Wow! Hello, person reading the first ever Tom’s Tinkerings newsletter. Off the bat, know that the contents of these newsletters will be shaped (I hope) through a back and forth between you and I. I don’t have a clear vision of what I want this to be or what it itself wants to be, so the first few are gonna be a shotgun blast of a whole bunch of different things and we’ll just take it from there.
As 2025 proceeded and I got into the weeds of developing an actual brand to sell bags under, I started to shy away from sharing personal projects as much as I used to because I wasn’t sure how that content would blend with “LOOK AT THIS PRODUCT I’M SELLING!“. I was still making things other than bike bags, but it took a while to figure out the best way to distinguish them.
UNTIL NOW!
Below is a link to my first ever Side Quests post! Side Quests can range from my personal clothes, furniture, game design work, all sorts of stuff. This specific post is about a waxed canvas jacket I made using the Paynter Field Jacket pattern. My goal for these posts is to include as much info as I can without reaching an actual “tutorial” amount of content, but linked is every place I purchased fabric from, places I get jacket inspiration, and a few changes I made to the pattern. Take a look!
Small Web
While I was working on this first newsletter I came across Kagi, a (paid) search engine makes the users the customer rather than generating revenue from running ads or selling tracking data. The engine is interesting and I might explore it a bit more in the future, but what originally caught my eye was their initiative Kagi Small Web. You can read more about it in the link, but their focus is to actively catalogue websites that are typically hobby/special-interest ones that exist outside of normal web ecosystems (lots of personal blogs). Part of this effort is to surface recent relevant posts from these pages in Kagi’s search results alongside what you’d normally see, but they also have a StumbleUpon-like page that randomly shows a website from their curated list: https://kagi.com/smallweb.
There’s never been an easier time for people to share their special interests online, and with the way the web is starting to eat itself), putting that info on a website outside the purview of major social media platforms seems like the best option. Part of this newsletter will be sharing some of my favorite bits of the Small Web, and if you find any I’d love to hear about them!
- 100r.co (Hundred Rabbits): I’ve been following these folks for several years; they’re a two-person art collective living on their sailboat Pino, traveling and developing a whole smorgasbord of things from games and software to recipes (hosted on a separate site GrimGrains) and detailed notes on how they repair their boat. Some of the most multifaceted people I’ve seen, go get lost in their website. As an aside, the Tom’s Tinkerings logo and the Commission Corner and Side Quests logos were created in their program DotGrid!
- ThinkyGames: Not sure if this is technically “small” but compared to a larger game journalism publication, it is! Thinky Games catalogues puzzle and puzzle-adjacent games big and small, news and articles. This also includes physical games! As a big fan of games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol, I can’t recommend enough browsing here for your next game.
- eliotswasteland.tripod.com: This is a bit of an odd one. In high school, one of my lit classes included reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland for an entire unit, and this specific website was indispensable. It doesn’t seem to be loading successfully for me, but it’s still fully functional on the wayback machine here. I love these kinds of websites that are so explicitly single-use but still contain a wealth of information.
Upcoming Projects
Some things I work on may or may not end up becoming full posts on my website, but you can still catch progress in my newsletter! I recently picked up knitting and am about halfway done with a scarf, but also just picked up some yarn and needles to start on this beanie. I am hoping to finish it in time for it to still be useful before Chicago warms back up!
Chicago Happenings
I anticipate a good amount of my audience here to be residing in Chicago, so those folks get a little extra treat as I share cool events/resources/opportunities specific to my home. The big one is that the application for Chicago Public Library’s Maker-in-Residence is open now until February 11th! It involves facilitating classes and creating an installation in one of Harold Washington Library’s windows, and is paid! If you or someone you know would be a good fit, definitely apply. There’s two residencies, both lasting twelve weeks.
Also if you don’t have a library card, GET ONE! I recently got a Blu-Ray player and have been checking out movies from my local branch almost weekly. It’s the best.
That’s all for this go-around, I’d love to hear your thoughts, what you liked, what you want more of, or just reach out to chat. Stay tinkering!