand, it was about as I expected: a tiny town with a lakeside street full of houses built in the early 1900s when the area was an important tourism destination, with older buildings a bit higher up on the hills (because streams in this area will flood). And of course, getting there by foot rather than by train we also saw the parts where real people live (but not work: that’s cross-border commuters country).

Soon after arriving in Porto Ceresio we stopped to eat our lunch on a bench at the lakeside; up to then we had been pretty comfortable in the clothing we had decided to wear: there was plenty of frost on the ground, in the shade, but the sun was warm and the temperatures were cleanly above freezing. Removing the gloves to eat, however, resulted in quite cold hands, and we didn’t want to stay still for longer than strictly necessary.

So we spent another hour and a bit walking around Porto Ceresio like proper tourists and taking pictures. There was an exhibition of nativity scenes all around the streets, but to get a map one had to go to either facebook or instagram, or wait for the opening hours of an office that were later than the train we planned to get to go back home, so we only saw maybe half of them, as we walked around: some were quite nice, some were nativity scenes, and some showed that the school children must have had some fun making them.

Another Christmas decoration were groups of creatures made of evergreen branches that dotted the sidewalks around the lake: I took pictures of the first couple of groups, and then after seeing a few more something clicked in my brain, and I noticed that they were wrapped in green LED strings, like chains, and they had a red ball that was supposed to be the nose, but could just be around the mouth area, and suddenly I felt the need to play a certain chord to release them, but sadly I didn’t have a weaponized guitar on me :D

Another thing that we noticed were some benches in the shape of books, with book quotations on them; most were on reading-related topics, but the one with the Constitution felt worth taking a picture of, especially these days.

And then, our train was waiting at the station, and we had to go back home for the afternoon; it was a nice outing, if a bit brief, and we agreed to do it again, possibly with a bit of a detour to make the walk a bit longer. And then maybe one day we’ll train to do the whole 5-6 hour thing through the hills.

A few years ago I wrote some planner generating code to make myself a custom planner; in November 2023 I generated a few, and posted them here on the blog, in case somebody was interested in using them.

In 2024 I tried to do the same, and ended up being even more late, to the point where I didn’t generate any (uooops).

I did, however, start to write a Makefile to automate the generation (and got stuck on the fact that there wasn’t an easy way to deduce the correct options needed from just the template name); this year, with the same promptness as in 2023 I got back to the Makefile and finished it, so maybe next year I will be able to post them early enough for people to print and bind them? maybe :)

Anyway, these are all of the variants I currently generate, for 2026.

The files with -book in the name have been imposed on A4 paper for a 16 pages signature. All of the fonts have been converted to paths, for ease of printing (yes, this means that customizing the font requires running the script, but the alternative also had its drawbacks).

In English:

daily-95×186-en.pdf

blank daily pages, 95 mm × 186 mm;

daily-A5-en.pdf daily-A5-en-book.pdf

blank daily pages, A5;

daily-A6-en.pdf daily-A6-en-book.pdf

blank daily pages, A6;

daily-graph-A5-en.pdf daily-graph-A5-en-book.pdf

graph paper (4 mm) daily pages, A5;

daily-points4mm-A5-en.pdf daily-points4mm-A5-en-book.pdf

pointed paper (4 mm), A5;

daily-ruled-A5-en.pdf daily-ruled-A5-en-book.pdf

ruled paper daily pages, A5;

week_on_two_pages-A6-en.pdf week_on_two_pages-A6-en-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week on two pages, A6;

week_on_one_page-A6-en.pdf week_on_one_page-A6-en-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week per page, A6;

week_on_one_page_dots-A6-en.pdf week_on_one_page_dots-A6-en-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week per page with 4 mm dots, A6;

week_health-A6-en.pdf week_health-A6-en-book.pdf

weekly health tracker, one week per page with 4 mm dots, A6;

month-A6-en.pdf month-A6-en-book.pdf

monthly planner, A6;

And the same planners, in Italian:

daily-95×186-it.pdf

blank daily pages, 95 mm × 186 mm;

daily-A5-it.pdf daily-A5-it-book.pdf

blank daily pages, A5;

daily-A6-it.pdf daily-A6-it-book.pdf

blank daily pages, A6;

daily-graph-A5-it.pdf daily-graph-A5-it-book.pdf

graph paper (4 mm) daily pages, A5;

daily-points4mm-A5-it.pdf daily-points4mm-A5-it-book.pdf

pointed paper (4 mm), A5;

daily-ruled-A5-it.pdf daily-ruled-A5-it-book.pdf

ruled paper daily pages, A5;

week_on_two_pages-A6-it.pdf week_on_two_pages-A6-it-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week on two pages, A6;

week_on_one_page-A6-it.pdf week_on_one_page-A6-it-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week per page, A6;

week_on_one_page_dots-A6-it.pdf week_on_one_page_dots-A6-it-book.pdf

weekly planner, one week per page with 4 mm dots, A6;

week_health-A6-it.pdf week_health-A6-it-book.pdf

weekly health tracker, one week per page with 4 mm dots, A6;

month-A6-it.pdf month-A6-it-book.pdf

monthly planner, A6;

Some of the planners include ephemerids and moon phase data: these have been calculated for the town of Como, and specifically for geo:45.81478,9.07522?z=17, because that’s what everybody needs, right?

If you need the ephemerids for a different location and can’t run the script yourself (it depends on pdfjam, i.e. various GB of LaTeX, and a few python modules such as dateutil, pypdf and jinja2), feel free to ask: unless I receive too many requests to make this sustainable I’ll generate them and add them to this post.

I hereby release all the PDFs linked in this blog post under the CC0 license.

You may notice that I haven’t decided on a license for the code dump repository; again if you need it for something (that is compatible with its unsupported status) other than running it for personal use (for which afaik there is an implicit license) let me know and I’ll push “decide on a license” higher on the stack of things to do :D

Finishing the Makefile meant that I had to add a tiny feature to one of the scripts involved, which required me to add a dependency to pypdf: up to now I have been doing the page manipulations with pdfjam, which is pretty convenient to use, but also uses LaTeX, and apparently not every computer comes with texlive installed (shocking, I know).

If I’m not mistaken, pypdf can do all of the things I’m doing with pdfjam, so maybe for the next year I could convert my script to use that one instead.

But then the planners 2027 will be quick and easy, and I will be able to publish them promptly, right?

After cartridge pleating and honeycombing, I was still somewhat in the mood for that kind of fabric manipulation, and directing my internet searches in that vague direction, and I stumbled on this: https://katafalk.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/patternmaking-for-the-kampfrau-hemd-chemise/

Now, do I want to ever make myself a 16th century German costume, especially a kampfrau one? No! I’m from lake Como! Those are the enemies who come down the Alps pillaging and bringing the Black Death with them!

Although I have to admit that at times during my day job I have found the idea of leaving everything to go march with the Jägermonsters attractive. You know, the exciting prospective of long days of march spent knitting sturdy socks, punctuated by the excitement of settling down in camp and having a chance of doing lots of laundry. Or something. Sometimes being a programmer will make you think odd things.

Anyway, going back to the topic, no, I didn’t need an historically accurate hemd. But I did need a couple more shirts for daily wear, I did want to try my hand at smocking, and this looked nice, and I was intrigued by the way the shaping of the neck and shoulder worked, and wondered how comfortable it would be.

And so, it had to be done.

I didn’t have any suitable linen, but I did have quite a bit of cotton voile, and since I wasn’t aiming at historical accuracy it looked like a good option for something where a lot of fabric had to go in a small space.

At first I considered making it with a bit less fabric than the one in the blog, but then the voile was quite thin, so I kept the original measurement as is, only adapting the sleeve / sides seams to my size.

With the pieces being rectangles the width of the fabric, I was able to have at least one side of selvedge on all seams, and took advantage of it by finishing the seams by simply folding the allowances to one sides so that the selvedge was on top, and hemstitching them down as I would have done with a folded edge when felling.

Also, at first I wanted to make the smocking in white on white, but then I thought about a few hanks of electric blue floss I had in my stash, and decided to just go with it.

The initial seams were quickly made, then I started the smocking at the neck, and at that time the project went on hold while I got ready to go to DebConf. Then I came back and took some time to get back into a sewing mood, but finally the smocking on the next was finished, and I could go on with the main sewing, which, as I expected, went decently fast for a handsewing project.

While doing the diagonal smocking on the collar I counted the stitches to make each side the same length, which didn’t completely work because the gathers weren’t that regular to start with, and started each line from the two front opening going towards the center back, leaving a triangle with a different size right in the middle. I think overall it worked well enough.

Then there were a few more interruptions, but at last it was ready! just as the weather turned cold-ish and puffy shirts were no longer in season, but it will be there for me next spring.

I did manage to wear it a few times and I have to say that the neck shaping is quite comfortable indeed: it doesn’t pull in odd ways like the classical historically accurate pirate shirt sometimes does, and the heavy gathering at the neck makes it feel padded and soft.

I’m not as happy with the cuffs: the way I did them with just honeycombing means that they don’t need a closure, and after washing and a bit of steaming they lie nicely, but then they tend to relax in a wider shape. The next time I think I’ll leave a slit in the sleeves, possibly make a different type of smocking (depending on whether I have enough fabric) and then line them like the neck so that they are stable.

Because, yes, I think that there will be another time: I have a few more project before that, and I want to spend maybe another year working from my stash, but then I think I’ll buy some soft linen and make at least another one, maybe with white-on-white smocking so that it will be easier to match with different garments.

For quite some time, I have been thinking about trying a bit of patchwork, and English Paper Piecing looked like a technique suited to my tastes, with the handsewing involved and the fact of having a paper pattern of sort and everything.

The problem is, most of the scraps of fabric I get from my sewing aren’t really suitable for quilting, with a lot of them being either too black and too thick or too white and too thin.

On the other hand, my partner wears polo shirts at work, and while I try to mend the holes that form, after a while the edges get worn, and they just are no longer suitable for the office, even with some creative mending, and they get downgraded to home wear. But then more office shirts need to be bought, and the home ones accumulate, and there is only so much room for polo shirts in the house, and the worst ones end up in my creative reuse pile.

Some parts are worn out and they will end up as cabbage stuffing for things, but some are still in decent enough conditions and could be used as fabric.

But surely, for English Paper Piecing you’d need woven fabric, not knit, even if it’s the dense piqué used in polo shirts, right? Especially if it’s your first attempt at the technique, right?

Well, probably it wouldn’t work with complex shapes, but what about some 5-ish cm tall Standard Compliant bestagon? So I printed out some hexagons on thick paper, printed some bigger hexagons with sewing allowance as a cutting aid, found two shirts in the least me colours I could find (and one in grey because it was the best match for the other two) and decided to sacrifice them for the experiment.

And as long as the paper was still in the pieces, the work went nicely, so I persevered while trying to postpone the Moment of Truth.

After a while I measured things out and saw that I could squeeze a 6.5 × 7 hexagon pattern into something resembling a square that was a multiple of the 2.5 cm square on the back of my Piecepack tiles, and decided to go for another Standard for the back (because of course I wasn’t going to buy new fabric for lining the work).

I kept the paper in the pieces until both sides were ready, and used it to sew them right sides together, leaving the usual opening in the middle of one side.

Then I pressed, removed the paper, turned everything inside out, pressed again and. It worked!

The hexagons look like hexagons, the squares look like squares, the whole thing feels soft and drapey, but structurally sound. And it’s a bit lumpy, but not enough to cause issues when using it as a soft surface to put over a noisy wooden table to throw dice on.

I considered adding some lightweight batting in the middle, but there was really no need for it, and wondered about how to quilt the piece in a way that worked with the patterns on the two sides, but for something this small it wasn’t really required.

However, I decided to add a buttonhole stitch border on all edges, to close the opening I had left and to reinforce especially the small triangles on the hexagons side, as those had a smaller sewing allowance and could use it.

And of course, the 11 × 11 squares side wasn’t completely an accident, but part of A Plan.

For this project there isn’t really a pattern, but I did publish the files I used to print the paper pieces even if they were pretty trivial.

And there are more polo shirts in that pile, and while they won’t be suitable for anything complex, maybe I could try some rhombs, or even kites and darts?

A bit more than a year ago, I had been thinking about making myself a cartridge pleated skirt. For a number of reasons, one of which is the historybounding potential, I’ve been thinking pre-crinoline, so somewhere around the 1840s, and that’s a completely new era for me, which means: new underwear.

Also, the 1840s are pre-sewing machine, and I was already in a position where I had more chances to handsew than to machine sew, so I decided to embrace the slowness and sew 100% by hand, not even using the machine for straight seams.

If I remember correctly, I started with the corded petticoat, looking around the internet for instructions, and then designing my own based on the practicality of using modern wide fabric from my stash (and specifically some DITTE from costumers’ favourite source of dirty cheap cotton IKEA).

Around the same time I had also acquired a sashiko kit, and I used the Japanese technique for sewing running stitches pushing the needle with a thimble that covers the base of the middle finger, and I can confirm that for this kind of things it’s great!

I’ve since worn the petticoat a few times for casual / historyBounding / folkwearBounding reasons, during the summer, and I can confirm it’s comfortable to use; I guess that during the winter it could be nice to add a flannel layer below it.

Then I proceeded with the base layers: I had been browsing through The workwoman's guide and that provided plenty of examples, and I selected the basic ankle-length drawers from page 53 and the alternative shift on page 47.

As for fabric, I had (and still have) a significant lack of underwear linen in my stash, but I had plenty of cotton voile that I had not used in a while: not very historically accurate for plain underwear, but quite suitable for a wearable mockup.

Working with a 1830s source had an interesting aspect: other of the usual, mildly annoying, imperial units, it also used a lot a few obsolete units, especially nails, that my qalc, my usual calculator and converter, doesn’t support. Not a big deal, because GNU units came to the rescue, and that one knows a lot of obscure and niche units, and it’s quite easy to add those that are missing¹

Working on this project also made me freshly aware of something I had already noticed: converting instructions for machine sewing garments into instructions for hand sewing them is usually straightforward, but the reverse is not always true.

Starting from machine stitching, you can usually convert straight stitches into backstitches (or running backstitches), zigzag and overlocking into overcasting and get good results. In some cases you may want to use specialist hand stitches that don’t really have a machine equivalent, such as buttonhole stitches instead of simply overcasting the buttonhole, but that’s it.

Starting from hand stitching, instead, there are a number of techniques that could be converted to machine stitching, but involve a lot of visible topstitching that wasn’t there in the original instructions, or at times are almost impossible to do by machine, if they involve whipstitching together finished panels on seams that are subject to strong tension.

Anyway, halfway through working with the petticoat I cut both the petticoat and the drawers at the same time, for efficiency in fabric use, and then started sewing the drawers.

The book only provided measurements for one size (moderate), and my fabric was a bit too narrow to make them that size (not that I have any idea what hip circumference a person of moderate size was supposed to have), so the result is just wide enough to be comfortably worn, but I think that when I’ll make another pair I’ll try to make them a bit wider. On the other hand they are a bit too long, but I think that I’ll fix it by adding a tuck or two. Not a big deal, anyway.

The shift gave me a bit more issues: I used the recommended gusset size, and ended up with a shift that was way too wide at the top, so I had to take a box pleat in the center front and back, which changed the look and wear of the garment. I have adjusted the instructions to make gussets wider, and in the future I’ll make another shift following those.

Even with the pleat, the narrow shoulder straps are set quite far to the sides, and they tend to droop, and I suspect that this is to be expected from the way this garment is made. The fact that there are buttonholes on the shoulder straps to attach to the corset straps and prevent the issue is probably a hint that this behaviour was to be expected.

I’ve also updated the instructions so that they shoulder straps are a bit wider, to look more like the ones in the drawing from the book.

Making a corset suitable for the time period is something that I will probably do, but not in the immediate future, but even just wearing the shift under a later midbust corset with no shoulder strap helps.

I’m also not sure what the point of the bosom gores is, as they don’t really give more room to the bust where it’s needed, but to the high bust where it’s counterproductive. I also couldn’t find images of original examples made from this pattern to see if they were actually used, so in my next make I may just skip them.

On the other hand, I’m really happy with how cute the short sleeves look, and if² I’ll ever make the other cut of shift from the same book, with the front flaps, I’ll definitely use these pleated sleeves rather than the straight ones that were also used at the time.

As usual, all of the patterns have been published on my website under a Free license:

• pattern for the petticoat;
• pattern for the shift;
• pattern for the drawers.

TL;DL: if you’re using rrdtool on a 32 bit architecture like armhf make an XML dump of your RRD files just before upgrading to Debian Trixie.

I am an old person at heart, so the sensor data from my home monitoring system¹ doesn’t go to one of those newfangled javascript-heavy data visualization platforms, but into good old RRD files, using rrdtool to generate various graphs.

This happens on the home server, which is an armhf single board computer², hosting a few containers³.

So, yesterday I started upgrading one of the containers to Trixie, and luckily I started from the one with the RRD, because when I rebooted into the fresh system and checked the relevant service I found it stopped on ERROR: '<file>' is too small (should be <size> bytes).

Some searxing later, I’ve⁴ found this was caused by the 64-bit time_t transition, which changed the format of the files, and that (somewhat unexpectedly) there was no way to fix it on the machine itself.

What needed to be done instead was to export the data on an XML dump before the upgrade, and then import it back afterwards.

Easy enough, right? If you know about it, which is why I’m blogging this, so that other people will know in advance :)

Anyway, luckily I still had the other containers on bookworm, so I copied the files over there, did the upgrade, and my home monitoring system is happily running as before.

I’ve collected some more Standard Compliant stickers.

Some went on my laptop, of course, but some were selected for another tool I use relatively often: more pattern weights like the ones I blogged about in February.

And of course the sources:

• the stickers I designed;
• instructions for making the pattern weights (includes a link to the 3d model);
• source for the cat sticker;
• I couldn’t find the sources for the blue mobian sticker, only for other variants.

I have enough washers to make two more weights, and even more stickers, but the printer is currently not in use, so I guess they will happen a few months or so in the future.

I might be slightly insane? Or am I going to prove something about the nature and accessibility of sewing and MYOG¹ as a hobby?

I love my modular backpack, but it has a very modern look that is maybe not the best thing when otherwise dressed in historybounding dress, and it’s also a bit bigger than I planned or needed it to be.

So, when one of the shops I buy from had some waterproof cotton canvas on sale I failed my saving throw against temptations and bought a few meters, with the intent to make myself a backpack in a different style.

It needs to be a backpack, because my back doesn’t like asymmetrical bags², and as far as I know 19th century backpacks weren’t the most comfortable things, so I decided to go for a vaguely timeless roll top model that has the added advantage not to require a lot of hardware for the closure, just a few D-rings.

Leather straps would look cool, but also require some tools that I still don’t have, so I decided to look for some cotton webbing, and when I finally found some in 25 mm and 50 mm width I could finally start on the project.

Except for one thing: thread. As much as I believe that regular n°50 cotton thread got a bad reputation from sellers who decided to cut quality in favour of profit, it is not up to the task of sewing a backpack. Nor that I’d use regular sew-all poly thread either.

I do have some of the thread I used for my other backpack, which would have been strong enough, but it’s also in black, which isn’t exactly the look I was aiming for on the natural / ecru colour of both the canvas and the webbing. I also misremembered it as only being available in that colour (it isn’t), so I wasn’t tempted into doing a full online order of technical materials just for that.

On the other hand, I did have in my stash some strong thread I could trust for this job, in natural / ecru. There was only one problem: it was 33×2 Tex linen, and not suitable for the sewing machine. You can’t handsew a backpack.

Or can you? Of course it’s going to be much slower, but I’m still in a situation where I have more time and space for handsewing than I have for machine sewing. And as for strength, my perception is that for the same stitch length an handsewn backstitch is stronger than a machine lockstitch, or at least it is more effort to unpick (and thus harder to accidentally unravel if the thread breaks).

And so I tried.

And it worked.

Having to backstitch everything instead of being able to use a running backstitch of course meant that it was slower than other sewing projects, and any time there were more than two layers of fabric I had to use the stabbing motion rather than the sewing one, which is even slower, but other than a few places with many layers of both fabric and webbing it wasn’t hard.

And to be fair, the seams were fewer and shorter than other sewing projects, and with the usual interruptions and uneven time availability it was done in less than a month, which is somewhat typical for one of my handsewn projects.

It may have been because of the pattern, but I think it’s relevant that it was also easier than other backpacks I’ve made, with significantly less cursing, even when doing seams that would have been quite fiddly when sewn by machine.

I have to admit that now I’m tempted to plan another backpack using the same pattern or a slight variation, sewn by machine in a different fabric, to see the difference in the time it takes and to check if the changes I think would make it easier to sew by machine are actually the right thing to do. But maybe I’ll wait a bit, other projects are in the queue.

The pattern is as usual online, released as #FreeSoftWear.

Having used it for a while, I have to say that it is just the right size to fit all the things I usually carry,

The fact that it only opens from the top means that finding things that have fallen to the very bottom involves a bit of rummaging, but not having to change a zipper every few years when (not if) it breaks is also very nice, so I’m not sure which shape of backpack I prefer.

The soft back of course is an issue when the backpack is filled with small items, but the molle webbing is there exactly because I have plans to solve it, beside the trivial “put something flat towards the back”.

As an object, I’m happy with the result. As a project, it was way more than successful, exceeding all expectations, especially for something somewhat experimental like this one was.

An unsorted list, including some I already knew, but was reminded of.

• dpkg-mergechangelogs exists.
• Sewing your own shirt, posting it on planet and wearing it on the first day of DebConf, is more effective than a badge for making people recognise you.
• I need to look into a number of tools for testings things (and try to start using some of those at $DAYJOB).
• Masks are good. masks protect you from debbugs. masks protect you from ring cameras in the hotel you’re staying on the day after debconf.
• It’s really nice to be chatting of random topics during lunch and discover that you are talking to the maintainer of a package of which you are one of the very few users! (the latter bit needs to be changed :) ).
• I need to look into sequoia and all of the modern OpenPGP stuff.
• Even if I don’t have a lot of money, apparently I have even less sense (there will be blog posts on the topic in the mid-term future).
• I can go to a talk about AI and not hate the speaker (yeah, the bar is pretty low there :D ). The automatic subtitles still failed in the same way as automatic subtitles always fail.
• Debian gets used in really cool places.
• At times it is a bit — or a lot — dysfunctional, but Debian still feels like a family.

And I still haven’t watched the recordings of those talks that I couldn’t (or decided not to, because the hallway track was more interesting) attend.