My pirate RPG is now being crowdfunded! Do you like playing weird, vice-ridden magical pirates? Then please, check it out! Download the free quickstart (a preview of the game)! If you like it, consider backing! This is my first big project, and I wrote, illustrated, and designed it! Thank you!
i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim
WAIT
there we go!!
Fiber arts is just Math in sheep's clothing
So you remember those pockets I wove into this fabric couple months ago? Back then I was charmed by the idea that I could hide a small item in there - I could give this fabric a secret that is part of its structure and impossible to get out unless you break the fabric itself.
So I wrote this little poem, a gentle call out for being curious enough to break my beautiful hand woven linen fabric and messaged my lovely sculptor/jewel smith friend.
Yesterday we were finally able to realize my vision! These tiny bronze plaques are made to hide in the fabric are - peeking through shiny enough that you see that there is something there to tease at your imagination but - impossible to get out or read without breaking it.
This is amazing
Learning how to weave! After a brief attempt at card weaving, I discovered pick-up weaving and immediately switched over to weaving with a heddle. And since I need to make everything as complicated as possible, I'm working on creating my own patterns as I learn.
Still figuring out how to maintain an even tension when I move my set up around. Ultimately, I'll get a loom and that should solve most of my issues. They're a tad wonky, but I'm pleased with my patterns and excited to come up with more! :))
Here's a peek at what playing around with these patterns looked like on paper!
The red and white speckled effect reminded me of mushrooms, so I turned all the houses into mushrooms for my last repeat. I also added in a fox (mostly successfully) and tried to turn the hill into a hobbit hole (less successfully). I'll iron out these motifs in a future band!
The ducks were my first attempt at creating a pattern and you can see how much I adjusted things as I went along! (The left being the beginning and the right the end)
I've learned a LOT about pick up pattern creation by working on these guys, especially where one should and shouldn't add pick-ups/push-downs. I'll continue tweaking these patterns as I learn more and hopefully have a nice proper pattern to share with you all at some point!
“Love Between Fairy and Devil” memes: 1/?
the thing about rereading gtn is you realize how well the perspective works in terms of keeping things a mystery on account of gideon’s absolutely clueless himbo brain:
- she talks about how rigid and unnatural harrow’s parents are as puppets, meets protesilaus and describes how rigid and unnatural he is in the exact same way, and her only analysis is “well i bet i can take him in a fight”
- she zones out right as abigail starts talking to cytherea about communication between the original lyctors (which obviously has major implications) and calls it “boring”
- she doesn’t realize corona’s facade even when corona demonstrates MULTIPLE TIMES in front of gideon that she’s incapable of doing typical necromancer things AND ianthe explicitly refers to herself as the singular necromancer of the third to gideon
- palamedes also points out that gideon should know how many keys are left in play and she DOESNT because she just hasn’t been paying attention or bothered keeping count
- dulcinea also surprises gideon with her perceptiveness and unexpected ability to win TWO keys and harrow even warns gideon she’s dangerous and gideon STILL doesn’t perceive her as a threat cuz hnggg hot lady nice
and it’s very obvious Things are Happening but because gideon dismisses it, we kinda do too. and we aren’t privy to any of the extra insight because our narrator is too busy simping over cougars, blonde bimbos, and her boss to take note of any of the big stuff.
but hey at least she figured out that camilla is ambidextrous and uses dual blades as her primary weapons instead of a rapier?? go you funky jock lesbian! but gideon i am begging you to do some critical thinking babe. if harrow had even half of the information gideon was given gtn would have been over in fifty pages
*laughs* Dunking on Gideon = entirely fair. Of course, if Harrow managed to be even slightly less secretive and spoken civilly to LITERALLY ANYONE, including her own cav, she might have even gotten some of that info in GtN. *finger-guns* Social anxiety or not, bed, the lying in thereof, made, etc.
harrow, who has actual valid reasoning: dulcinea is DANGEROUS. and i hate her cav. no i will absolutely not explain any of my logic for why i am thinking this
gideon: jealousy’s a disease harrow get well soon
“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter
No love, however brief, is wasted.
seeking an audience
Thoughts on Odile of Swan Lake?
Sometimes, you come home for an extended Christmas vacation—thank god for two vacation days a month—and your father has turned a bunch of the local community college girls into swans. That’s just how life is. You try to be understanding, really; it’s not like you don’t have a couple shitty dates tucked away in your back garden. (They make an unholy noise whenever the wind is high, but they also eat the spider mites, so.)
During the day, you feed the swans-who-are-technically-girls whole wheat bread, because that’s what the internet told you was best for swans. (Cultivated grains, right?) At night, you lend them your high school sweatshirts and old pajama pants, and blow up every air mattress you can beg or borrow from friends. Your father glares at them whenever they try to sit on the sofa, snarling to be quiet during Late Night. One of them, the slender brunette, cries silently.
Afterwards, the girls whisper to one another, and your father retreats to the back patio to smoke a cigar. After the first night—after Odette, who goes by Etta, clutches your sleeve and whispers, can you get us out of here?—you go out to join him.
“What exactly was your plan here, dad?” you ask, and Rothbart, the poster child for single-father assholery, grunts and goes on smoking.
You get up at four the next morning, in order to make the swans a human breakfast while they’ll still appreciate it. “Thank you,” Etta says when you hand her a plate of runny eggs, almost-burnt toast. She’s pretty, in a small-town coed sort of way. In the hazy, artificial light of the kitchen, her eyelashes are fine and pale against her cheeks, and it makes you think of something grown in the dark, a flower that will never bloom.
“Yeah, well,” you say, giving Etta an extra slice of bacon. “Merry Christmas.”
.
You call your boss the twenty-sixth, and tell him that your father’s had some health issues, you’re going to need FMLA. He tells you not to worry about it, just make sure to let HR know.
Outside the window, the swans are huddled together on the half-frozen pond in your backyard, their heads bent together like lovers. You can’t help admiring the elegant curve of those long, white necks, how lovely they are, set against the grey slate of the sky and the shadows of the skeletal trees. They’re trembling—you didn’t even know swans could get cold.
You tell your boss you’ll keep him updated.
.
The missing posters are all over town, once you know to look. Pretty, white—Rothbart’s gotten stupid and started breaking his own rules—Midwestern girls. Cornsilk hair, braces-trained smiles. Some of their photographs show them in cheerleader outfits, band uniforms. Another stupid, sloppy detail.
“Isn’t it sad?” Mary Anne, who was your friend and hated you in the same breath, simpers. “All those girls, just up and vanished.”
“Sad,” you echo. “Do the police have any leads?”
They don’t, you know. No one has leads on girls that turn into swans, any more than they have leads on men who turn into toads, or wolves, or birds, or frogs, or ravens. It’s the only reason your family has lasted as long as it has—being careful, always careful, and making sure that when a curse stuck, it stuck. Every morning since you came home, you’ve found Kelly Loshanko standing in your front yard, her nostrils flaring; she’s starting to show her age, and you’re still surprised she’s managed to last this many deer hunting seasons. You’ve heard rumors there are still families in Grand Rapids suffering from the curse your great-grandmother laid down on their bloodline, because they offended her. Or because she wanted to, or simply because she could—your great-grandmother was never one for explaining herself.
(You sometimes think about having that much power, all the things you could use it for. It would be a new world.)
Mary Anne is talking about her husband, who’s been spending “too much time on the internet.” You make sympathetic noises, and think about how unlikely it is that Etta ever finds a man to love her who has never loved before.
“Bamboo is antifungal”
Because it’s rayon
“Eucalyptus fabric is cooling!”
Yeah, because it’s rayon
“We make clothing called seacell out of seaweed!”
Yeah I looked on your website it’s made by the lyocell process, which means-
-wait for it-
Listen. There is a list of actual plant fibers that are directly made into fabric: cotton, linen, ramie, some hemp. I’m sure I’m missing a couple.
But if you’re wondering “huh how did they turn that plant material into fabric,” 99% of the time? It’s RAYON.
All rayon is made by putting plant material in chemical soup, dissolving out everything but the cellulose, and turning the cellulose into filaments/fibers.
The source of the cellulose has zero effect on the eventual fabric.
Rayon made from bamboo or eucalyptus or seaweed is not any better than rayon from any other sources.
Don’t let companies mislead you!
The only benefit of one kind of rayon over another that i can think of is the relative environmental impact of one plant over another. Pesticides, harvesting methods, how quickly a source grows, square acreage per pound of fiber, etc. (I don't know what those numbers are.)
To be fair,
the lyocell process uses a different chemical soup than the rayon process.
Compared to rayon, lyocell soup is less toxic, more reusable, and more energy efficient.
So lyocell *is* environmentally better, even before you consider the effect of using different plants as the source of cellulose. And in addition to being less harmful to the environment, it’s safer for the factory workers.
So if you’re committed to using a cellulose fiber, it’s better to get lyocell for those reasons.
but, yes! The final material will behave exactly the same, because it’s all cellulose.
You cannot iron or machine-launder seacel or tencel or lyocell, for the same reasons that you can’t use heat on rayon.
But when you see all the advertising saying how lyocell is antifungal, cooling, biodegradable etc. etc.,
(and the exact same thing is true of rayon),
that isn’t really *about* lyocell versus rayon.
It’s about lyocell versus POLYESTER.
because obviously cellulose can never replace natural fibers,
but it CAN do everything polyester does, plus all these things that polyester can’t!
Lyocell could completely replace polyester forever, and the world would be a better place!
But, critically, polyester is
1.) dead cheap
2.) part of the Big Oil empire.
Back when rayon was first invented, people were making the exact same talking points.
But Big Oil was like “well, if you don’t care about the environment, we’re the dramatically cheaper option… and if you DO care about the environment, here’s all these scary facts about the nasty rayon Chemical Soup! And your precious cellulose supports the logging industry! Checkmate, haha!”
and so, nothing changed.
Now we have lyocell, which has the exact same qualities and is more Idealogically Pure.
Right now it isn’t that common or popular, because it hasn’t found its niche. It can’t compete with luxury fibers!
But if we all just looked around and saw how fucking much polyester fiber there still is in the world,
and realized that all of it could be replaced!!! with lyocell, or with something else,
we could just STOP USING POLYESTER FIBER and it would be a major win for the planet.
By using lyocell, we are able to dramatically increase the species of plants that can be used to make fiber.
I'm a spinner, so I've gotten to spin fibers made with the lyocell process that you probably wouldn't find in the industrial clothing industry, but illustrate the above point.
It's not many right now, but I've gotten most of my lyocell fibers in random fiber boxes, so I haven't gone and sought them out. But, I think my favorite so far has been rose fiber. Which can't be made into any fiber in any traditional methods whatsoever ever. I've also gotten to spin lotus and pineapple fiber. Both of these do provide fibers naturally, but its so labor intensive that they are truly luxury fabrics. Bamboo goes without saying, because it's been mixed in so many blends, and now there's a biodegradable nylon that was interesting and I'm not sure if I want to spin it again, but it has a lot of promise.
But. With being able to make fiber out of a type of viscose/ lyocell/ other chemical processes that are actually getting safer for workers and the environment, we will be able to vastly increase the type of plants we can use to make textiles and stop relying on just a few plants. Which will take all the pressure off, say cotton and the environmental factors that takes, and spread it out so there is less impact on the earth.
Uh Oh: The Third Person Omniscient Narrator Of Your Life Just Started Repeating The Opening Paragraphs Verbatim
Pressed flower collage of a comet moth, by Helen Ahpornsiri
PRESSED FLOWERS???
Sometimes ppl do stuff with art and I go "why did you.... how did you.... thank you for your esoteric and ultra specific medium art"
Hat tip @blurbofparadise ! A nice thing about pressed flowers is that they’re such a renewable, light-touch, low-cost material. I really love this design!
Finally finished this one after working on it incrementally in my spare time for the better part of a year 🐍
due to inflation you must answer my riddles five
due to budget cuts i will grant you two wishes
due to recent layoffs there is only one of me and I lie 50% of the time
So uh. I have that gold fabric/leather paint now. And some gloves sitting around that I never wore. And I got the itch to make things.
Uhm. Enjoy?