How to · 2 min read · updated 2026-10-23

How to make a custom fanny pack with your inside joke

A joke only six people get, printed so loud that strangers ask about it.

From joke to pattern

On Inside Joke Fanny Pack you type the joke, anything from a couple of words to 120 characters. An AI art director reads it and picks up to six motifs from a library of 38 hand-drawn ones, writes three quotes for the pattern and chooses a colour palette. You can swap any of it, and reshuffle the layout until the right quote lands on the front.

The quotes are where the joke lives. Each one is all caps and at most 22 characters, so think in shouted fragments: the thing someone said, the place it happened, the date. GARY'S BOAT beats a full sentence about Gary's boat.

One pattern across every panel

A fanny pack is sewn from several pieces: the front (15 x 8 in), the strip along the zip (15 x 3 in), the back (15 x 8 in) and an inside pocket (6 x 4 in). If each piece gets its own copy of the pattern, it looks restarted at every seam.

So the pattern is drawn once as one big repeating sheet, about 4.5 in per repeat, and each panel is a window onto it. The zip strip sits directly above the front and the back sits above that, so the pattern climbs over the top of the pack. Where the pieces are sewn it may not line up to the stitch, but it won't restart.

Sizes, and the matching shirt

Two sizes, S/M and M/L. The same pattern also prints on an all-over-print tee, front, back and both sleeves, from XS to 2XL, for the friend who commits.

Other fanny packs with a face on them

• Saint Mode: a friend's face turned into a saint, halo and all, repeated across the pack.
• The Bachelor(ette) Collection: the guest of honor's face on a fanny pack, and on a whole table of matching merch the group orders from one link.

Questions people ask