Desdemona The Sewing Bee

[silvermoon424]

UNFATHOMABLY based hive mother. Let's pour one out for our fallen bee comrades.

[massachusetts-official]

A modern Massachusetts classic

Official Post of Massachusetts

[desdemonabee]

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A post shared by Katie Lovely (@katie.lovely)

[vincentbriggs]

so why is there some manner of

Beaft

on your straw hat?

My beautiful son the embroidered caterpillar brooch?

he was just posing there for a picture. It's a good neutral background.

[sosuperawesome]

Beaded Flowers // Beadwork Store Art

[mrvelocipede]

Hey, remember that amazing continuous-cables technique? I had an idea for a thing to do with it, and spent two days knitting swatches and fiddling with charts. On the third day I ached all over and had a slight fever, so either I'd been coming down with something or I'd been divinely inspired.

After a couple of days of recovery, I looked at my swatch and realized it needed its obvious counterpart, so then I spent another week designing an even worse chart. It didn't need the continuous-loop grafting, at least. It just used a lot of weird non-standard cables.

So now I have these:

The motifs are both 52 rows high, and they both start and end with 19 stitches. The stitch counts change a lot in the middle, though. I have a few things I want to tweak and refine in the charts, and then I don't know what to do with them. I despair at the thought of ever writing any kind of usable instructions for them, or even annotating the charts so anyone other than myself can read them.

It could be done, of course. I just don't want to spend the amount of time it would take, unless somebody was willing to offer me piles of money, or really interesting bribes.

ETA okay I'm working on cleaning up the charts! Not sure how long it's going to take. Watch this space for further announcements.

[reblogforsamplesize]

TUMBLR'S SECOND ANNUAL BUG RACE

🐛

🐌

🪱

🪲

🐞

🐝

Voting ended onFeb 3, 2024

🐛 caterpillar - the returning champion of the 2023 race at 41.6% of the votes

🐌 snail - runner up of the 2023 race at 38.3%, only 3.3% behind the caterpillar.

🪱 worm - placed last in 2023, with only 20.1% of votes

🪲 beetle, 🐞 ladybug, and 🐝 bee are new competitors!

[bumble-b-goode]

LETS GO BEES

[vanillacherie]

kitty artist 🌈🖍️

[desdemonabee]

The Year of Style

Once upon a time before the pandemic and the massive one-two punch of family loss and mental breakdown, I used to dedicate time and attention to what I wore and how I looked.

Once upon a time I also used to be able to write blog posts, but let's fix one thing at a time. I have the skills and the fabric stash to build a wardrobe, so we'll do that first. I've actually already been sewing!

This cheery shirtdress is almost done! She hung in the window for a bit to account for bias drop in the skirt and the hem has now been trued up and finished, so now all she needs is buttons.

I also whipped out a really cute 1/2 circle skirt in a pretty coral colored linen from the stash, but I took zero pictures except for the supply run I made to Joann so that's all you get for now. I'll brag about my very first invisible zipper installation in my next post!

[the-bramble--patch]

You know how companies used to make flour sacks with pretty flower patterns on them because mothers would make dresses out of them for their daughters? We should bring that back. Paper bags designed to be reused as wrapping paper. Jars of jam designed to look nice filled with pencils or homemade sauces. Fabric that's high quality enough to use as a patch.

Give things a second life!!

[xoxo-miahgrace-oxox-deactivated]

how many possible views are too many for one sewing pattern?

2

3-5

10

I don't care how many options so long as the pattern is clear

Voting ended onDec 13, 2023

Please share becuase I keep making sewing patterns that explode into like choose your own adventure things...

I don't want to overwhelm people but also like I want people to have options and feel motivated to redo the same projects over becuase that's how you learn the most.

Conflicting

[youcanthandelthetruth]

The Earthrise sweater, inspired by the art of Alexei Leonov depicting the first spacewalk.

[desdemonabee]

Funny story, 9 years ago today I apparently posted on Facebook about how I "legit hated sewing" and now look at me. I had a great time getting this put together last night!

There's a little extra under the arms that might need to be taken in but I'm going to pin in a sleeve to test it before I decide. Also I'm very pleased at how well the collar fits into the neckline; it came straight off a completely different pattern and I didn't alter it at all, just mashed them together and it worked!

[geiser]

no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive 'vegan leather' and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket' bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate's back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather... its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years...

[starcrossed-sky]

also they love love LOVE to try and sell you "plant-based leather" that you then look at the details and it's "45% cactus" or whatever and there's no mention of what the rest of it is

it's plastic.

it's always plastic.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Let me tell you a story.

50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it's body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.

But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.

The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn't melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.

Anyway, I pulled grandad's jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.

The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there's no market for leather these days. Its skin won't be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a "vintage" cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they'll sell another one.

[rhysintherain]

That cow, that became a leather coat?

It's probably also a saddle that another cowboy is still riding.

And several belts. Probably some wallets, several gloves, some riding tack.

Nobody who doesn't work with leather understands how much material you get from one cow. I have sides (like 1/4 of a cow) that I've been making things out of for years and there's still lots left in my materials stash.

Once that coat is too worn out to wear, there will still be lots of the leather that's still good. Someone who can't afford to buy hides will probably make smaller things from those pieces (that's how I started working with leather).

Even when every piece of that hide is completely unusable, it will decompose like it was originally going to, and shed no microplastic particles. A synthetic alternative lasts a fraction as long and sheds microplastics for its entire life.

You also can't use that synthetic leather for many of the things you'd use real leather for. It's not fire resistant, so welders can't use it to protect them from sparks. it doesn't have the tensile strength of real leather, so you can make equestrian tack out of it. It doesn't provide any abrasion resistance, so you can't make motorcycle leathers from it. It can't be used for protective equipment in sports like archery, because it would disintegrate under normal use.

Synthetic leather can only be used in place of real leather in fashion and upholstery applications, and it's not very good at either. It requires hundreds of times more material for the same applications due to its short lifespan, and it produces plastic pollution constantly.

There's literally no good argument for replacing real leather with synthetic alternatives. Even if you want to go the animal rights route, how many marine and aquatic ecosystems are you willing to sacrifice for the life of a few cows? Are you even saving cows, when we use them for so many other industries? Does a domesticated animal have more right to life than the wild species impacted by synthetic leather production?

In the long run, it's just not worth it.

[desdemonabee]

Natural materials if at all possible - A+

[desdemonabee]

Made a collar last night. Also sewed up a bodice and skirt; now they all gotta become one garment. But I ran out of bobbin thread and it was like 9:30 p.m. so I called it quits for the night.

[sergle]

"tiktok is so toxic yall are on that evil app but I'm built different 💅" to you!! TO YOU!! YOUR TIKTOK ALGORITHYM MAY BE EVIL

Mine is FIRE

[nativenews]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Good! For! Them!

[bumblebeebats]

"Don't just throw ripped jeans away, you can repair them using these 10 cute Visible Mending techniques!!" unfortunately my friend the first point of failure for every single pair of jeans i have owned in my life has been the Crotch and Ass. Knees: fine, cuffs: fine; but 3 years in, and all that stands between the world and my astronaut-patterned taint is 0.5µm of denim worn so thin that every squat threatens to tear it to shreds like wet toilet paper. If the Tiktok craft community could figure out a way to resurrect jeans afflicted in such a way that doesn't involve adding a whole ass buttpatch like some sort of inverse assless chaps situation then that'd be great

[desdemonabee]

Reverse assless chaps i am dying hahahahahahaha

That being said, the term you are looking for is "full seat breeches" and horse people* who like to walk like they are wearing a diaper wear them. (Also horse people who want maximum butt-to-saddle stick, but when you're not on the horse they are HORRIBLE.)

(*it is me, I'm the horse people)