Sewist is a modern, gender-neutral term for a person who sews, combining the words "sew" and "artist." It is most frequently used to describe someone who sews as a creative hobby or an art form, rather than purely for commercial manufacturing.
I'm not afriad to admit I learned a new word today. So cool.
AI summaries strike again - to what [u/Fendrinus](u/Fendrinus) asked, if you go to the original source there is not evidence that it was a portmanteau with artist.
“Some individuals prefer “sewist” because they see it as a combination of “sew” and “artist.” It is more likely an example of a basic method of forming a noun from another word (usually a noun, but not always), by adding the suffix “ist.””
Link has an easily bypassed paywall (and the article is fascinating).
“Sewist” is arguable as to whether it’s defined as a “dictionary word” and has wonky history, but this shows where AI can take an article summarizing an article summarizing online discourse and present it as fact.
It’s almost certainly just sew + ist looking at the earliest usage, and some early 2000s bloggers liked the idea that it was actually a combo with “artist” and spread that story. It’s not even a modern term (just more popular in the last 20 years).
Edit - and if we go down the rabbit hole, it seems like there would be a functional distinction between say sewer and sewist but even how that line is drawn doesn’t seem agreed upon.
We call everything "verb" or "noun" ist in my household. It's great. My cat is meowist/mewpist. She's not very good at either because she generally just trills or screams, but still!
It bothers me that at work we use the word sewer. Yes, it does mean one who sees, but I encountered that pronunciation and definition much later in life.
Seamstress sounds like a dominatrix in denim. Seamster sounds like a wise cracking cartoon cat known for being horny who we will later recognize with awkward discomfort is, in fact, a rapist.
Ever seen a pot holder with a strip of fabric around the outside edge? That is bias tape. It finishes the edge by covering the layers, prevents fraying, and strengthens it.
It is called "bias tape" because it is cut on the "bias" which means at 45 degrees from the direction of the weave. This makes it more flexible and somewhat stretchy, which helps when sewing it on and also helps with its function
It's used for a bunch of things, like reinforcing seams, covering unfinished edges, piping, etc. It's called bias tape because it's woven on a bias, which is to say that the threads run at a 45° angle to the length of the tape.
To add to this, cutting it on the bias allows bias tape to be applied more neatly around curves without puckering, as being cut on the bias allows fabric to stretch and bend more easily.
Back in the day when you made a seam you would want to reinforce it with bias tape. You would put it between two things your sewing together as reinforcement.
Not usually for support; there are other things that add support to the structure (like boning, or interfacing)
Bias tape is most often used to finish an edge of fabric. Fabric will unravel if left to its own devices, there are lots of different ways it’s finished (serging and various hems being the ways you see most often) but sometimes a fabric just isn’t a good fit for a hem. It might be a big fat thick fabric that will get absurd when rolled on itself, it might have structural things in it like boning, or it might just be a funky shape that doesn’t like to cooperate with the # shape of the weave.
Bias tape is cut on the bias, in big diagonal strips, so the fabric is better at wiggling around (most garments are not made this way because it uses extra cloth and also it can make them all droopy floppy if not designed for it and allowed time to relax) it’s then folded in half hot-dog-style (long ways) and then folded in half hot-dog-style again making a big long skinny strip of fabric where the unfinished edges are tucked inside.
That long skinny strip of fabric is put on the unfinished edge and sews in place, and so now they unfinished edges of the garment (or whatever) and the unfinished edges of the bias tape are all tucked inside and will not unravel.
I feel kinda dumb not realizing Bias tape, is cut on the BIAS.... but thats reallt cool! I haven't even considered the thickness getting to be too much if you hem something to its self.
It's for binding edges. It's cut on the bias so it bends around curves smoothly- people used to use it to finish seams on structured garments like blazers, but I've mostly seen it in the past few years to bind the edges of quilts and throws.
Could be for sure. Fruit of the loom actually has a timeline of their logo on their website and claim none of the official logos ever had the cornucopia but I swear I feel like the whole reason I even know what a cornucopia is was from seeing it on fruit of the loom stuff as a kid. Like the only other time you see one of those things is in thanksgiving decorations.
I'm pretty sure this is why I think i remember it being there. My brain is mixing up their logo with the Thanksgiving handouts we got as a kid that we had to color in and it for sure was on those.
I remember my first grade teacher using the fruit of the loom example to explain to us kids what a cornucopia is when we got a thanksgiving coloring page that was just an empty cornucopia and none of us kids recognized what it was.
This is what gets me. I remember asking my mom about what the basket thing was and told me its called a cornucopia, which was a fun word to learn at such a young age. So much so, when my teacher ran his usual "try and stump the teacher" spelling tests he did on Fridays, I brought that word. I distinctly remember him asking me where I heard it, and I said from fruit of the loom.
I had the opposite experience, I had tons of Fruit of the Looms stuff but still vividly remember having to ask what a cornucopia was when I read Hunger Games later because I had never seen the word before and had no idea what it looked like.
I remember very vividly that, for a small time when I was a young child, my "Fruit of the Loom" underwear was now labeled "FTL" in all blue with lines around the elastic. In fact I remember my dad even commenting that it's a stupid thing to shorten "Fruit of the Loom" to because it really stands for "Faster Than Light".
And yet I've never found any information on this rebrand, or even this brand, ever again.
I suspect that the 90s and early aughts were a wild time in knockoffs, and stores like walmart and target were going to get whatever they could... including a Fruit of the Loom with a cornucopia.
I remember getting those from Zellers in Canada. They were not fruit of the loom but they looked like it. The socks and undershirts sucked and fell apart faster.
The logo was much brighter too and very close to what people draw when they "remember" fruit of the loom.
My hypothesis has always been that a lot of printed t-shirts that came from print shops or small vendors were using knock off t-shirts as bases before it was easy for people to check that.
It turns out, that for many years we were all feeding our pets kibble with a shit ton of indigestible bone meal in it. They kibble manufacturers figured out cheap, but better protein sources and have reduced the amount of filler in modern kibble, so dog turds stay a nice cocoa brown now.
I looked it up at some point because I have a habit of looking up everything that irks my brain. Idk when though, usually it doesn’t stick around in my head but dog poop is pretty sticky.
Assuming you actually want the answer and I'm not missing super obvious social cues, torpedo bras! They were popular until modern, rounded bras entered fashion. Torpedo (or bullet) bras were cone-shaped, and when women would grow into them, the breasts would often take the form of said bras, leading to the point that was common in 70s playboys.
Source: Don't yuck my yum.
EDIT: There's also other things:
Average weights were lower, so breasts weren't as padded out with fat, so they often were more torpedo-shaped than round like modern-day. Less processed food and sugar in diet compared to today.
It was popular in porn because in Hollywood they couldn't show off cleavage, so pointy bras /breasts were basically a sex symbol Hollywood was able to sell without breaking the law. See examples such as Bridgette Bardot and Marilyn Monroe.
I swear one time I watched my dad poop and it came out white but that has to be a fake memory because why would I watch my dad poop and why would it be white
Well, technically white or clay colored stool can indicate a serious medical condition such as gallstones, a tumor, hepatitis, or cirrhosis. That's as far as I can add to this conversation. I do not wish to address the rest.
I’m curious: in your minds eye, what angle do you remember seeing? Because I can’t fathom why there would ever be a reason for a child to “watch it come out white.” Maybe if you were spying on him while out camping or something?
Bias tape is strips of woven fabric that are cut on the bias, or at a 45° angle from the straight edge. Cutting it on the bias gives it some stretch so that it can sew along curves without puckering. If you have any potholders at home, it's likely that the raw edges were finished using bias tape.
So my head cannon on this is that most US students up through the 90s had to make Thanksgiving crafts, one of which was the cornicopia with all the Thanksgiving foods. So we all had to painstakingly draw, color, cut out and glue them onto a paper cornicopia and we all just made that association. Bunch of food in a pile? Cornicopia.
Somewhere out there is a universe with a Bearenstæn Bears and some half dead half living Kroonenberg of Nelson Mandela, but on the positive side one universe has actor/comedian/NBA allstar/DJ Sinbad O'Neil.
Wait is that genuinely not a cornucopia? This is the logo I remember, all 5 pixels of it, and it looks like a cornucopia. So it was fruit of the loom’s fault for using fucking dot matrix printing techniques…
I got a Fruit of the Loom shirt for Christmas as a kid and asked my grandma what that thing on the logo was and she pulled out a real cornucopia. FoTL is also how I learned what a cornucopia is.
Always bugged me how in the original fruit of the loom logo all the shading lines are completely horizontal and share a similar design language of broken lines, but the cornucopia in this pic completely ignores that subtle detail. IMO any true Mandala effect cornucopia absolutely would follow that design convention + thinner border lines etc.
Let me start by saying that you are absolutely correct.
But, also it's uncanny that people who remember someone that didn't exist remember it in the exact same way. Which I don't remember them explaining why from that article
That’s my personal theory. It’s just easier for me to believe that people’s memories are faulty than to believe that they’ve jumped to a parallel dimension where there was a cornucopia (or where it was spelled Chic-fil-a (or Chik-fil-a) or where it was Berenstein Bears or whatever).
It’s been proven that even eyewitness testimony in court is extremely unreliable (people often get the color of a vehicle wrong in a car crash for instance). Plus humans are highly suggestible. That’s why police aren’t supposed to ask leading questions during interviews. You can accidentally make someone truly believe they saw something that they actually didn’t.
The red leaves (?) surrounding the grapes look like a cornucopia shape. Scrolling past this post I thought it was a altered image with an added cornucopia.
I think this is the optical illusion tricking us all into believing there was always a cornucopia there.
I’ve been following this specific Mandela effect for a very long time. People didn’t used to remember it the same way. There used to be a lot of variance in size and color and direction and all that. It’s only when that specific fake got picked as the one people used to illustrate the cornucopia that people’s descriptions started getting closer to that one until now many people insist it’s EXACTLY right and I’m lying about its source.
There’s also this weird thing where people used to just claim they remembered the cornucopia and people who don’t just didn’t notice. Now like 90% of the people who say they remember it have specific anecdotal stories about why they KNOW it was there. But not unique stories. The same story with small differences like some people were doing laundry with their grandma and not their mom, those sorts of changes. Actually there are like three stories and people pick which one totally happened to them… but once again the high percentage of having a story as proof is ever increasing but fairly recent
Which I think is a good piece of evidence to how mandela effects form and spread.
I specifically remember being surprised there wasn't a cornucopia in the logo because the vintage logo with brown leaves kinda looked like one from a distance. We however had plenty of tacky cornucopia fall decor on table cloths, festive napkins, etc.With that common iconography, I had assumed it was the same thing on Fruit of the Loom up until that point.
Similar with Berenstain Bears. Hooked on Phonics taught me to sound it out. Other people see a long word and just gloss over it and substitute something they already know.
I encounter this mental shortcutting all the time with people dropping the middle syllable from my name. They see a word they don't recognize and panic jumble the whole thing up to get to the end as quickly as possible. They even do it in email with the name spelled out right in front of them.
I mean, there are tons of other articles that explain it in detail. It's basically a misconnection the brain is making because you're presented with familiar things that are easy to associate. The cornucopia is something most of us are familiar with being depicted with fruit in it, so if someone brings up Fruit of the Loom and asks if it had a cornucopia, it's a very easy path for your mind to reinforce because it makes sense to you. And since our brains all work basically the same way, they also commonly malfunction the same way.
And that’s pretty interesting. But instead of being somewhat impressed that our brains tend to malfunction in similar patterns, and our memories get contaminated so easily- people want to die on hills rather than admit they could be wrong about a small pop culture detail from their childhood.
FOTL is crazy litigious. I don’t think they would have allowed that.
Plus people have been claiming the cornucopia disappeared for like 50 years up until claiming it disappeared during Covid. If it were a super common knockoff (to explain why so many people “remember” it) some of the clothing would still exist.
There's a going theory that one factory used an unauthorized sample logo for a long time. It would explain a lot and makes sense given how much less control was exercised over regional manufacturing 40+ years ago.
If you are in the US, maybe? You might not have known the word for it, but cornucopia decorations are pretty ubiquitous around Thanksgiving (and I feel like were more common in the past), so you probably had seen them.
Can't speak for other countries but it's very common imagery here, just only in that specific context so it's easy to forget.
The teacher asked us in 4th grade what we thought the baskets that show up around thanksgiving was called. I blurted out "A LOOM" and she replied "do you think that because its on your underwear?" It was incredibly embarrasing I will never forget that.
I actually have a theory on this. I think all of our elementary school teachers used to print out the FotL logo and a cornucopia and used them for Thanksgiving decorations, and we just internalized that.
In my grade school in grade 1 the teacher had the months of the year posted around the classroom with different designs. The November one had a cornucopia with the fruit and some pilgrims and turkeys. I remember this distinctly because I am Canadian and we have Thanksgiving in October so it was weird. I am thinking many of us have seen this as kids and thats where the memory is coming from. It was in the 90s. Anyone else remember these?
Thanksgiving was a much bigger holiday than it is today and I think some folks forget that. Like it was bigger than Halloween. Pilgrims and cornucopia and hand turkeys and dried corn everywhere. Anyone from the US/CA saying they learned cornucopia from an alleged logo and not from elementary school is delusional
(mind you I too thought the logo had a cornucopia but I at least recognize that my memory is shit and I've imagined stuff that wasn't there for other scenarios. The widespread nature of this Mandela effect is the weirdest part, but I think the fact that Millennials love to claim remembering random niche bullshit as part of our culture and that's adding to it).
The fruit of the loom answer is this: Contracts were given out. A third party country in a tiny town printed their logo with a cornucopia. Very few people saw it but it was real. Literally the same story as almost every other situation like this. Berenstein/stain? Same thing, third party company that printed it wrong.
Edit: wow 185 replies. No wonder we're all fucked.
It was always Berenstain. I noticed this as a kid & always pronounce it “Bear-in-stain” inside my head because I’m one of those people who remebers spellings by phonetically pronouncing words in my head. “Wed-nez-day” is another example, even though I say “Wends-day” out loud.
This always fascinated me because I used to argue with my friend about whether it was pronounced Bearnsteen or bearnstine. I enjoyed those books vividly and never saw a berenstain spelling. But I definitely did have some underwear as a child with the cornucopia. Who knows. Localization?
It comes from all the thanksgiving imagery. Every single November almost every thanksgiving picture has a cornucopia with fruits/veggies in it. So we automatically associate fruits and veggies splayed out on the table to have a cornucopia. That’s all it is people.
This is more than mildly interesting, I was today years old when I learned about “bias tape” now I want to research why bureaucracy is associated with red tape.
A pack of bias tape now is like $4-6. ;-; I always run through it so fast as well. I also have some vintage sewing notions, it’s crazy to see the prices and quality from back then. Old cotton bias feels so nice compared to the modern polyester stuff.
Deleted and disengaging from this conversation because you guys are crazy for being so mad you feel you have to privately message me and sling insults. Over a Mandela effect…
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u/AnotherSoulessGinger 7h ago
Obviously this is from the sixties, pre-cornucopia.
/s
(but as a sewist with a bunch of vintage supplies, I do think it’s probably 60s, maybe late 50s)