Clamor for Glamor

here's a link! you'll have to make an account in order to pre-order (for free) and access the course. 🤟

asl ii will also be available for free!

Moon. Fabric and thread. Stitched from a photo my brother took.

@mishi_embroidery

Nakshi kantha (Bengali: নকশি কাঁথা) is a type of embroidery tradition from Bengal region, i.e Bangladesh and Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and part of Assam. The basic material used is thread and old cloth. Traditionally, kantha was produced by women strictly for the use of the family. However, these days after the revival of the nakshi kantha art form, they are produced commercially.

The name nakshi kantha is derived from the Bengali word naksha, which means artistic patterns, and kantha which originated from the Sanskrit word kontha, meaning rags, as kantha is made of rags. Traditionally kanthas had a white background accented with red, blue and black embroidery; later yellow, green, pink and other colours were also included. The running stitch called 'kantha stitch' is the main stitch used. Even though no specific strict symmetry is followed, a finely embroidered kantha will always have a focal point. Most kanthas will have a lotus as focal point, and around the lotus there are often undulating vines or floral motifs. Other motifs may include solar, lunar, wheel, swastika or other circular images as well as flowers, leaves, birds, fish, and animals. Although most kanthas have some repeated traditional motif, no two nakshi kanthas are same and the individual style of the artist is retained.

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 | textile series

(Afternoon April 13, 2023) The Missouri Attorney General just used an Emergency Rule to ban all gender-affirming care for people of all ages (yes, adults) in the state.

In order to receive any care, transgender minors and adults alike will have to:

This will cut TENS OF THOUSANDS of trans people off of medical care. Please care about us, oh my god.

The Lavender Clinic is the ONLY source for gender affirming healthcare in the state of Hawaii.

They have less than 48 hours remaining to raise the funds they need in order to stay open.

Please join me in donating if you can, and PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. They are in immediate need!

Non binary office bat boogie!

Better viewing here

This is probably my most well known embroidery animation. The main goal with this one was to see how complex I could make a character design in this medium and still have it be feasible to make. The answer is: about this complex, lol. After this one I began bringing in bits of fabric so that I could still have complex designs but make things a little faster for myself.

Some different frames from the non binary office bat boogie! The smear frames were my favourite part to sew.

Blue Tube Quilt - optical Illusion 

Montse Forcadell Biasco

Cambrils Tarragona Spain

Spanish Patchwork Association Show.

hey not sure if i have any Jewish followers from NJ but FYI. this is really concerning

Confirmation this screenshot is real. It was tweeted at 3:06 PM on Nov 3, 2022 (local time). For those with screen readers, the tweet reads: "The FBI has received credible information of a broad threat to synagogues in NJ. We ask at this time that you take all security precautions to protect your community and facility. We will share more information as soon as we can. Stay alert. In case of emergency call police."

They followed up at 3:39 pm with: "We are taking a proactive measure with this warning while investigative processes are carried out." Then at 6:00 pm: "The FBI takes all threats seriously and we are working with our law enforcement partners actively investigating this threat. We are also engaged with our faith based partners in the affected community."

This NPR article (published 7:35 PM Nov 3, 2022) has slightly more detail: "The alert was posted after officials discovered an online threat directed broadly at synagogues in New Jersey, a law enforcement official said. The posting, though, did not target any specific synagogue by name, the official said." The article also says officials in Jersey City and Hoboken had promised increased police presence.

As of 11:10 PM Nov 3, 2022, Newark's FBI field site's website has no further information. Please do not panic, but consider talking precautionary action and/or reaching out to your synagogue for advice/concerns/etc if you attend in New Jersey. Remember that a threat is not a guarantee, but that acting with your own safety and the safety of your community and family in mind is always a positive.

I am reblogging because this post is time sensitive, and to provide further links/verification. I have only done a cursory search, and I encourage those in the area or more up to date to reblog with updates and/or corrections. Again, please do not panic or sensationalize, as it does no one any good-- this is only to spread information for those who need it.

Much love to all my followers, and I hope this turns out to be a cruel hoax.

Kansas Republicans have been trying to massively restrict abortion in the state for years. In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that they couldn’t, because the Kansas state constitution guarantees personal liberties. With the fall of Roe, the Kansas Republicans are now holding a state referendum that would allow them to over-rule their Supreme Court and introduce severe restrictions on abortion in the state. BUT they’re being sneaky about it. Because they know that if they put the referendum on the ballot in November, they might well lose. 60% of Kansas citizens oppose the kind of severe restrictions on abortion that the Republican legislature want to introduce. So instead of holding the referendum in November with the midterms, they’re holding it THIS TUESDAY, with the party primaries. The primary ballot that is typically reserved only for party members to select their candidate for the Novemeber midterms. Republican voters are far more likely to participate in August primaries in Kansas than Democrats are. Unaffiliated voters make up more than one-quarter of the state’s electorate, and usually have no reason to come to the polls during primaries. In TWO DAYS, the citizens of Kansas vote on abortion rights in their state, in an election that most of them don’t bother to take part in, take little interest in, and it’s highly likely that large numbers of them don’t even know there’s a special reason that THIS ONE TIME THEY REALLY NEED TO TAKE PART IN THE PRIMARY VOTING. On a day when they’re all at work. This is how Republicans rig the game. Over and over and over. If you know anybody who lives in Kansas, get the fucking word out. Let them know this isn’t the standard party primary, that they NEED TO VOTE. Because otherwise the Republicans will pass this unpopular bullshit with the approval of a tiny minority of Christian evangelicans.

Kansas primaries are open to unaffiliated voters, meaning you do not have to be registered Republican or Democrat to vote (you may be able to ask for a nonpartisan ballot, but as I don’t live in Kansas I’m not sure)

What's up Amazon haters! Bookshop.org is doing free shipping to combat Prime Day. Purchases on Bookshop help support the indie bookstores in your location!

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

BUT HAS ANYONE KNITTED DOOM?

@commodorebuzzkill, yes, darling, they actually have.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110200-knitting-doom/

And they are also on Tumblr as @knittingdoom.

I am still very early in the project but I’m making slow progress.

Thank you for the tag!

Now this is something I’d watch on tv!

(via)

i need y'all to steal and repost my anti-lawn memes to as many pinterest boards and facebook pages as possible

Assyrian dog figurines with names carved on them, 650 BC “Expeller of evil” (mušēṣu lemnūti) with white pigment and red spots “Catcher of the enemy” (kāšid ayyāb) with red pigment “Don’t think, bite!” (ē tamtallik epuš pāka) with white pigment “Biter of his foe!” (munaššiku gārîšu) with turquoise pigment “Loud is his bark!” (dan rigiššu) with black pigment

I completely regret not purchasing this High Art (Seattle Goodwill)

got to see a wonderful exhibition called Torah: Stitch by Stitch - over 100,000 volunteers are still actively working on cross stitching the entire torah, four pesukim at a time + the option to add designs. they think the project will be completed in late 2020, and you can still sign up for a cross stitching kit to be sent to your house so you can contribute to the project.

i love love love the idea of reclaiming torah through something that is traditionally a feminine activity with about 98% of the volunteers being women - it’s mamash so empowering, and awe inspiring to stand in front of. what an incredible artwork!