#instructional

[contac]

[armory-rasa]

COUCH POUCH!! Free Pattern & Tutorial

...called thus because they use upholstery-weight leather for the bag body, that in my case was in fact skinned off a couch. 🤣 Turns out they are relatively quick and easy to make, so I tidied up the pattern for printing and took pictures to document the process when I made another five of them.

First off, print your pattern, 100% scale:

The bag shape was a modified version of the pattern I used for the Morpheus sandbag, but sized to fit in the roughly 11" squares that my couch skin came in. It makes a bag that sits very well on a tabletop, thanks to the flat base.

Though it turned out to not be the most efficient use of material, because that plus-shaped pattern tessellates well, if you're cutting them out of a full hide, but makes a lot of waste when you're cutting them out of squares of material. A more efficient design would have a half-rounded front and back, and a gusset between them, like so:

Ah well. It's not like I have any shortage of couch skin, though for the next round I'm going to experiment with a more efficient pattern.

First step, trace and cut out the bag body from your chrome-tan leather:

Like I said, this was upholstery leather, but anything that's flexible and ~1.5 mm thick will do.

The flap and front need to be a stiffer leather though -- I used 7 oz latigo, but veg-tan would work equally well. (And then you could ✨tool it!✨)

Cut them out, and then use the pattern to mark where your holes are going to be. Mark the holes on your bag body too:

The latigo pieces get hand-stitched to the bag body, so I used a stitching groover to carve out little channels for the thread -- it's not strictly necessary, but it makes your stitches lay a lot more neatly:

Punch the holes shown below:

I used a ~5 mm hole punch for those, and a 1.5" slot punch for the belt loops. Some of the holes on the front piece you're not punching yet, because they need to go through both layers.

I put a dab of contact cement on the pieces (circled in white) to help hold them in place when I go to punch the stitching holes:

(Make sure you're not putting glue between the belt loops)

Wait fifteen minutes for the contact cement to dry until tacky, and then line up the holes and the edges and press the pieces together:

Punch stitching holes:

Saddle-stitch both pieces in place (takes 28" of thread per):

Now you can punch these holes:

(I used a slightly smaller hole punch than for the others, but it doesn't really matter.)

Now press the right sides of the leather together and sew up the seams from the inside:

A regular sewing machine should be able to handle this, though you will need thicker thread, a heavy-duty leather-sewing needle, and a walking foot attachment. (If you don't have a walking foot attachment, it is SO WORTH getting one, even if you don't expect to sew much leather. Seriously, I use it for everything -- once you go walking foot, you don't go back. 💀) Because you can't pin leather without leaving permanent holes in it, tiny binder clips can be helpful for keeping your material lined up.

What they look like when you're finished sewing:

Cut 19" of lacing for the drawstring, and 11" of lacing for the toggle:

I use the 1/8" EcoSoft lace from Tandy, I think it's stronger than real leather would be at that thickness. The only important factor here is that you need something with a bit of texture and friction -- a silk cord isn't going to stay closed, it's going to slip open.

MANY BAGS.

For these I used a wooden toggle -- cut another 8" of lacing, looped it through the toggle twice, and then made a tight square knot on the back:

But another option is putting a concho or a large button on the flap. The bag I copied this design from, in fact, uses a concho toggle:

Thread some beads on the laces to keep the ends from getting lost, and you are DONE! 😁

Happy Bagging!

[sdpubliclibrary]

Zine Librarians Code of Ethics Zine

[qos4blk]

[friend-crow]

Alright, since this is apparently going to be a week of harvesting (and planting) herbs, I'll give you a quick rundown on how I do it.

Cut the herbs. Depending on the herbs you may want to be more or less strategic in where you cut them. Mint and sage you can kind of just hack away at, but do a little research on the herb in question so you know what you're doing.

Wash the herbs. I don't have a lot of pollution going on in my garden, but there's insects and spider webs and such that are best dealt with at this point.

Dry the herbs (part 1) -- this stage is about drying the water you washed them in. I use a salad spinner to get most of it off, then I let them sit in the basket part of the spinner, which I set on my dish drainer until they're dry to the touch.

Tie in bundles to hang.

Put paper bags over them -- ideally the thinner type like a lunch sack, for air flow. This keeps spiders from spinning new webs on your nice clean herbs. Also good for keeping dust from settling, if you're like me and liable to forget about your herbs for a few weeks.

Dry the herbs (part 2) -- this stage is about drying out the water content from inside the herbs for long term storage. Hang your bundles in a cool dry place.

This looks like a lot but it's really pretty simple and easy, especially once you've done it once or twice.

If you're making infusions and such, it's always a good idea to dry your herbs first, as the water content can cause them to go bad faster.

[zegas]

Proud to announce CREATING COPRA: the Definitive DIY Guide to Making & Self-Publishing Comics. This book covers everything from inspiration to final production. Practical, idealistic, and everything in between. Pre-Orders are up, so reserve your copy now!

[iftadwascool]

Touch Grass, a How-To

[dipskits]

Motivation Series

Motivation Series is a collection of images created by New Jersey musical artist Binnie MF on Friday, November 18th, 2022. It was an attempt by the artist to create something he could go back to when he felt his creative energy was low. It is conversational in tone, and contains both prose and a list of ideas and topics as well as a flowchart of a way you could go about in order to create art.

[reinhardtpoetry]

Any Recommendations for Instructional Books about Comic Writing?

I've read books about making comics by Alan Moore, Scott McCloud, and Stan Lee.

I still want to know more about scriptwriting. For example, how do I write arcs and develop characters while avoiding new-writer mistakes?

Does anybody have any book recommendations? Thank you in advance!

[thriftstoresisyphus]

Dr. Michael Fox "Dogtalk"

[contac]

[armory-rasa]

Much easier than expected! I tried it two different ways, once where I carved all the leaf detail with the swivel knife first, and once where I just stamped it -- and seeing as they came out nearly indistinguishable, and one was a lot less work, I'll be going with the latter.

So, trace your leaves with the stylus, and carve the longer lines with your swivel knife:

Take the A99 Craftool stamp (or something similar) and tap lightly with the pointy end into all the crenellations in the leaves:

(You have to angle the stamp very sharply towards you in order to make the gradient fade out, instead of making a clear outline of the whole teardrop shape.)

Use a narrow beveler and finish outlining the points on the leaf:

Give the leaf some depth with a smooth pear shader:

(I'm not great at using the pear shader, but fortunately it's a pretty forgiving stamp.)

Lastly, add some decorative cuts with your swivel knife. (And you do have to do this last, otherwise the pear shader smushes them.)

le voila! spiky leaves.

[dr-grayson]

Sharpening our defensive skills in this weeks tutorial. I give you guys 3 different options when it comes to dealing with leg kicks. None of these involve checking or taking the kick and firing back, so each features an approach you might not be using yet. Learn to evade and intercept, check it out.

[dadsdepictionofdiscipline]

Trad wife

Ladies, and I mean real experienced ladies, will you please help these young girls out? Feminism has ruined their minds, capitalism has taken away their knowledge of the way a real woman should act. These young girls don't cook, clean, want to care for kids or know how to hire service anymore.

"Take care of me Daddy!" Is all I ever see. How am I supposed to build our world into an Empire with all these desperate, untrained girls around? If I'm taking care of them, how am I supposed to fend off the world?

I've had to learn how to cook, clean, do the laundry, take care of the pets and the kids. All the things that the women I've been with can't seem to figure out, yet they expect me to take care of them and pay for their world? No. No, that's not how this is going to work. One man may feel invincible, but in reality there's a limit to what we can do.

So I ask of you, trad wives, continue this simple list to help all of these Zoomers and Gen Alphas devote themselves to not the education of maths, sciences of the outside world, but building a good home through kitchen chemistry and budget calculation. Remind them that a good woman isn't stupid, simply educated in different areas of study.

A good girl knows when a dish is clean

A good girl knows to sort their laundry

A good girl knows how to pair their wines

A good girl knows how to spend their time

What else should a good woman do? Feel free to get more specific, and take the time to educate this generation of useless women. Help them keep our world moving, and help support the men who will dig us out of this hellscape that has been created from all the seperation. Help them, to help this world be a better place to live.

[shadywitchfestival]