this was meant to be a linguistics blog

i’m having trouble finding sewing patterns, especially either men’s or unisex clothing or like. functional storage/housewares that aren’t all a specific type of aesthetic (hard to put into words, but kind of like the simply southern brand? there are SO many pattern blogs that look like that exclusively)

I have looked up just "free sewing patterns (specifications)" which does work sometimes. I find that if a blog post is before 2020 you won't be given an AI pattern. I've found a good simple waistcoat pattern this way that I'll hopefully actually sew up the actual product soon instead of just a mock-up.

The other main way I've found free pattern sights is go on YouTube and look up pretty much the same thing. You'll get a bunch of videos with just links to patterns in the description. It's a toss up on whether or not the patterns will still be free but once you're on a website you can rummage around and find other free patterns.

Some fabric stores like mood will also release free patterns as a way to entice people to buy the fabric and notions from their website to get the exact product that they made. Here's the small collection of mood's mens and unisex patterns. I've had really good success with their free patterns in the past if you are interested in any of theirs.

https://blog.moodfabrics.com/category/free-sewing-patterns/menswear-unisex-patterns/

Museums sometimes have cool men's wear if you aren't afraid of hystorical inspired pieces too. I shared one a while back on here.

Just remembered this and I need some knitting enthusiast in London to get deeply unwell about it ASAP

It was likely knitted in the 1700-1750 range and it’s 3 meters in circumference at the widest point. They cast on approximately 2650 stitches. It’s seamless and how exactly it was knitted (well before circular needles!) remains somewhat uncertain

It’s also covered in animal and plant patterns which do not repeat at any point.

BUT i got it all cut out from leftovers without buying any new fabric so that's my win

It's Pants

Build notes under the cut

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.