Visible Mending

Introduction:

Visible mending is a decorative way to fix up an item. Instead of trying to make your mend as invisible as possible, the idea is to make it part of the garment's design.

Visual mending is not a single technique: it's more of a mindset. If you've got an item you love, it deserves to be mended, and if you're going to put that love into stitches, why not show them off?

That being said, there are some specific techniques that are popular with visible menders. Let's take a look!

Sashiko:

Sashiko is a type of traditional Japanese embroidery that is used to both decorate and reinforce fabric. In visible mending, sashiko is often used to cover up holes with patches or to reinforce thinning fabric. This technique uses a variation on the running stitch.

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Some resources on sashiko:

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Embroidery:

Regular embroidery is also a popular technique to accentuate your mends. Check out my embroidery 101 post to learn how to get started. You can embroider patches, or use embroidery to hide or accentuate any stitches you've made to fix holes. Embroidery's also a great way to cover up stains.

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Patches:

There are many ways to add patches to a garment. My tutorial on patches is a good place to start if you want to make custom-shaped patches to sew on top of your fabric. You can also sew your patch on the inside of your garment and have it peek out from beneath the hole you're trying to fix. Fun ideas for this are lace or superheroes.

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Darning:

Darning is a technique used to repair holes in fabric by using running stitches to weave extra fabric over the hole as to fill it up again. While traditionally darning is done in an invisible way by using the same colour of thread as your fabric, you can also use contrasting colours to accentuate your fix. Check out this written tutorial on darning by TheSpruceCrafts.

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Conclusion:

Visible mending is a creative way to fix up your clothes and give them some personality at the same time.

You should be proud of the fact that you took the time and learned the necessary skills needed to mend your clothes! Show off what you did!

A fun side effect of wearing these obvious mends is that people will notice them. They'll remember your fixes the next time they're faced with a hole in their wardrobe, and it will make them more likely to try it for themselves.

These are just a few ways to visibly mend your garments. Want more inspiration? Check out Pinterest or r/Visiblemending on Reddit.

Fuck can't believe I never posted this it's been sitting in my draft folder for ages apparently. This was the intro post that got me into visible mending/embroidery and all.

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

They died of AIDS because

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history.  Neither is homophobia.

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?

There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”  It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.

/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”

Speaking to the MSM point in the final addition.  Functionally a problem in trying to get studies going in the 80s and 90s that tried to figure out what in hell was going on was trying to get people into studies.  To answer questions.  Because you could lose your job, home, family, life if you incautiously admitted to being gay/queer/homosexual.  So among the men who were terrified of being on any kind of record as being gay because they self identified that way there were a whole host of people who didn’t actually see themselves as gay. Because it was just not something they could accept. But what always fascinated me was in the studies we did (I’m out of Vancouver, BC and have been part of an HIV/AIDS research organization since 96, for context) at one point we had a staunch group of individuals who were predominantly immigrants from other cultures who culturally had definitions of behaviour that didn’t align with North American behaviour labels. Insertive partners in some cultures are not gay as they were/are not mechanically different from “the normal male” sexual actor.  Receptive partners were.  Basically the thinking in some people’s minds is that women=receptive and insertive=male.  And if your sex didn’t match the sexual position…  Now. To be clear.  I’m not saying these things as a point of “this is what I think”.  This is what had been captured in interviews and conversations and studies over the years.  Some people aligned themselves these ways.  I’ve always seen it as part and parcel of the gender issues and misogyny that we’re still, 30 years later, arguing about.  As to the rest… I’ve written about this (and lectured and written and lectured and written) before.  In this particular thread even.  It will never stop amazing me the revisionism that happens around queer.  Those of us who were in large protesting crowds, remembering “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Over It!” being told “it’s never not been a slur/been used by us” just…wigs me out. What I remember?  What I remember is my now husband and then friends (and myself) knowing that the straight culture we lived in equated holding hands with a sexual act.  Holding hands in public as queer people was fucking.  It was viewed the same.  Today that seems ludicrous but it’s how it was.  Our being was an act of aggression, of sexual acts, of a political agenda.  A spiritual and moral violence. And we knew. Like everyone has known: the fear behind that was potentially a tool we could use. So standing in rooms with scientists and physicians who had decided we were dirty queers with sick fucking lives and minds, prone to acts of perversion and inhumanity?  We wore shirts with QUEER in big bold letters so when they talked to us, met our eyes, it was over the words they were whispering in their heads.  It was under the leather we wore, the sexualized outfits with no room for misinterpretation about FUCKING.  And SEX.  And in these meetings discussing policy and funding and science we stood there in our entirety on display, forcing them to look at us in all of this - to see we felt all of it was normal and not something we were ashamed of? How could the idea that sex was enjoyable be a topic of debate that had implications on our fundamental humanity?  Apparently people did, and do, think so. This all put us in positions of power in those negotiations.  Negotiations, do not ever forget often that were about whether or not their largess would allow us to live.  So while people were embarrassed to be confronted with their prejudices that they were comfortable expressing out of sight and hearing of us, we stood and HELD their eyes and their attention. Queer fuckers.  Fags and perverts.  And we refused to fucking die quietly. (shrug) So to those that dislike the word, outside of the fire of my own history I will calmly discuss it and follow their instructions not to call them queer.  But if you step into my history, into the graveyard of the men and women I know who are now gone due to apathy and disinterest and hatred and homophobia… you’re going to hear queer.  In great swelling chants from the throats of thousands of people in the streets.  You can like it or hate it but you cannot argue it’s existence and the lever it was that shifted the world we’re arguing in the middle of, today.

If you want to know how all-encompassing AIDS was of queer culture, I’d like to direct you to RENT—not the movie or modern performances, but the original. Jon Larson was cishet, but he was also writing about his own friends and community.

You will note that literally half the cast has AIDS. If you listen to the original workshop, it’s THREE QUARTERS—Maureen is positive and Mark refuses to get tested out of fear because he’s showing symptoms.

Next: the Life Support scene. First of all, it was based on a real group called Friends In Deed. Second of all, something often omitted but still sometimes honored:

The intention was for the names of the characters to change for every actor, sometimes more than once in a run (literally up to and including “every performance”). That’s why none of the characters’ names are mentioned in the scene except by the actor with that name. Each actor was given the opportunity to name their character after someone they had known who died of AIDS, and the “default” names were all members of Friends In Deed.

So when you listen to that song, remember: every person named in it is dead. Of AIDS. It is entirely possible this is their only memorial. And when you hear a different name, that, too, is in memorial. Of a person who died because the whole world looked away.

I would also advise young members of the community to look up the AIDS memorial quilt. It’s been digitized and can be viewed online. Each panel is 6’x3’, roughly the size of a grave. The quilt weighs 54 tons and is the largest folk art object in the world; in its entirety it requires a space the size of the Mall in Washington, DC to display. (For non-Americans and/or people who are unsure: you know the pictures of presidential inaugurations, or MLK’s I Have A Dream speech? That’s the Washington Mall.)

Every single panel in the quilt represents a dead person. Some represent more than one dead person, because people would make a panel in memoriam and then they, too, would die of AIDS, and there would be nobody left to make a panel for them.

When you turn your back on “queer,” when you turn your back on “weird gays,” when you turn your back on trans people, this is what you are turning your back on. Fifty-four tons of nothing but names of the dead.

And I assure you, the people who hate us enough to have made the quilt necessary? They hate you too. You’re not special just because you’re the “right kind” of LGBTQIA.

“Excuse us for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

History of activism in the community for those less familiar or who'd like to read more on it.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep

Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.

idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 

  mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.

since it was suggested in the tags

anything that moves

the bisexual manifesto

the Samuel Proctor oral history project

a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws

more to come

I watched the asexual and aromantic communities get eaten away at by exclusionists and proto-TERFs and queer people making fun of microlabels and people who talked about how they just wanted all of us to stop dividing ourselves so much and people who decided that the concept of the Split Attraction Model was homophobic and people who flooded the ace and aro tags with porn and--

Well, you get the point.

But now a lot of people on this site don't know about ace culture and modern history, so here's some stuff you should know about:

The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) was started in 2001 by asexuality activist David Jay as a forum and educational space about asexuality.

A Carnival of Aces, which is a monthly blogging carnival on ace topics, has been taking place since May 2011 and has included such topics as coming out, non-traditional relationships styles and polyamory, asexual education (which I hosted), and labels and microlabels.

The Split Attraction Model is one model for talking about sexual and romantic orientation that splits out those two orientations, allowing individuals to describe sexual attraction/orientation as distinct from romantic orientation (e.g., aromantic bisexual, heteroromantic grey-asexual). While this model is primarily used by people on the ace and aro spectrums, it can be used by anyone who wants to discuss or describe sexual orientation as being separate from romantic orientation.

The AVEN triangle (or asexuality triangle) is a black and white or greyscale triangle that originated from taking the Kinsey scale and extending it down into another axis to address/acknowledge the range of attraction between what's on the Kinsey scale (allosexuality) and no sexual attraction (asexuality). It's generally presented as white at the horizontal line at the top and then black at the point at the bottom, often with a gradation of shades of grey down to the bottom.

Microlabels are specific (sometimes very narrow) labels for sexualities, romantic orientations, and genders. While these are not aro- or ace-specific, they were often associated with those communities because there was a culture of having nuanced conversations about narrow definitions, often by people couldn't find something that fit their experience in the standard L, G, B, or T lexicon. Demiromantic/demisexual, cupioromantic/cupiosexual, and quoiromantic/quoisexual are all examples of micro-labels.

The ace ring, a black ring worn on the middle finger of the right hand (generally) is a symbol of asexuality that some ace people wear. It originated on AVEN in 2005 when people were looking for a symbol that was rather covert.

Cake has also been an ace symbol, mostly from the idea that ace people agree that cake is better than sex. It used to be common to see a drawing of a cake with the ace flag colors.

The ace of (heart/spades/clubs/diamonds) has at times been used as a symbol for different ace spectrum/aro spectrum combinations. Ace of hearts is generally agreed on as alloromantic asexual and ace of spades as aromantic asexual (aroace or aro/ace). Ace of clubs is sometimes for grey-romantic asexual and ace of diamonds sometimes for demiromantic asexual, but those are less common.

Dragons were also associated with the ace community, at least on Tumblr. I'm less certain where this one came from (theories include that they're mythological creatures the way ace people are seen to be or that it's because there were headcanons that Charlie Weasley was ace).

Trans person here! I'm afraid Idk very much on how to sew and cut stuff well, but small things that'll make t-shirts more feminine:

- Cut a few inches up the side. Put on shirt. Tie knot with the 'tails' to make the shirt a bit more 'feminine'. The slight curve looks feminine without being too immediate about it and if you sew a button/pin/patch onto the part where the cut stops, it can also look cute with the side untied. Cut both sides for more opportunity to mix and match stuff. If the cut is too short, cut a little more. Try not to make it too long.

- Cut up the sleeves! Just make a bunch of parallel cuts anywhere from 1/4 of an inch to an inch (or however much you want, these are my ballparks) on the sleeves/shoulders and you're good to go! People braver than I will also fold the shirt along the vertical line and make 2 or 3 small (distance from tip of thumb to tip of pointer finger when both are extended as max distance for example) horizontal cuts right above where the pecs/breasts are. There's fancy designs you can do but these are the ones I know off the top of my head. It's not a magical girls-only look, but I have yet to meet a man who wears this style while a good half of the women I knew wore them all the time in the summer/with an undershirt in the winter.

- Tuck t-shirts into skirts! I do this for sensory issues. It does look more feminine, esp when paired with skirts that flare out a bit. Don't pick a very delicate/fine skirt to pair with a rough t-shirt or it will look bad (Hot Topic skater skirts go great with all of my tees and have pockets!).

- For tank tops: If you have long hair, draw some of the back into a hair tie. The cloth with move in a way where the it's neckline will now be more similar to women's tanks. The hair hides the hairtie-fabric bunch and you're good to go. If you're fancy about it, work this out on paper/model, pin the fabric in place, and sew it like that.

- Remember the 'cut up the sleeves' trick? Do it down the sides on the shirt in lots of fine cuts (closer to 1/8-1/4 inch) and you get free length! Do this with a shirt that's your size or a little big, and you get a beautiful dress. Make the cuts about 1.5-3 inches while cutting since it'll be on both sides and become 3-6 inches total. The more you cut the looser it'll hang but it will look a little weird if you go too far in. Wear with underclothing if modest, without additional layers if brave.

- Pair the shirt with more feminine stuff and it'll work. Clothes don't inherently have to be locked into their inital gender box forever. Half of the men's stuff I wear looks freaky feminine and some of the stuff I've bought in women would look better on a guy than a girl. It's all about what you pair with.

That's all I've got but I hope this helps!

Thank you for your additions!

Tailoring masculine clothes with Stylish D

While there's plenty of good tutorials on the internet about tailoring feminine clothes, information on tailoring masculine clothes can be a little harder to find.

If you've been looking for a good resource, check out Stylish D's YouTube channel. He explains how to tailor off the rack items such as dress shirts, t-shirts, and trousers in a beginner-friendly way, and also has videos on topics like clothing care and sewing basics.

This is part of my ongoing Discworld jacket embroidery project. Of course Great A'Tuin has to be on there. And of course it has to be the biggest one of them all.

I’m going to put the finished product in my masterpost, but I’m so proud of the thing that I have to put it in an extra post beforehand. Enjoy!

Update!!!

Behold: the elephants! 😁

The turtle moves! Now it’s just the “cargo” left. And the universe. Well.

Update 3: Why did I have to try single thread for the disc. Why. How did I ever think that was a good idea. This is taking aaaages.

I’d say never again, but I know myself too well…

Still trying to decide whether to outline the landmass with darker thread or not. It would make the lands more distinct - but it might also make it look more like a comic. If you have any thoughts on it, let me know. I’ll only decide once I’ve finished the rest of the disc and that’ll be at least a week, if I had to guess.

I finally had some time to continue and the disc is done! Now just some stars, planets, etc…

My estimate is that this took about 150 hours. About half of that went into the disc because I discovered single thread embroidery.

And because I always think it’s really interesting to see the back of the embroidery - bonus:

On to the next one! Maybe I’ll do the luggage now.

Wow..!

Fuckin HELL, bud. You’re an embroidery 🪡 HERO. SPECTACULAR!!!

HOLY SHIT. HHOOOOLLLY FUCKING SHIT. OOHHH MY GOD. FUCK. IM LOSING MY MIND.

*calms down and clears throat*

This is so good omg.

And bless documenting the process, what tools did you use to trace the drawing onto the jacket? When I've tried doing picture to embroidery tracing, I literally cut the picture into shapes like a puzzle and traced them piece by piece but this looks way more effective/quick.

Also I love the idea of a Discworld jacket and look forward to seeing more as you add to it! (I loved seeing the librarian on the bottom!)

embroidery from peacockandpinecones my friends and I have been losing our minds over all morning.

I bow before the art gods and hope that I can one day achieve a fraction of this level of skill

Embroidery Art // Petit Cercle

I love these mundane things being phrased ominously. But I wanna give a Special mention to my mother doing the opposite and being real casual when she shouldn't have been.

She worked at the Navy Yard in DC in 2013 and one day texts me "there was a shooting at work today. See you at your game tonight!"

My siblings text didn't even mention it just asked if they'd be staying after school so she could figure out logistics of getting to the sports game. My sibling asked about it panicked cause a friend saw the news and she was like "oh that. Yeah, crazy day. Anyways I can pick you up at 5"

[TRANSCRIPT:

Mafia dude: BOSS! We found out who the mole is! It’s polyamorous Tony.

Mafia leader: that rat fuck! I want him dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wife dead! I want his wi-

END TRANSCRIPT]

I've been like bouncing off the fucking walls all day and couldn't figure out why I was so jittery and then I found out that the lemonade I got at panera has 260mg of caffeine. For context the coffee I drink sometimes to stay awake has about 65-90mg. Why does lemonade have this much caffeine. Whats your fuckint problem

What tbe fuck Panera I am going to Call Saul

This is so fucking dangerous. I’m not allowed to drink energy drinks (heart condition) and it wouldn’t even occur to me to check if the fucking lemonade has caffeine in it.

By the way, Starbucks is also a HUGE offender about this: basically all their "refreshers" are caffeinated, but this is not clearly stated anywhere and most of the employees will not tell you even if you ask.

It's definitely cool and good how caffeine is pretty much never clearly labeled on anything. Deffo love that shit.

This was posted in January, and in light of the recent deaths/lawsuits related to the high, previously unlabeled caffeine content in paneras lemonade, I figured I had to add:

💕SKETCHBOOK TOUR💕