NEEDLE LEEDLE LEEDLE LEE

A blog for all stitch related things (mostly cross stitch and knitting)

[dankmemeuniversity]

[eldritchscholar]

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.

[benegesserwitch]

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.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

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.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

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

[costumersupportdept]

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)

[synebluetoo]

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

[moiraecrochet]

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.

[the-fibre-stuff]

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.

[swords-n-spindles]

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

[iplaywithstring]

I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).

[2forstitching]

Crafters of tumblr. Is a Cricut Easy Press worth the cost? I have only done a handful of HTV things and usually use my iron. I would love to hear any alternatives people have found.

[comfiduck-deactivated20240914]

It’s annoying going shopping when you can craft because you see something cute and you’re like “oh but I could make this” and then you’re like “but it takes so much more time and effort” and then you’re like “but if you made it yourself you could source more ethical and good quality materials and also stop supporting the fast fashion industry” and then you’re like “but I’m not good enough to make it it might look awful” and then you’re like “but the only way to get better is practice” meanwhile half an hour has passed and your partner is just like “can we PLEASE go?”

[spockandawe]

Can.... can I ask how... do learn bookbinding? .-. It’s like... a distant goal of mine but I am very 🤷🤷🤷🤷 on starting

The good news is that it’s extremely attainable!! So, the easiest entry level tier for bookbinding is stitching together individual signatures (the folded pieces of paper nested together to make sections of a book), and the easiest material is doing that with is just regular printer paper. That was what keyed me into this, my dad was printing little short documents for work and sewing them together so he could have a non-screen version of what he needed to reference. I usually try to work in the range of signatures that use 5-10 sheets of paper (which gives you 20-40 pages as a booklet), though it’s possible to go smaller, especially if you’re working with thicker paper. I haven’t tested the upper end, but that’s where I’m comfortable.

NOW. Before I get into printing, let me take a detour (printing is where things get, like, technologically complex, because it depends on what software and printer you have access to, but that doesn’t have to be connected to the mechanics of Making A Book

SeaLemon’s youtube channel was where I started out! A lot of her videos are about various ways to make smaller notebooks, though her videos on casebinding, kettle stitch, and making bookcloth are most relevant to what I’m doing now. but she also has a LOT of smaller-scale tutorials that are great for pulling together a little notebook of your own, or a sketchpad, things like that. 

And the videos are really easy to follow. I don’t reference her anymore for the casebinding work, but I do someday want to go back in there and experiment with more of the stitches for pulling together cute little notebooks. My exposed-spine books and the ones that were covered with a single piece of fabric were done from her tutorials. I want to say that SeaLemon was my primary reference for making my text blocks, while this next channel is a really extensive look into the casebinding part of things.

I appreciate Das Bookbinding a lot, even though it was SUPER overwhelming when I was just starting out, and I wouldn’t have been able to follow anything. But even before I was able to follow along, these videos show a lot of like... the mechanics of making something so polished and complex, even if I’m not able to imitate all the steps myself. I used these videos as a reference for the set of books with the fabric spine + paper cover + fabric corners, for example. I haven’t done a deep dive into this channel, so there may be more accessible videos in there than the ones I dug up, but regardless, it’s an EXCELLENT resource.

And now... printing. This is where it’s hardest to give concrete advice, and I hate telling people they should go give money to huge corporations for their software, or pay huge amounts of money for fancy hardware, but I am also a coward who buckled and paid for word really early, and was fortunate enough to receive a color laser duplex printer as a gift a few years back, so I don’t personally have a good grasp on the most effective free/cheap options out there. So I can only speak to the expensive crap, but I know there are less expensive ways to do this too.

So! The two programs I have used are adobe acrobat and microsoft word. I originally was working out of google docs, where I printed to pdf, opened in acrobat, and printed as booklets. Adobe acrobat has a booklet option in the printing menu, where you can’t select your own signature size, but if you say ‘print as booklet’, and then print twenty pages at a time, you can generate your own ten-sheet signatures. The downside of doing this is that I was not making good use of the space, because the aspect ratios were off, and I had big margins I couldn’t control.

Once I realized that, and also realized that a lot of the files I wanted to print were larger than google docs wanted to handle, I bought a word license. Word also has a way to do booklets, where you can go to page layout, select booklet mode, and then select the number of pages you want in each signature (divide by four to get the number of sheets it will use). I print from word to pdf, which shuffles all my junk around for me to get it in order it needs to print, if that makes sense. It’s difficult to describe, but really not too difficult to do, especially if you have a short story or something to mess around with yourself, so you can print it off, fold the pages, and assemble it in order. Also, page numbers are your friend, even if they’re a pain to wrangle. I’ve had to match up dropped sheets without page numbers before, and I was FULL of regrets.

Now, I know that some people use inkjets, and some people do two-sided printing with one-sided printers, but i also know that other people have made use of other printers they have access to, or have taken books to places like staples or kinkos to use the printers there. I don’t know anything about how difficult or expensive that is, but it’s an option!

Now, one downside of this hobby is that it takes a NUMBER of small items to make it work, but they are typically small, and none of them have been that expensive. First, to assemble, I print off my sheets and fold them in half. And then I use a bone folder to really get those creases sharp. I mark off places to put holes and use an awl to punch them. I sew things up using either embroidery floss for short books (two strands, run over a block of beeswax) or waxed linen thread for long ones, using a curved needle. There are bookmaking ribbons you can use to give spines extra hold, but I haven’t used those. When it’s done, I glue my spine using a glue brush and sandwich my book somehow (I followed a sealemon tutorial to make a book press with two cutting boards, or I bury books under a stack of textbooks). 

I have a stash of heavier paper and fabric that are suitable for covers and endpaper, and to convert cloth into bookcloth (another sealemon tutorial), I have iron-on adhesive sheets and tissue paper. Once my book spine is set, I may glue a piece of mull/muslin to it, and/or a piece of ribbon for a bookmark. I cut my covers and spine out of chipboard, using a craft knife, guide ruler, and cutting board, then everything is ready to assemble.

That sounds like a lot, and there are other optional items I didn’t include, but none of these things are that big, or that expensive. I think my cutting board was the most expensive item I purchased. And if you just want to start with booklets, you can absolutely get started with a regular straight needle and thread, and still accomplish plenty. It’s been interesting as a hobby, because I haven’t done many things where the tiers of increasing complexity were so clearly visible, if that makes sense? I took my time trying new techniques, and I’m consistently becoming happier and happier with my efforts, but even back at the beginning when I was aware I barely knew what I was doing, the first time I glued a text block into a case I had made was a WILD feeling, and I still feel like a hell of an amateur (and don’t know enough to gauge how accurate that feeling is asdgsfda), but the earliest steps of learning to bind a book are highly, highly attainable, and I absolutely recommend it.

[lavenderprose]

Today I found out that yarners think crocheting socks is subversive and controversial and I just…on one hand, why the fuck not, I guess yarners are allowed to have their controversies, but on the other, how much time do you have in your FUCKIN DAY??

[lazulisong]

My main concern is how they would feel but Maggie u know yarn fandom gotta think about something while knitting five miles of stockingnette for a sweater

[arinrowan]

Look, you can’t just leave it at that, why is it subversive and controversial? *gets popcorn*

[snipertrifle]

I mean, I’m taking this on good faith, and I’m not saying this is my own personal belief.  I believe in all crafts. 

But…the structure of the stitches and the resulting fabric is pretty different between crochet and knitting.  You get different effects between them, which lends themselves to different crafts.  And none of the effects of (most) crochet stitches lend themselves naturally to socks.  You’re (usually) going to end up with something either stiff and bulky, or full of holes that will Not Feel Good to walk on. Whereas knitted socks will just…BE elastic and comfortable.

Sure you CAN do it.  And there are people and patterns that do it well!!

But MOST crochet socks are a bit like calling this a bicycle

I mean… Okay?  But people are going to Talk.

But this is BABY controversy, this is nothing.  You haven’t even touched on the good shit like RHSS or that time the Olympic Committee dissed us.

[arinrowan]

Iiiinteresting. So one of those “just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD” things.

Also I know very little about the yarn fandom except for that bit where a woman had to fake her death and had a nervous breakdown over selling homespun/dyed yarn so like, I already have big expectations.

[snipertrifle]

Was that the one that “died” of leukemia or the one that “died” of lupus, or the one that overdosed?

[arinrowan]

From what I know of the narrative as it was described to me, I want to say the one that overdosed, but I am intrigued and vaguely concerned that there are multiple distinct individuals the above situation could apply to.

[kimmywithay]

hey umm, what the fuck

[destroyroxy]

the fake deaths thing: indie yarn dyer gets popular, gets overwhelmed by orders, can’t refund money because of shitty bookkeeping, decides faking online death is the only way out.

i’m sure some of them are unintentional rather than premeditated scammers but they’re all still thieving assholes who shouldn’t be running businesses and need to give all the money back.

the olympics commitee: ravelry, well-known knitting (fiber arts in general) site, held a contest they called the ‘ravelympics’ to drum up olympic support then get a cease-and-desist letter for copyright infringement, and the letter said that calling it that ‘denigrates the true nature of the Olympic Games’ and was ‘disrespectful to our country’s finest athletes’

except, you know, ravelry had like 2 million users who all, by nature of ravelry being a website, have basic tech literacy. the social media backlash was so bad that the olympics board had to make 2 official apologies because the first wasn’t good enough.

RHSS: Red Heart Super Saver is cheap Walmart-level yarn. some people hate it because it used to be just really fucking awful and they haven’t bothered updating their opinions. some people hate it because they hate non-natural yarns. some people hate it because they’re yarn snobs(which, btw, comes in two flavors: the disdainful assholes and the people who just don’t see the point if you have the money and don’t indulge yourself). a lot of people defend it because it’s cheap and widely locally available and honestly not that bad after a wash and some fabric softener.

crocheted socks: exactly what kaitoukitty said. people who crochet socks tend to either be new crocheters who are not aware crochet is not the best medium for socks or experienced crocheters who are pushing the boundaries of the medium.

babies on fire: i can’t believe we’re talking about yarncraft controversies and no one mentioned babies on fire. that’s my favorite controversy.

so when deciding what material to make baby blankets out of, in addition to considerations like softness, ease of washing, and allergy concerns quite a lot of people like to consider what would happen to the baby if the blanket was set on fire. yes, really.

wool has the problem of hand-wash only blankets for a new mother (superwash wool exists but that’s a whole ‘nother paragraph), allergy concerns, and also real fucking expensive if you want quality not-itchy-on-baby-skin wool. but pro-wool-blanket people insist that because wool actually resists being set on fire pretty well and also can self-extinguish, it’s the only sensible choice.

acrylic on the other hand is cheap and you can throw it in the washing machine, and while bad quality acrylics might be stiff and plastic-y they’re not itchy, but if it gets set on fire it will melt onto the baby’s skin. pro-acrylic people insist that if your blanket is on fire, you probably have bigger problems than what the blanket is made of.

[kimmywithay]

wow I didn’t expect such a detailed response. thank you!

[gallusrostromegalus]

Fiber Arts Just Be Fucking Like That.

[actualaster]

what hte FUCK

[2forstitching]

Anyone ever throw a book cover across the room because you messed up every single step of trying to make a cover and attach to your text block? No? Just me?

[butchlinkle]

historically, pixel art was rendered on limited hardware, there were strict limits on how many colours could be displayed on screen at once and in a single sprite.

These limits no longer exist, so you are no longer beholden to any of them. Despite what you might hear in certain pixel art spaces, there aren’t really any rules anymore, because there’s no technical limitations forcing you to work a specific way. You can make your pixel art have as many colours as you want, be whatever size you like, and have as many frames as you want it to.

However! the smaller you make a sprite, the harder things will become to read unless you shrink down the number of colours in equal measure.

In a photo you might have. i dunno. 1,000,000 pixels in it or something like that. Thats like a really small photo but that’s still so many pixels that you don’t really notice any of them individually. They all blend together into one big mass to tell you what you’re looking at in groups of hundreds!

On the other hand, in a 16x16 sprite you’ll only have 256 of them. Every single individual pixel can have something to say!

But if every pixel is trying to say something at once, it muddies the sprite and makes it hard to read. However, if a group of pixels are all the same colour, they’re all saying the same thing, and it becomes a lot easier to understand what you’re looking at.

like, for example, take a look at this 16x16 crop of a random photo.

does that look like a whole lot of nothing? yeah . theres 256 pixels, and theres 256 colours. the pixels aren’t really working together to tell you anything, so instead it just becomes one big vague mass. if i reduce the colour count to just 6 colours and increase the contrast, though,

it starts to look less like visual noise, and more like water at sunset!

The contrast is important - part of why you want to keep your colour count low is to make groups of pixels distinct from each other.

But, how exactly do you keep your colour count low, anyway?

a colour ramp refers to the gradient of colours in your palette that are used to shade one particular colour, such as tempests hair or her skin

instinctively you’re probably going to want to make individual gradients of colour for each of these things.

however, if you connect these ramps together, you can greatly reduce the number of colours you’re using in your piece. This also helps create a cohesive palette!

when it comes to connecting ramps, value matters much more than individual hues. you want to have a good range of values to have a readable sprite!

I think actually a really good example of value mattering more than hue in sprites, is this guide to anti aliasing by pixeljoint user ptoing

also just generally good advice, but take a look at this bit in particular

despite the wildly varying hues, they work together just fine. by focusing on the value when you combine your ramps, you can create some really interesting colour palettes!

anyway. now for some vaguer notes on how i do lighting

anyway thems just some thoughts for you all

[sosuperawesome]

Bead Embroidered Art Hoops

Zime Ksa on Etsy

[disgruntled-neighborhood-wife]

@snoflaking @play-the-yellowcard

[wishfishy]

Oh, that special rage when every single one of the coloured pencils that you finally, finally received and desperately need have crumbling cores.

Well heck.

[gallusrostromegalus]

And this shit right here is why Prismacolor is the FUCKING WORST.

OK so the core of a color pencil is made of 1. Pigment 2. Binder, and then this is surrounded by a wood case. Unfortunately, Prismacolor is only good at the first one. They do have some lovely rich pigments, but thier binder is wax-based which is prone to cracking irreperably. Additionally, the wood is frequently severely warped, shattering the lead the minute it’s off the line.  It’s such a problem that my illustration profs call Prismacolors “The Pencil That Smiles Back”.  Also, they’ve never put a glue endcap on thier pencils (unlike most of thier compettitors) that helps prevent breakage. You *can* try microwaving them for 2-3 seconds to see if the wax will re-melt together, but if they’ve been through the mail, they’re probably shattered betond repair.  I do get prismacolors because they make a few extremely useful pigment mixes and they’re richly colored, but they’ve gotten so shattered that the easiest way to use them was to dump the lead into one of those resealable 1-oz bead jars, mash it into a fine powder, pour in baby oil to melt the binder, let it dry, then rehydrate it with baby oil and paint it on again when I need it.  

If you like the buttery texture and heavy pigmentation, Derwent makes a vastly superior pencil for not much more, but it doesn’t have the range of colors prismacolor does, but it can come off as ‘chalky’ and I’ve had Two out of Sixty with breakage issues. If you want a pencil without breakage, extremely reliable pigment consistency and relatively inexpensive, Faber-Castell’s Polychromos is my favorite, but it doesn’t lay down as much pigment as Prismacolor or Derwent.  Caran-Dache and Lumos have also been good to me but they’re mad expensive with limited availability here in CO.

[pinksnowdevil]

prismacolor pencil has metal on it in the name so microwaving it will make it spark fyi. Oven or a heat pad works better.

[wishfishy]

Guess who found this out the hard way a couple hours ago?

[gallusrostromegalus]

OH GREAT. NOW YOU CAN’T EVEN FUCKING MICROWAVE THEM. 

[craftinggeek]

It’s science 🤓 . . . #crossstitch #xstitch #twitterpost #text #crossstitchersofinstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CKonr06Mpvl/?igshid=1ljkdmk8kk136

[blackcherryblood]

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

[dragonswithjetpacks]

MY DASH NEEDS TO HEAR THIS.

[knittystitch]

The big secret about knitting is that it is, at its core, just a really elaborate slip knot.

[ms-demeanor]

Okay so in LA they've had the reusable bag and thick plastic bag for ten cents going on for years but in Vegas they still give you thin plastic bags at every store but they're these really thin shitty bags that you pretty much can't reuse because they barely survive the trip from the car to the house.

So basically this is how I tell you that I've started making plarn that I'm crocheting into a plarn basket that I will use to hold the plarn balls I make in the future in order to control how many plastic bags are pouring out of our cabinets.

[ms-demeanor]

How to make plarn:

1. Flatten out a clean plastic bag

2. Cut off the handles and the bottom

3. Cut diagonally into the plastic until the strand is about as thick as you want it to be. (Probably aim for at least an inch thick, it doesn't have to be super even all the way around but you don't want it to get so thin that the strand will break)

4. Cut in a spiral until you run out of bag and then diagonally cut your way out of the final loop.

5. Tie the end of the strand to the end of whatever you were working on or to the last stand you cut.

6. Wind or crochet like any other bulky yarn.

The gray disk at the bottom of this post is the bottom of my basket, I'm using an N/10mm hook in a double-crocheted spiral. (I've just started the first layer of elevation)

So far I'm about 10-12 bags in and I've been trimming the tails of the joined bags as I go.

(One bag's worth of plarn goes about halfway around the disk at this point, I think I'm going to do 3-4 more gray bags before I change colors; bags come in 3 general colors around here so this basket is going to be mostly white with gray and brown accents.)

[ms-demeanor]

Also save the bag scraps, you can use them as stuffing. I'm gonna make a big fucking pincushion with mine. It's gonna be a cube made out of the leftover cat fabric that I don't want to use for masks.

[ms-demeanor]

Worked my way through the ball in the first photoset, made some more balls. I'm intrigued by the way the patterns on the white bags show up. I've got some Ross and 99 cent store bags in the next white ball to add some purple and blue-green to the mix.

Making this basket might actually exhaust my current supply of plastic bags, so I've asked my dad to set aside his thicker bags for me in LA so I can compare working both materials.

Kind of get the feeling that I'm going to be a complete gremlin and make a laundry hamper out of the thicker plastic.

[ms-demeanor]

It's a little ugly, but it's going to do a great job of holding my plarn and associated projects.

[snurtle]

Oh this is totally apocalypse punk! Makes me want to make my own for use in small grocery runs. Or just to write a scrappy band of fictional survivors using them, haha.

[ms-demeanor]

NGL, cutting apart a pile of plastic trash and turning it into thread and rolling it into balls and crocheting it into fabric does feel like some variety of cyberpunk Rumplestiltskin shit.

[sworntovalor]

Here’s a “life-hack” for you. Apparently concentrated Kool-Aid can be used as a pretty effective leather dye. I was making a drink while cutting the snaps off some new straps for my pauldrons and I got curious, so I tried it, thinking, “ok even if this works, it will just wash out.” Nope. It took the “dye” (undiluted) in about 3 seconds. After drying for about an hour and a half, it would not wash off in the hottest tap-water. It would not wash out after soaking for 30 minutes. It did not wash out until I BOILED it, and even then, only by a tiny bit and it gave it a weathered look that was kind of cool. Add some waterproofing and I’d wager it would survive even that. That rich red is only one application too. Plus it smells great, lol. So there you go, cheap, fruity smelling leather dye in all the colors Kool-Aid has to offer.

[hammerhide]

WELL THEN!

[pomegranateandivy-deactivated20]

this may be important to some of my followers *and certainly not just getting reblogged because of my costuming and my boyfriends desire for leather armor*

[armeleia]

When I was in middle school we used to use it to dye our hair.  Potent stuff.

[baedlyweathered]

If you’re dying anything with kool-aid it’s best to use SUGAR-FREE ones otherwise the thing you’re dying might get all sticky

[samthor]

the flavor only packets where you are supposed add sugar are the best.  they will dye any natural fiber: leather, wool, cotton, hair,  flax, jute, silk and so forth.  heat the dye water so it is more potent.  let dry then rinse excess out in cold water.  there’s  a whole system to this. 

[mittensmcgee-deactivated2018033]

Oh my god

[triforceofdoom]

This will prove very useful for any future cosplays I wanna do.

[sewingforyourlife]

Kool Aid isn´t available here…but that is still pretty interesting.

[clarawinnie]

Eight frame dragon gif I made during quarantine. It took a long time to animate, fabricate and assemble this but I’m really happy with how it turned out!

[clarawinnie]

Since this guy is picking up steam again, here are the eight individual frames. To clarify, these are needlepoint and each frame is 6x4.

[the-fibre-stuff]

On a 7 mesh? (i.e. 1176 stitches per frame?)

[2forstitching]

First printed book (minus one I never finished years ago) made from start to finish. The cover cloth is up cycled from a shirt I bought at goodwill, the title is iron on vinyl, traditional sewn end bands, and the text is thanks to Project Gutenberg. Featuring a warped spine from trying to title it, and 2 attempts at attaching the cover bc the first time it was completely warped. I like any new hobby that combines/teaches a variety of skills at once.