I come from a family of artists and musicians.
My mum is an artist, her mother and father were artists.
My sister is a writer.
My aunties and uncle - are artists.
My step-dad is a musician.
My older brothers are musicians.
There is something that needs to be protected. And that is ART.
Music is art
Drawing is art
Writing is art
Storytelling is art
Learning to express yourself and your emotions - is art.
Using your mind, your hands, AND your heart all at once - is art.
Typing a sentence into a machine, and having it spit out an image in 4 seconds is not the same thing.
And honestly, I think deep down, most people know that.
AI is everywhere right now. It’s unavoidable in a lot of ways. It’s the first thing that pops up when I use Google, it’s the automatic customer service for a lot of online business, the ads on social media are AI regurgitated slop. The list goes on!
I understand a lot of people use it as a tool - to help with coding, business software, and researching etc.
But there is a massive difference between:
using AI as a tool,
and replacing human creativity with it entirely.
Human art matters.
I cannot emphasise enough how much it matters to me.
The process matters.
The hours matter.
The mistakes matter.
The weird wonky sketches that gets re-drawn 57 times matters 🤣
Myself and my mum have hand-drawn 15 out of the 26 Yume patterns. The other 11 were created by real artists - that I paid for their time and work, and licensed properly to be woven .
Some patterns take me months to finish. Sometimes I will work on a pattern until I hate it, and I’ve redrawn the whole thing multiple times over.
My mum draws for hours every single day. She’s always been incredibly talented at putting what she sees in her head onto paper. Some of my fondest memories as a child were watching my mum draw with soft pastels, it was mesmerising.
My mum draws for hours every single day. She’s always been incredibly talented at putting what she sees in her head onto paper. Some of my fondest memories as a child were watching my mum draw with soft pastels, it was mesmerising.
When you buy a wrap from Yume… You are not just buying fabric - you are buying hundreds of hours of human thought, emotion, maybe sometimes too much emotion, inspiration, and care - all woven into cloth.
And yes, I know my communication as a brand is far from perfect 😭
I’m unorganised at the best of times 💔.
Sometimes I reply within 60 seconds
Other times it takes me 4–5 business days because I’m drowning in messages, children, avoidant tendencies, life, and just general chaos.
But I think a lot of us are becoming exhausted by how artificial everything feels lately.
AI generated artwork
AI generated “models”
AI generated customer service
AI generated writing
AI generated adverts
AI generated products?!
AI generated EVERYTHING
At what point do we stop learning skills because a machine can do it faster? 😭 *cries*
It doesn’t feel right.
Art is supposed to reflect humanity. Ans a machine cannot replace human connection.
Our experiences
Our cultures
Our imperfections
Our emotions!
AI cannot feel any of those things.
Side tangent - we used to love watching miniature baking on YouTube, but now it’s been completely infiltrated with AI generated slop. It’s HORRENDOUS.
I recently started reading a book on KU, and I’m 99% sure that it was ai generated, or at least very heavily edited by AI. How crazy is that?! I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it.
And how f*cking difficult is it to get ahold of a human being at Royal Mail now? When I urgently need to contact them, and I just get passed around from chat bot to chat bot like a hot potato.
Even Shopify give you the option to generate slop at every opportunity, it’s truly EVERYWHERE.
On a more serious note,
There’s also the environmental side of it.
AI systems need these HUGE data centres, that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. So. Much. Water. Every image generated, every “make me 100 logo concepts” prompt uses energy somewhere in the world.
Technology already has a massive environmental footprint, and I personally dont feel comfortable contributing unnecessarily to that.
It takes away work from human beings - ESPECIALLY when small artists are already struggling.
I also deeply dislike (haaate) how much AI art is built from existing human artwork - scraped from the internet without consent. Artists spend YEARS developing their style, only for machines to imitate it in seconds?!
It’s just wrong.
It feels stolen. I mean, it IS stolen.
I know some people will disagree with this post.
And That’s okay. Genuinely. 🫶🏻
I’m not telling other people what to do.
the purpose of this blog is telling you what I stand for. What Yume stands for -
Yume will always be:
Hand-drawn, by my, or my mum, or artists within the babywearing community.
Woven by a textiles mill that is family owned, and nearly 150 years old!
Overlocked and hemmed by real hands, a seamstress that puts a heck lot of love and care into every piece she makes.
Packaged and shipped by yours truly
(even if sometimes I take a long time 😭)
Even if it means making mistakes, I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and try to fix them with the best of my ability.
Even if it means my patterns are imperfect sometimes
Even if it means my patterns are imperfect sometimes
Because humanity IS imperfect
But at least we try our hardest.
And at the root of it all,
I think that’s the whole point.