Choose from one of my reductive nuance-free options or else

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If you’re looking for some free to low cost quilt patterns, I have a few sites in my favs you may be interested in checking out. Many of these quilters are on Instagram. If you have an account (I do not), consider following them. They offer free patterns, designs, tips and tricks, and other nifty things.

FPP = foundation paper piecing

Unicorn Harts - FPP, all patterns are great for beginners, and many of the patterns are free. I love her patterns and highly recommend them. If you’re looking for zodiac stuff, this is a great designer to consider.

Violet Craft - FPP, patterns range from beginner to advanced, and many are free as well as low cost. She has full quilt patterns instead of just blocks available.

Quiet Play - FPP, patterns range from beginner to advanced, several are free as well as low cost. She has blocks and full quilt patterns. Lots of free Star Wars blocks as well as a pattern for making a quilt using those.

Fandom In Stitches - FPP, 100% free, but take note that what you make with most of these patterns cannot be sold. What you make must be free as gifts, trades, or kept for yourself. I used this site for the last Quilt Block Swap.

Lilly Ella - FPP and traditional, many free and low cost, geared more towards moderate and advanced but a few are good for beginners. Those butterflies I recently made? Her pattern. She has blocks and full projects, like making a sewing machine cover and fabric baskets.

Sew So Easy - FPP and traditional, everything is free. From the very beginners to advanced, clothes, various projects, quilts, all of it is free. They put out a newsletter every week with new stuff on the website.

Gnome Angel - FPP and traditional, free and low cost, PDF and physical books, full quilt patterns as well as individual blocks, and she has quilt-a-long events. If you’re looking for a quilt that uses 100 different blocks for less than $30, this is who you should check out. They write the patterns with FPP and traditional quilt options.

Teresa Down Under - FPP and traditional, free and low cost, PDF and physical copies, full quilt patterns and individual blocks. She’s the one who taught me how to FPP! She loves interacting with her followers and teaching people how to quilt. She has a Youtube channel as well!

Sew Hooked - FPP and traditional, free and low cost, and has a lot of fun fandom things to check out. Beginner and advanced options. They participate in quilt events, like sew-a-longs, and give reviews on a few things.

Generations Quilt Patterns - FPP and traditional, all free, very beginner to advanced. There aren’t any full quilt patterns, just blocks. Still my favorite website to use for figuring out patterns I wanna use. An excellent site for making a sampler quilt (a quilt made using a bunch of different blocks).

Carol Doak - FPP, free, beginner to advanced. The quilt block designer who made my favorite quilt books. All those little blocks with stars, trees, houses, and other small things? Nearly all were designed by her. She has several books, and if you opt to buy any, consider getting the 300 blocks book seeing as the smaller ones are also in it.

Crafty Nomad - FPP, beginner to advanced, low cost but with free tutorials. I’ve not used her patterns before, but they look to be geared towards all levels. I have a difficult time learning from videos being a more in-person and diagrams with pictures and instructions kind of person.

My Pattern Search - I did a google search using “free quilt patterns -pinterest” (minus the quotation marks) to get a general collection without Pinterest showing up. When you look for patterns and don’t wanna be flooded with Pinterest boards, use -pinterest. You can do the same with -amazon, -walmart, and various other sites you don’t want showing up in search results.

Quilting Daily - This is an excellent website with all sorts of projects from very beginner to advanced! Sign up for the newsletter if you don’t mind getting one daily. They have giveaways and other events you receive notice of in the newsletters.

Fave Quilts - FPP and traditional, all are free, from beginner to advanced. Some of the info they list, like the links, may no longer be valid, so look over the patterns carefully. They link to other websites with the patterns.

Stashify - FPP and traditional, all free, from beginner to advanced. They won’t be adding new things to the site since Covid19, but they do still have patterns listed.

All About Quilts - FPP and traditional, all free, from beginner to advanced. There’s a video on the page showing how to make FPP blocks. There are full quilts listed as well as individual blocks.

All People Quilt - FPP and traditional, nearly all are free and have at one point or another been in various quilt magazines, lots of pictures, download, and print options. I’ve used many of the patterns featured on the website. There are also tips and tricks available on the blog and articles they post.

Fat Quarter Shop - Traditional, focused primarily on using precuts. The patterns range from beginner to advanced, with lots of pictures, download, and print options.

Moda Fabrics and Moda Fabrics Wordpress - Mostly traditional, with pictures, download, and print options to choose from. Beginner to advanced. The second link has virtually no organization, but it’s all free.

Bear Creek Quilting Company - Mostly traditional with a lot of pics. Beginner to advanced.

Quilter’s Cache - Mostly traditional and it’s just quilt blocks. The site is difficult to navigate, so I haven’t done much exploring. Seeing as it’s mostly just quilt blocks, I suggest using Generations (link up above) because they’re also just blocks but far easier to navigate.

The Fabric Hut - they created an ebook with 161 patterns, 100% free, for download.

My Personal Collection of Free Patterns - This is a Dropbox folder with free patterns I’ve collected. Download whatever files you want. I’ll add more as I find them, but make sure you check out the links available on some of the patterns for more information regarding them.

There are many other designers out there; these are just what I have saved and/or used. Remember to check all the info on the patterns! Some have rules like not selling the finished items/quilts, and others require just mentioning/tagging them when you post the projects online.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or any of these designers and websites. If you have questions regarding a specific pattern, I may be able to help, but if it’s from one of the sites, consider contacting the designer(s) first.

So we all know that Tumblr is US-centric. But to what degree? (and can we skew the results of this poll by posting it at a time where they should be asleep?)

Reblog to increase sample size!

Just checking.... We all pronounce Miette like My-TAY in our heads, right?

It's "mne-eeh-t." "Mne-eht" said with that soft tongue on the upper palette French sound or "mee-yet". I put the "n" because the pretty tongue roll on the "y" kinda sounds "n"-like to me.

I've been saying it Mee-yet in my head. Like the French word for "crumb."

is it not like mye-teh?

“middle aged women shouldn’t participate in fandom” and you think it’s teenagers that are writing those brilliant, incisive 100k fics of your favourite characters

Louder.

or who write the shows/movies/books your fandoms are based on

There is a line

Where things start to get really really creepy and weird.

Oh indeed?

Don’t imagine that the likes of you get to tell us where that line is, youngling. Or attempt to cite the Old Fandom Magic to us. We were there when it was written. In fact, some of us wrote it.

…Let’s stay inside the 20th century for the moment (though it would be possible to take this further back). I come of the generation of fans who invented media fandom. I remember the laboriously printed fanzines piled up on convention dealers’ tables (and the fanzines that were kept out of sight under those tables… the source of the descriptor “slash”). I remember the letter campaign that first saved Star Trek. (And am proud to say that Bjo and John Trimble were fandom-neighbors of mine.)

I remember the great New York Trek conventions where the power of that fandom first began to reveal itself: the conventions where big center-city hotels got so oversubscribed that the fire marshals had to intervene. I remember the legendary Trek con at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan where the ladies who normally worked a nearby brothel bought memberships and started working convention registration because they saw us having so much fun with our fandom. I was twenty feet away when Bill Shatner got hit with that pie during his GoH speech (and I know who paid for it to happen). I was there the time a guy dressed as the Starship Enterprise and another one dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser got into a (staged) fistfight during a costume competition and fell off the runway onto the guests.

I was at the Sunday morning con-committee breakfast when somebody came up with a note Nichelle Nichols had pushed under the con suite door (while plastered, she later told us), asking for champagne and eggs Benedict for breakfast. I saw the distraught expressions among the concom—and some other guests: seriously, what was Fred Pohl doing there?—since unfortunately there was no room service in the hotel on Sunday. And then, among the groans, heard the unexpected response (since the first McDonald’s in Manhattan had just opened across the road): “I know. Let’s get her an Egg McMuffin and a Colt 45.”*

But under all this light-hearted stuff lay a lot of hard work and commitment to sharing the fun with others. With my contemporaries, a majority of whom were female, I watched the fandom we’d built start to grow and thrive and spread to other shows, other media, building on the blueprints we’d drawn. I watched other Trek fans turn into professional writers and editors and even a few showrunners (some of them even writing for Trek, which gave a lot of us the chuckles). I’ve seen mass-media fandom as a whole become a worldwide phenomenon, now taken for granted everywhere, and treated like something that’s always existed. Except—before us—it didn’t.

More to the point: the ever-increasing attendance at such public events, and then the sheer size and undiminished drive of online fandom when it finally got started, had the effect of emboldening the studios that would eventually start making even more shows that would leverage the power of that fandom, and the advertisers who would indirectly help pay for them. Meanwhile, the fellowship built among fans of all ages during that growth has remained, and it too has grown and spread.

So my coevals and I assert the inalienable right to keep on being part of what we helped make. We’re in our fifties and sixties and even sometimes our seventies, now, this founder-generation of fans and its immediate descendants. We built this superstructure of passion. We continue to participate in it because we’ve made lifelong friendships in it, and because we haven’t stopped finding enjoyment in the characters and media we came to love as younger people. We welcome the influx of new fans (in their twenties, or thirties, or forties, or whatever) into old fandoms… as long as they don’t start acting like they think they have the right to dictate who else will be there, on the basis of some utterly specious premise like being “too old” to have “Young People Fun” any more.

Youth is not about how many years you’ve been on the planet. Joy is not about being young. If you honestly think it is, you’d better find out who lied to you, and get yourselves sorted out—before a horrible dry joyless age of, like thirty or forty, descends upon you, and you find yourself stuck in it forever, trapped in your own ageism with no way out.

Meanwhile, if you imagine we’re going to be run off a whole half-century old way of life by a crowd of humorless, self-important, overentitled babes in arms who think people (especially women over twenty) shouldn’t be allowed to continue having whatever kind of fun they choose to in their (soi-disant) “old age”…?

Think again. We’re not going anywhere. And as for you, with your pouting and whining that we should go home and make our spouses sandwiches or something, and abandon what we founded?

Not gonna happen.

Make no mistake. We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us. Don’t like it? (points) The fire escape doors are thataway, leading into other platforms you may find less threatening. As for us, we’re keeping this one. (We’ve just barely got the decorating the way we want it…!) Here we will stay and continue to celebrate the fandoms we love. We have a right to exist, and to be part of the phenomena we helped create. We’ll welcome you as you grow up enough to appreciate it.

…Assuming you can.

*…Which she loved, BTW. She’d forgotten about the note and was delighted to find that someone had brought her any breakfast at all.

speaking of hundreds of thousands of words done by fans, the previous rb is by diane duane, who wrote ten star trek books and worked on the next generation. the fandom olds built these fandom spaces, gave fandom the power it has today. have some respect

ageist commenter: But you wouldn’t want to be like…THEM! *posts picture of happy beautiful women*

Me: Actually I would very much like to be like them, the fuck is wrong with you?

So today I got a rather unkind comment on AO3 (one could call it hate), but I believe it to be a bot for several reasons:

I'm curious, did anyone else get comments like this? Let me know.

And to those who have gotten rude comments and are now worried/upset: Maybe it was just a bot too. Either way: You're awesome for putting your writing out there for others to enjoy and you don't deserve to get rude comments for it. If you want feel free to message me to compare cases and discuss details :)

For comparison, this is the one I received.

Here are some more examples fellow writers allowed me to share:

As you can see, these comments all the match the description above. Also they seem to be weirdly obsessed with AI and this entire operation may be an attempt to promote writing AI - which, if true, is disgusting on several levels.

(If any of the people with the AO3 usernames in question happen to see this: Don't worry, we're all sure it wasn't you, no hard feelings and sorry that a bot stole your name for hate comments. The names are only shown as proof that they are indeed stolen)

Oh I was just wondering why I got a weird comment today!

This is mine. Looking at the pattern, it is definitely a bot. Stealing usernames and posting as guests under that.

I was upset for a hot minute, replied asking what did they mean... Turns out I shouldn't have bothered.

Thank you for the addition! This certainly paints a picture - they're claiming that the work of actual human authors is subpar (the toddler comment on mine and the human comment on yours) and/or bring up AI.

Sorry this happened and I hope you're feeling better now💕 personally, I do believe this work was written by a human being and a lovely too!🫂💗

I don't think they're so much trying to get people to use AI to write fics - there seems to be some sort of a scam where the bots encourage commenters to put a fic through their 'AI scanner' to check if it was written by a robot.

They're literally trying to get readers to do the work of scraping fics for them.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

oh shit, it's 3/21/23, 32123, palindrome day

don't worry, your'e still in time for 3/22/23, 32223, palindrome day the second

I missed BOTH of them.

don't worry, you're still in time for 3/28/23, 32823, palindrome day eight

im very exited for next years weed palendrome day of 4/20/24

so it's weed day and palindrome day, on leap year. perfection is achievable

oh shit, it's 4/20/24, 42024, weed palindrome day

When I say “school should be disability accessible”, I don’t just mean we need handicap rails and EAs. Kids should be able to miss a day without failing out of school. You shouldn’t be dismissed from clubs because your attendance record is “spotty” (true story). I once missed an entire week of school because of a terrible, unending migraine. I was expected to keep up with my studies despite the blinding pain that came with working on my computer. When I heard my teachers say that you couldn’t miss exams, I asked what I would have to do to be excused from them. Their response? “Either get a doctor’s note an hour before the exam or death of an immediate family member.”

I cannot express how rigid this expectation was. First of all, with my condition, I wouldn’t have enough warning about my sickness to go to the doctor and request a note. For many people, this is exceptionally difficult, especially with the current shortage of medical professionals. Next, it ignores the fact that my schedule may not line with theirs because of my medical needs. Once, I had to visit a hospital a province away (which I was on the waiting list of for over a year) on the same day as an exam. I begged my mother not to take me because I was so nervous that I would be marked as an automatic fail. I was lucky enough to make it work, but that’s only because of my spectacular support system consisting of family members and wonderful doctors.

Disabilities aren’t always about needing a bus that can accommodate wheelchairs. It’s already difficult enough for many of us to maintain school attendance without the harsh punishments involved for skipping a day. We need to be able to miss school without being punished. Only than can you claim that the school is “accessible”

Tag directory

#Not polls – everything on this blog that's not a poll. Includes answered asks, administrative posts, etc.

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#Polls about the Bathroom – toilet usage, human waste, public restrooms, and other bathroom habits including brushing your teeth; many of these have the #unsanitary or #gross tags

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The Tortured Poets Department Prologue

At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding

As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck by a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y

You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things

Lovers spent years denying what's ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created

Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan

Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align.

And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky.

Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new

And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips

He never even scratched the surface of me.

None of them did.

"In summation, it was not a love affair!" I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest.

A smirk creeps onto this poet's face Because it's the worst men that I write best.

And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink

All’s fair in love and poetry

Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

the lucky one (taylor’s version) // clara bow

anybody know what to do with it all

this always

worst part about getting angry is how much it makes you want to be mean

sorry i said something dickish. a few mildly frustrating things happened to me in succession and it turned me evil

Hey not to derail this post or anything but how the fuck did you post that in the future

It’s simple; this website fucking sucks.