We have just released another big project on our website. It is called 100Patterns and is a digital collection of traditional cross stitch patterns. Casual users can tap on the patterns to reveal their scheme, take a screenshot and copy them at home, while desktop users are also given the opportunity to download them as PNG or SVG files for pixelart and design projects. Most of these patterns have been created well over 100 years ago, so copyright issues should not exist, but sources are being provided for everyone to make their own research. It's our first project dealing with folk and tradition instead of subculture in central Europe.

In our research we discovered how commercialized folk culture and stitching have become. It is hard to find authentic patterns now that various actors have flooded the internet with traditional-looking but uninspiring patterns they sell. Distinguishing the various European cultures from another and participating in them has become difficult, and 100Patterns is an attempt in fixing that. Yet it's not a nationalist project by any means. The influence all European cultures have had on another are obvious, and historic regions like Galicia or Bukovia and stateless peoples like the Sámi or Sorbs are being included. You can check out the final page right here:

100Patterns

The end of bi-weekly blog posts

For the first time since this blog's launch, we couldn't uphold our 2-week upload cycle. Other than 100Kards, 100Patterns has been created in the last few weeks alone and has taken a lot of time from everyone involved. Still, many more patterns need to be added soon to represent the remaining European cultures, and we are already thinking about new features like sharing or saving specific patterns, or translations. But for a while, all this needs to wait.

For now, we will pause our bi-weekly blog posts and focus on other tasks instead. We need to go outside, enjoy the rest of summer and get creative ourselves. The aesthetics we wrote about long to be brought alive in projects too small to write about and too large to create in just two weeks time. The time has also come to optimize our website perfomance-wise, fill our home page with content and find ways to make our blog posts more engaging and stylish. Even more, 100Kards and 100Patterns offer a lot of potential for our developers and designers. But all of this is of no use if the reach of Komoś stays as small as it is right now. We need to cultivate our Instagram account, become active on Reddit, print some stickers in real life and create content that catches attention. When all of this is done, maybe Komoś will be an established collective and take part in shaping aesthetics and cultures for real soon.