Amy's Stitches

A blog for those interested in knitting, crochet, cross stitch, embroidery etc

[knittinghistory]

this is a head's up that i block transphobes, homophobes, and radfems who interact with this blog.

[knittinghistory]

nearly every kind of traditional handicraft is going to attract right-wing weirdos who think it symbolizes a past world where women were women and men were men proverbs 31 white man's burden blah blah blah etc etc. knitting is certainly no exception, and in my experience, historical knitting is even more likely to attract that kind of attention.

just so we're very, very clear:

knitting was not invented by white people

knitting, while historically most commonly practiced by people in cold climates (namely europe), does not belong to the quote unquote "west"

except for extremely brief windows of time in very specific locations, knitting was not considered "women's work"

knitting is not a symbol of rugged individualism. in fact, throughout most of history knitting was considered a social activity, inextricably entwined with community

knitting has been used as a tool of oppression. for example, Black slaves in the americas were sometimes advertised for sale with the promise that they were excellent knitters

[systlin]

I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?

Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land. 

And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand. 

This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade. 

So what did they do?

They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required. 

So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?

So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter. 

But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them. 

[janglingargot]

Just wanted to add that the suffix -ster was originally specifically feminine, a means of denoting a lady known by her profession. Spinster = female spinner, baxter = female baker, webster = female weaver (webber), brewster = female brewer. If one of the ladies named Alys in your village was known for selling her excellent weaving, you might call her Alys Webster (to differentiate her from, say, Alys Littel who was rather short, and Alys Bywater who lived near the pond).

This fascinates me for many reasons, but especially in the case of modern families with last names like Baxter or Webster or Brewster. What formidable and well-known ancestresses managed to pass on those very gendered names to all their descendants, when last names were changing from personal “nicknames” into indicators of lineage among the middle and lower classes? There’s a forgotten story of a fascinating woman behind every one of those family lines.

[wasureneba]

Resource for the history of the -ster suffix here.

[hyperallergic]

Indonesian fiber artist Mulyana has taken over the Fisher Museum of Art with colorful, hand-knitted and crocheted aquatic life. 

With the duality of life and death as a recurring theme, Mulyana crafts a tactile, mystical world in which fish, whales, and coral reefs coexist with sea monsters and slow states of decay. 

Read Renée Reizman’s review of Mulyana: Modular Utopia.

[dduane]

Okay, now I'm feeling vindictive

This is worse, in its way, than the pornbots.

Here's something that turned up in my ask box just now.

...So. You've all seen these. Some of them are genuine. Lots aren't.

Here's where their message leads:

...Okay. The first warning sign: this account is about 3 days old.

But the second: searching on the details of the plea for help via Google, what do we find but...

...Poor Macaroni has repeatedly been hit by cars, and has repeatedly suffered busted femurs, since 2015.

"This," as the saying goes, "starts to look like carelessness." :/

Taking advantage of the kindness of strangers this way is vile... and plainly there's no shortage of people willing to indulge.

So: yeah, I'll be delighted to help the OP get some more traction on this! You betcha. By:

Blocking. Reporting. Reporting to PayPal as well. And dropping @staff a note, when I have a moment. Because allowing this stuff to prosper here just invites more people to try it on. :/

...Pass the news around, friends. ("And call it Macaroni.")

[amysstitches]

Another wreath using burlap. I really like this one but does it look Christmassy or Boho? https://www.instagram.com/p/CnuikvSs-RQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[amysstitches]

Really behind in my posting of my projects. Check out this teal wreath-my attempt at trying something different! https://www.instagram.com/p/CnuiVWLMPnn/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[theolminitiative]

You know, I see pictures like this baby woolly rhinoceros and think, "Aww! Look at the baby!!!! How strange to think that rhinos once had hair like that. I wonder what it looked like when it was alive...." And then I remember that baby Sumatran rhinos exist...

I mean, sure. They're not completely covered with fur, but it bridges that gap between how we distinguish the past and present. They give such a stark reminder that those animals were real, and they're almost like a "museum species". A vestige of a forgotten time. Forgotten lifeforms. Also, unbelievably endangered. So, as sad as it is we should try to enjoy these kinds of species as much as we can. Conservation is important as fuck y'all.

[fansplaining]

Accessibility is a huge topic that is very valuable and interesting to learn about. I encourage everyone, disabled or not, to learn about accessibility, because it benefits everyone. Some examples of accessibility we see in transformative works spaces are content notes and image descriptions. These may be aimed at particular disabled fans, but often benefit others who are not disabled, an effect commonly called ‘the curb cut effect,’ after those dips in curbs where you can roll your wheelchair, bike, or stroller up from the street to the sidewalk. In my years in fandom, it’s been nice to see content notes spread from fanfic to mainstream media.

— Sandy in our “Disability and Fandom” double episode. Click through to hear their whole segment or read a full transcript.

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[pissvortex]

it was a book from 2005 that never really took off until they put it in the Macy’s parade for some reason. the title being coercively named “A Christmas Tradition” seemingly made a bunch of parents panic and think they were withholding some beloved christmas tradition from their children, leading to the book and subsequent elf doll to receive its first ever surge of popularity. at that point it just started spreading through cartoon adaptations (creating the expectancy of this product from children to uphold Christmas Lore) and online memes showing the elf in silly locations. anyone who was a child from 2012-2014 will tell you that it literally appeared out of thin air one year.

a truly unique American christmas tradition fueled entirely by marketing and parents’ need to one-up other parents by proving how much more fun they are with their kids

[pissvortex]

as someone else in the notes also pointed out, the emphasis on this tradition is that the elf is “always watching you” and reporting everything you do to santa claus, but you aren’t allowed to interfere with the elf’s surveillance or touch him or else he loses his christmas magic, and you literally just murdered an innocent elf.

coincidentally the year Elf on The Shelf gained popularity was also the year Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents proving that the U.S. government has been surveilling everyone using invasive techniques regardless of criminality

[roboticchibitan]

I see a lot of memes about refusing to knit gauge swatches and they hurt my heart a little bit. Like. I get it I've been there. But you're actively working against your own interests. Please just knit a swatch.

@tattinglacework said in the tags of my post about yarn substitution that a gauge swatch is the knitting/crochet equivalent of "measure twice cut once" and I'm stealing it forever now because it's so true. I've had to frog weeks worth of work because I needed to go up two needle sizes and I didn't do a swatch. But it was better than having a finished shawl that was way too small to be useful.

And listen, eventually if you keep refusing to do swatches and being all "teehee I'm such a rebel" about it, you're going to come to a project that you're super excited about, really looking forward to, spend time planning, maybe even buy really nice yarn for it... and you hate the finished product and never use it. Which makes all that work a waste of time.

I know it seems like knitting a swatch is a waste of time but knitting for a week only to have to frog it all is more of a waste of time than the hour I would've spent knitting a swatch. Even with cobweb lace knitting where a proper gauge swatch takes several hours (I've spent 10 hours on a gauge swatch before and I am glad I did cuz it saved my ass), it's a looooot better to knit for several hours and know the next 100 hours will not have been in vain.

A swatch can also help you see whether you like how that yarn works up, and can give you an idea of how that yarn drapes and works up. This is important if you are knitting with a different fiber yarn than what the pattern calls for. Some fibers have a lot more stretch than others. Wool is nice and stretchy but silk is not. Cotton isn't very stretchy. Acrylic stretches and drapes differently than wool or cotton. A swatch will tell you if a fiber is suitable for a pattern.

Some pattern swatches are stockinette stitch and some are in pattern, and an in pattern swatch is going to tell you a LOT about how that yarn will work with that pattern. For example: I like to buy the occasional indie dyed yarn that's got pops of color and multiple colors per skein. But those yarns are hard to find patterns for because the color change/variegation is so quick that it ends up being very busy fabric. A gauge swatch in pattern will tell me if a pattern will show well or get lost in the variegation. Indie dyed yarn is expensive and I am poor so I want to make something I actually like, is the right size, and I will actually use because looking at it doesn't make me miserable.

I'm begging you, just make a swatch. At worst you've lost a little bit of time confirming your needle and yarn choices work for the pattern. At best, you're saving yourself from spending dozens of hours on something you'll never use because it didn't turn out the way you want, doesn't fit, and you hate looking at it now.

Also this is important and I've deeply regretted not doing it before: treat your finished swatch how you're going to treat the finished object. Block it if you're going to block the finished item and then unpin it and let it rest for a while (your swatch WILL lie to you if you do not) before taking any data from it. If you're not sure how a yarn is going to survive the wash, chuck your swatch in the washing machine to see! Better to felt a swatch than a pair of socks you just spent a week knitting.

I used to be very "no gauge swatch we die like men" so I Get It. I really do. But I have also been in the "didn't swatch, spent eighteen months and 3,000 beads on a project only to block it and have it be almost exactly a foot too small" boat and let me tell you that'll change you as a person. Just knit a swatch. It takes so much less time than being wrong does.

[stitchingaroundthebend]

I mean look, I know this in my head. But my heart says cast on right now you instant-gratification-deprived serotonin-poor depressed b*tch

[iplaywithstring]

If you're not wanting to knit a swatch, but you've got lots of yarn (so you won't have to frog the swatch) try to make the swatch something useful! A mug rug or a cup cozy or a bit of lace you can throw in a frame or something can make it feel like less of a waste of time, and it's less important that those things be exact.

[the-fibre-stuff]

With enough experience, so you know what to guess at, you can cheat a bit more than that. If you know that you’ll get a decent fabric, you can do toe-up socks without a swatch and once you’ve increased approximately the correct number of stitches, measure your tension to figure out how many stitches to increase to. Similar tricks can be used for mittens or hats.

The Yarn Harlot suggests starting sweaters with a sleeve. if it didn’t work, you’ve only lost a sleeve, not a whole back or an entire sweater.

[upennmanuscripts]

We are frequently asked why we don’t wear gloves in our manuscript videos. In today's #ManuscriptBasics, curator Dot Porter @leoba will do her best to explain. If you have a question, ask, and maybe we'll make a video to answer!

[houghtonlib]

We endorse this message!

[catchymemes]

[knittinghistory]

Kaufman's Department Store advertisement. The Pittsburg Press, 15 Feb. 1915, p. 20.

[amysstitches]

I would argue that it is not impossible to drop stitches on a circular

[knottybliss]

I have literally all of these but also this could be a tag meme

Source: J.A. Mills (jamills.com, j mills paints on Instagram)

[handmade-lilianade]

Getting called out on this fine morning

[aftabkaran]

Today in Kermanshah. “ Woman, life, freedom”

[darkwingatlarge]

share this shit people. they are risking their lives in the streets for women’s rights while you make snide and dismissive posts about revolution from your comfortable suburban room in your parents’ house.

[pizzacast]

Since the new danhmer seris is out, I want to remind everyone don’t be wild with this. Don’t make fanpost about him, Fanfics or fancams/edits.

He is not a fictional character or a good person, but was an evil real asshole.

Remember to be adults or at least mature. Don’t idolize this man. Idolizing him will be disrespectful to these young men.

These young men who had dreams and so much to live for. Never forget them.

[ilookattextile]

Crochet bread cover from the French-Canadian community in Manitoba, Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library

[knottybliss]

…I’m tempted y’all

[the-fibre-stuff]

Are you planning on doing it in English instead, or just confusing your family? (Or are they fluent in French? Because let me tell you, 4 years of French(+5 years of core French) was not enough for me to get it at first.)

(Please tell me you’re just going to confuse your family.)

[knottybliss]

I’ve taken enough French that I got the lol of the bread/pain connection pretty quickly when I saw the caption, and while at least one of my kids has taken enough French to also get the joke, it will be even funnier because I wouldn’t use it to cover bread, I’d just make it a couch decoration or something.

Maybe find a teeny little bread charm to suspend from the bottom center point.

[the-fibre-stuff]

Oh, you’re intentionally having it say [English] pain, not <bread>. Very entertaining.

[amysstitches]

When you have coeliac disease. Bread is pain.