DIY Cloth Napkins

napkin-tower

Cloth napkins are always nice to have at the table, but are they really practical?. I don’t mind washing cloth napkins, but I do HATE ironing them. If I had cloth napkins that did not need ironing then I would be convinced that they are required at all my parties. The most important thing about making your own cloth napkins is going to be choosing the fabric color. You need a color that you can utilize again and again in different themes or table settings. I love the idea of having white but seriously how practical is white? Will your guest know not to throw them away? What do you think? Is having cloth napkins at a BBQ or buffet dinner just that little bit too snootty? Make your Own Here.

There are a lot of stories out there these days about AI use in the crafting space for everything from answering technique questions to writing patterns.

And there’s a lot of content about how to spot AI patterns, or even just photos on the Internet that people are claiming to have made but are clearly AI generated.

As the models get better, though, it can be harder to tell. Gone (mostly) are the days of AI sewing patterns with models who have too many fingers, but one thing it’s still hard for AI to replicate is individual stitches.

You’ll see this in knitting, crochet and cross stitch, where a project might look good from a distance but if you zoom in you’ll see there aren’t individual stitches, or they don’t look the way real stitches would look.

That’s part of the rationale behind a change at r/CrossStitch, the largest cross stitch community on Reddit, which now requires people to show a close up of their finished projects (lots of people seem to be showing off the backs, too) to prove their projects aren’t AI.

Lord Libidan reported on this news and I agree with them that I’m not sure why people in an online forum would be sharing AI “finished objects” when it’s a venue where you can’t sell patterns. But I understand their desire to keep the forum free of AI images. I wish Etsy had such a requirement so that people selling patterns had to prove they’d actually stitched them (though there are plenty of patterns that just show a chart and not a finished item, AI or not.)

Lord Libidan probably has a different perspective because he’s seen people selling kits made from an AI version of a free cross stitch pattern of his. Which is another layer.

I have my own feelings about AI and crafting but I just think it’s really interesting both the things people will do with AI without saying it’s AI and the lengths other people will go to in order to prove something is or isn’t AI. Or even calling something AI just because it’s really detailed and looks good? What times we live in.

[Photo via Lord Libidan, closeup of an image made by Google Gemini’s Nano Banana]

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