if astrology was real it ought to be affected by anthropogenic space objects. imagine being like yeah this month has sucked for me bc the iss is in sagittarius
Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources
Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!
So you're having trouble getting a certain fabric to move smoothly through your sewing machine.
You *could* be experiencing a maintenance issue, but unless Something Very Bad happened, you probably don't need major service. I'll discuss service tips in a future post, so stay tuned.
The following fabrics can cause issues.
Lightweight silk
Lightweight polyester that you call silk
Satin
Stretchy stuff like Lycra or spandex
Stretchy stuff like T-shirt or sweatshirt knits
Bulky fabrics
Upholstery fabrics
Vinyl/leather (vegan leather is vinyl. Pleather is vinyl. It's either animal hide or vinyl.)
Sequin/Rhinestone/glitter fabrics
Fabric plus wadding/batting/squishy stuff in between(quilts, pre quilted fabrics)
Cuddle fabrics (Minkee, Flurr, ultra soft velour)
Velvet, velveteen, velour
So many layers
Matching striped or plaid patterns.
All of these items are special. They all require special treatment.
Here's the equipment that can make these easier to work with:
A Walking Foot. You need one. Everyone needs one. Your machine feeds fabric through by pulling on it from below with a mechanism that "walks" along, upside down. So the bottom layer is being pulled through, and we hope for the best on top. A Walking foot provides that same feed on the top, right side up. So the fabric is being drawn through the machine from both the top and bottom at the same time. Good for: almost everything on the above list I believe it was originally designed for machine quilting but mine has carried me effortlessly through fur Santa suits, Minkee projects, slinky, slippery fabrics, and more. Bad for: Some velvets because the wide foot can crush the velvet. Price: $30-50 USD, sometimes more for deluxe or proprietary versions.
A Non-Stick Foot. (Also called a Teflon Foot.) This foot will look very similar to your regular presser foot, but the bottom will have a non-stick coating. Great for: leather, pleather, vinyl, oilcloth, laminated fabrics, applique with adhesives. Price: around $15 USD
Straight Stitch Foot (And straight Stitch plate.) this foot has a single small hole in the center needle position. (Some of them are also 1/4" feet for quilt piecing.) Perfect for: slippery, lightweight fabrics, small pieces, and stretchy/knit fabrics that get pushed down into the machine. Price: around $15 USD.
A Roller Foot: if you can find one for your machine, these are a great option. Similar to a walking foot in application, this foot provides a smooth rolling bar as the top pressure, so that the feed mechanism can more easily push the fabric through. It's not as bulky as a Walking foot, and usually snaps right on to the machine like your other basic presser feet. Perfect For: leather/vinyl, small items with batting, straps on tote bags, crunchy fabrics with sequins. Price: $25-20 USD
A Special Technique: Ok, so sometimes even with the right needle*, the right foot, and the best creative intentions, you're still struggling. You might want to research how to work with that unusual fabric you got from Joann's on sale:
Sequins, beaded fabric, fabric with rhinestones: in the areas where you intend to sew the seams, get out a seam ripper and carefully remove the sequins, beads, or rhinestones from the fabric. This is how the pros do it. (If the items are "set" with metal fasteners, use pliers or a flat screwdriver to bend the prongs and remove both the stone and the setting.) Price: Your Time
Laminated fabrics: this is the *other* type of sequined fabric. The kind where the sequins are just reflective plastic bonded directly to the fabric. This stuff truly is The Devil. A Teflon Foot can help, a Teflon needle can help, or you can *try* to pick off the sequins. What I wound up doing was using a permanent fabric glue to glue the seams with this fabric, and see the linings. (Line it. Trust me. That texture is also The Devil.)
The above advice also holds true for other chonky, crunchy fabrics, btw. I like Fabri-Tac for gluing seams. I made Rocky Horror costumes that lasted years using this method. Price: around $10 USD for a bottle. Note: keep it sealed up in a ziplock bag.
One Final Note:
For the love of all that is holy, stop pulling the fabric through the machine.
Forcing fabric through the machine is bad for you, bad for the machine, and bad for the needle. Don't reach behind the foot, and don't let your hands go past the foot while sewing. Sit upright in your chair, control the fabric from in front of the foot, not behind it. Many people either pick up the bad habit from someone else, or learn to sew on a machine with feed issues, and wind up pulling the fabric through the machine because they can't get it to feed properly.
Correct hand posture illustrated below:
The needle goes down, the feed goes down. The needle comes up, the feed moves the fabric forward. The needle goes back down, the feed goes down. (See gif below in slow motion.)
You. Can't. Match. This. Pattern.
If you're pushing/pulling on the fabric, you're pushing/pulling on. the. needle. while it's in the fabric. If you break a lot of needles, and/or if the hole in the needle plate has a lot of scarring around it, I'm talking directly to YOU. Hands in front. Let the machine do its job. And if it struggles to do its job, give it the right tools.
Happy Sewing!
*Needle information can be found on my previous post:
💬 0 🔁 743 ❤️ 1090 · Why "Universal" means "Equally bad." · So you go to the store to buy needles for your sewing machine. You are going to
TIL that there is journalism equivalent to the Bechdel Test. An article about a female scientist fails the “Finkbeiner Test” if it mentions one of seven topics regarding her womanhood
Okay, one quote, and then you absolutely have to read the whole thing.
Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.
“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”
It blew my mind, because she’s right. The fact that there’s some many firsts left is the result of bias in the committees NOT IN THE WORK WOMEN DO
Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.
In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.
Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.
So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.
But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!
It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)
It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?
Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.
Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.
Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:
“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”
"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.
I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.
A lot of tough situations where we now feel like we “don’t know what to do or say” had social scripts just a couple of generations ago and they might have been canned phrases or robotic actions but they could still be meant sincerely and unfortunately we haven’t replaced them with any more sincere or easier new script.
a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations
if you have a date or two with someone and you don't see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:
"I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I'm afraid I didn't feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!"
like it sounds kind of trite but it was at least something to say and it can still be meant with kind sincerity. it also communicates in 2 sentences that you don't want to see them romantically again, but there aren't any hard feelings about that. that's it!!! that's all it takes!!!
Another example is that at parties a lot of people talk about how awkward it is to mingle or talk to people they dont know. But at old timey parties that was traditionally the HOST'S job, and there was a specific scripted way of doing it that eased the process! The host would bring you in, introduce you and maybe even a little bit about you like what you did for a living, and then guide you to a group you could talk to. They didn't just let you in the door and then ditch you to fend for yourself in a sea of strangers. That would be unthinkable and no one would be surprised if a get-together like that wound up being awkward.
I still do the party-host thing and yall can, too! (Thanks Mad Men for teaching me a lot of outmoded social scripts... no really tho)
Remember things about your friends! Ask people about their weekends, hobbies, holidays, studies, and jobs! Listen for the concerns people have and what they are working on! Draw connections between one person and another to get the ball rolling. "Oh, Maura, you just got your first cat! You should talk to Felix, he used to work at a rescue. Felix, please tell Maura all the new-cat-guardian pointers."
"Bill, Sheila, Xan, this is my friend Kale. Kale is really into Star Trek, Bill you and them should talk about it!"
Orrr whatever! After you make the introduction and draw the connection you just float on into the next interaction with someone else at the function. Just listen, care about your friends, get our of your own head, and think of how you can bring other people together and you will feel 100% less awkward.
hi i am so excited about this post because i have posted this exact thing MANY times on here, often in the specific context of how formal etiquette is so useful for autistic people especially, but also for everyone. even if you come off a little bit formal, which you will sometimes, having Old School Manners (or just knowing what they are) for various common scenarios is like having a magic ticket that will just sail you through all kinds of social iinteractions, gatekeeping, social weirdness, and as is pointed out in the above posts about introducing people to each other, can make you into a really valuable and helpful person for an entire gathering or group of people.
i also want to point out that knowing what the polite thing to do in all situations makes you a lot more effective at being rude and obnoxious when the situation calls for it, which is also a valuable and necessary adult skill
#things to write#but also#things to do#I could certainly benefit from a manual...
If you're looking for a manual on these sorts of things; social etiquette, social scripts, how to handle difficult and/or awkward social situations, etc. then I highly recommend picking up any book by Miss Manners. Her books really are the gold standard for learning the types of skills this post is talking about. I should also mention that Miss Manners is witty and hilarious so her books are also fun to read.
The best book by Miss Manners to get started with would be Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. This one is probably the best starting point because it gives the best overview of all the basics.
If you're the type who likes to listen to podcasts, I recommend checking out "Were You Raised By Wolves?" and/or "Awesome Etiquette". Both are also great tools for learning the type of social skills this post is talking about. I'm personally a fan of "Were You Raised By Wolves?" because not only are they pretty funny and informative, they also bother to try to teach the underlying social intelligence behind various manners and social etiquette so that you can have the skills to solve social dilemmas on your own. However, "Awesome Etiquette" is also pretty fun and informative.
#long post#I feel like 'i dont do small talk nobody cares about the weather' had a negative impact on social interaction#I mean yeah sometimes small talk about nothing gets awkward. but often it leads to the most interesting conversations#just asking 'what kind of music do you listen to at the gym' or 'have you read any books lately' could be such a lovely subject#I'm sometimes socially awkward despite being a huge extrovert. that's why etiquette is such a great thing#if you don't know how to act around people just stick to the etiquette rules. if they have a problem with it they're not for me anyways
Sorry @darlingdear but I couldn't let this stay in the tags.
I say this as someone who is neurodivergent had grew up very socially awkward, but recently I find the "screw small talk, I wanna get to know the REAL you" attitude to be pretentious as well as a demonstration of a lack of boundaries.
But also, I think a lot of people who have this attitude don't actually really know what does qualify as small talk. The definition of small talk is any topic that's of no real consequence and includes topics like food, pets, sports, music, whatever show you're currently streaming, whatever book you're currently reading, and yes, the weather. A lot of people who have this "I hate small talk / I don't do small talk" attitude probably think it's only reciting a bunch of secret scripts about the weather, and don't realize how much they engage in small talk whenever they talk about their pets or their favorite foods or the really cool show they're watching right now.
Small talk is just about boundaries and getting to know someone *before* you move into more serious and personal topics. The older I get the more I learn you really can't just trust anyone with more serious and personal subjects. Small talk first is important to gauge if they're someone safe and trustworthy first before moving into more serious and personal subjects. If you really genuinely refuse to get to know someone before immediately discussing serious and personal subjects you may have an issue with boundaries and should consider working on that.
Oh my god, so much the last point. All of them, but especially the last.
Small talk is a way of sounding out a person’s attitudes. It’s about finding out if they’re a rabid asshole or someone you want to spend more time with.
I had a professor who got angry at a group of (mostly women), from five countries, all of whom met yesterday, for talking about daytime TV. He basically insulted us and called us shallow.
Dude, we were figuring each other out with a safe topic! We were the best of friends three weeks later. We could broach harder topics because we understood each other’s boundaries better. If you immediately demand people bare their souls, you’re not likely to get them to be honest.
also it's always polite / a good idea to balance the conversation out between yourself and the other person.
By which I mean, if they've asked you several questions, turn it around: "and what about you?"
/ "what has your experience been in [topic]?"
I used to be too awkward to do it but noticed conversations would bleed to death. Then I overcompensated and only asked the other person question upon question. This was also Not Ideal because guys would end up thinking I was super interested in them and get confused when I shut off my interest / social battery later on.
So, balance: I try to talk about 50% of the time and share something that is either useful or relatable to the other or important to me. And by being interested and asking real questions you can get to know someone better and they will also know you a little, which can be really lovely.
Due to me seeing this post again, I decided to start re-reading Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, and all I can say is, this is a book Tumblr is really sleeping on.
It's not just the fact that this book is perfect for those of us who are neurodivergent, who can really benefit from having a book which kindly and patiently bothers to explain social rules and norms that people just expect you to know without ever telling you themselves.
It's also the fact that, despite this book being nearly 45 years old, Miss Manners makes it clear in the preface and opening chapters that she is explicitly against classism, sexism, and homophobia. She also makes it explicitly clear in the preface that her personal belief in the importance of good manners and etiquette has nothing to do with a desire to return to "the good old days", because those days were not actually good for women, LGBTQ+ people, poor people, and people of color.
What really made me re-fall in love with Miss Manners though was right in the opening chapter she addresses using sexualized threats and insults to debase and degrade others (you know, like "get fcked", or "suck my genitals", or "yeah well that's not what your mom / sister / other female family member had to say last night") because if sex is something that's supposed to be good and pleasurable, why are we using it as a threat to debase and degrade others? Honestly I love her so much for calling out the inherent sex-negativity of using sexualized threats and insults like that, and nearly 45 years ago at that!
Miss Manners has never been a stuffy old fashioned fuddy-duddy. She has always been a deeply compassionate woman far ahead of her time, whose sole mission is to make the world a kinder and more considerate place.
Given how often solar eclipse are used to date historical events, I think an international calendar should begin on the day of the first recorded total solar eclipse.
If scientist are right about some Irish petroglyphs, it is currently the year 5365. Christ was born in 3340. The Egyptian middle kingdom period lasted from 1300 to 1558. The Ottoman empire took Constantinople in 4793. Star Wars episode IV was released in 5312.
Not everyone has been around a horse to realize just how large and powerful (and fickle) animals they are. Even fewer have seen a few, let alone one, horse charge at them.
You are pressed to find a soul alive today that can testify to the experience of several hundred horses charging at your direction and you know they intend to charge past, over, and through you. The realization is alone enough to shake your will.
But then there is the sound. Imagine the space in your mind that 5 horses take up, then expand that to get close to what a charge might be sized at. 10 horses isn't enough. not 50 horses. 200 horses? That is not enough either. Imagine 1,000 horses coming your way with 4,000 steel hooves thundering, and you know nothing can change their minds heading your way - and the one thing that is expected to stop them are your and your friend's bodies.
This is a gap in recorded/presented/easy-to-imagine history in which you can imagine the shape of a role of the “Irish” Hobelar as a fighting unit.
Hobelars were mounted on small gaited native pony-horses called hobbies; carrying no gear and wearing no armour and riding practically bareback, a feat made possible by the fast smooth pace of the hobby (whose gait would presumably resemble the Icelandic pony’s tölt or the Mongolian war pony’s joroo.) the Irish Hobby is now extinct, but the name is where we get the word “hobby” from - an activity done for pleasure. This sounds made-up, doesn’t it? You can read a long post by myself and contributors here, which includes this poem from someone describing their fighting style and how annoying it was:
And one amang, an lyrysch man, Uppone his hoby swyftly ran; Hyt was a sportfulle sygthe, How hys darttes he did schak ; And when him lyst to leve or tak, They had fulle gret dispite.
There are a few reasons why you haven’t heard of hobelars (god forbid people have hobbies). It is important to the imperial construction of the myths of the British Isles (and the French) that Celtic people be negligible and subjugated in any narrative of medieval warfare. They did not correspond to a social class outside of warfare: you can spin so MANY sexy aristocracy-reinforcing tales of chivalry around knights that we’re still doing so today. Sexy tormented superhero with his ARMOUR and his SWORD and his big HORSE - let’s roleplay this 5 million times, and for political comfort, rather than trampling the peasants he now rules, we shall enshrine and repeat the safe metaphorical image of the “dragon” for him to fight as well…
Guy Who Just Caught A Wild Hobby From A Bog And Doesn’t Wear Armour (and runs around bareback, throwing stuff and being incredibly fast and annoying, and vanishing when you tried to kill them back) is just… less sexy. They literally weren’t superheroes. There is discomfort as well - if we kept their imagery, we couldn’t give them fictions to fight; hobelars were not romantic, they had no fixed honour; they were always a scrambling skirmishing fighting unit for killing people. As an academic puts it:
The hobelar is very much the poor relation in the study of the English armies of the fourteenth century, eclipsed by both the man-at-arms and the archer. Our understanding of his origins and role has been wholly based on only two major studies of this troop type: J. E. Morris’ ‘Mounted Infantry Warfare’ in 1914 and J. Lydon's ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’ in 1954. The lack of interest might be considered surprising, given that Morris saw him as the precursor to the mounted longbowman, while Lydon called him ‘the most effective fighting man of the age’, referring to the hobelar as ‘an entirely different type of mounted soldier’. Yet other historians have been happy to accept the conclusions of Morris and Lydon, considering the hobelar only in passing. Perhaps the reason that so little work has been done on him is that he is always considered in comparison to the man-at-arms – the elite warrior, in his shining harness, doyen of chivalry and a core element of the medieval political and social elite – and the longbowman – the almost super-heroic, Hundred Years’ War-winning, nationalistic symbol of medieval English, and Welsh, martial prowess. By contrast, there is little if any mention of the hobelar in the battle narratives of the middle ages; they have no great role to play in the successes of the English over the French. They do not form a political and social class within medieval society and there is no way, therefore, to discuss their impact outside of the military sphere. It is also almost certain that their Irish origins have counted against them too. Medieval Ireland has been considered militarily backwards by most historians of warfare, who seem to have inherited something of the dismissive tone of their English sources…
Right. 
You’ve read the posts above. You have dutifully pictured the mental image of being a pikeman, Just Some Guy with a big pointy stick, while thousands of pounds of steel-armoured horseflesh ridden by braying Tories comes at you. You have understood that this is inherently alarming, even if you understand the military theories involved, and are prepared to make horse-kebabs.
Now picture being that pikeman when hobelars turn up. First off, the hobbies are WEIRD. They’re fast and tiny, and they move Wrong:
Rather than lining up to be kebabs, as you expect, they feint - dance up to you like weirdos and turn away. They show off how - unencumbered and in good control of their hobbies - they can pretend to do the scary charge thing, breaking your will, but not get kebabed. They are not wearing armour; they’re not using saddles or stirrups, but some of them appear to be archers (?!) sometimes the hobelars get off and wind you up a bit and then jump back on their stupid hobbies. Psychologically they seem more like YOU, but then there’s the horses. They throw spears, or arrow-spears called “darts.” They laugh at you. They have amazing control of their hobbies, who turn away from pikeheads on a dime. The sight of hobbies skirmishing was described (above) as “a sportful sight” - presumably if they weren’t doing it at you, when it would be SO annoying.
There is zero expectation that Celtic mounted skirmishers will break a wall of pikemen. The hobelars have been sent to annoy you. What if this is part of their function, a natural activity in their wheelhouse, and they have perfected it. What if it’s working. What if, by the time the big shiny horses with their big shiny nobles come, you’re already a bit shaken…
Not saying this scene ever happened in history, but you can see from this a bit of how these histories are constructed: here is a unit that was effective and influential in its time and gave its name to “hobbies.” Here are the places where it would seem logical to use them. We have lost much of what would have been known about how they fought at all. The primary source for the quote of the “iyrysch man upon his hoby” is preserved in one single corrupted document in a corner of the internet that took me a morning to find. We will never forget knights, but with a strategically placed EMP, we would probably lose our ability to remember and connect over hobelars (why would anyone care.)
but care when you find yourself thinking that the entire system is pikeman vs knight, one vs the other, an armchair system that plays out like an RPG, rock-paper-scissors: care because so much of history is a spectrum of forgotten people.
The other way around! The toy “hobbyhorse”, a toy horse that gives you pleasure and lets you play pretend but clearly isn’t a real horse, gave its name to “hobby,” “activity for pleasure.”
The etymology of “hobby, a thing you do for fun” comes directly from “hobby, a little horse”. Which was once a real sort of little horse. Isn’t that great! We all need more hobbies.
Burning the mammoth flank just a lirtle instead of eating it raw gives grug more calorie to think. Grug thinking about color symbolism in silence of the lambs
dailybridgerton
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
kianamaiart
