learning new things!

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

The red part and the circle inside of it are the shuttle hook, bobbin case, and bobbin. The bobbin is free moving inside of the bobbin case which allows for that circular motion of the thread without getting caught (though they sometimes will anyway bc sewing machines can just be Like That).

This is how the machines I’m familiar with tend to work (though there are lots of different bobbin setups). The bobbin case attaches into the machine with the shuttle hook surrounding it.

Here’s a more in depth gif of the shuttle hook and bobbin!

Again, it works a little different on different machines but this is generally how it works. In the original gif, the green thread is threaded through the top of the machine and through the needle (black thread in this bottom gif). The blue thread is wound around the bobbin and acts as a sort of mini spool of thread from inside the machine. The top thread is hooked around the bobbin thread using the shuttle hook (as shown in both gifs), which makes the stitches stronger and cleaner on both sides of the fabric.

The little green gizmo is the bobbin. In the animation up top, the circle represents the bobbin. When we take out the bobbin (and in this case, the bobbin retaining collar) we can see the black bobbin case. In this specific style of machine (called a “horizontal rotary hook”), the bobbin is held into the case just by gravity. This is also called a “drop-in bobbin” machine because the bobbin just drops in, but horizontal rotary hook is a more accurate description.

If we take out the bobbin case, we can see the hook. Technically, the entire metal loop that goes around the bobbin is the hook, but the point of the hook that actually grabs the thread is where the arrow is.

The red part in the animation spins because that’s a part of the machine, and the machine is designed to spin it. In the case of this machine, there’s a gear underneath.

If anyone has wondered why, after 130 years of making sewing machines, no one has figured out how to make a sewing machine where you put a full spool of thread in the bobbin (and therefore don’t have to wind bobbins or run out of bobbin anymore), the answer is that the top thread has to pass entirely around the thread on the bottom. There’s no other way to make the lockstitch that sewing machines use. The smaller the bobbin, the easier it is to pass thread around it. Cheap machines will often have smaller bobbins because a smaller bobbin means a machine can be built with lower tolerances. But small bobbins are annoying to use, so designers are always trying to make better machines with bigger bobbins.

what i've done is instead of doing a bunch of markers where i have added a stitch, i've divided the poncho up into 8 parts, adding 4 stitches each row but alternating them so they add up nicely.

Hi everyone!! Pre-orders for the Wandersong Zine are now OPEN!! Thank you to all our amazing illustrators, writers, crafters, merch artists, musicians, (and more) for all their hard work!!

🤍 Please visit our carrd for more information on the zine and our bundles [x] 🤍 Or visit our Ko-fi to skip all that reading and just go ahead and pre-order a bundle! [x] 🤍 We also have an itch.io that will have the pdf available for download on September 27, 2023, Wandersong's fifth anniversary! [x]