Do you understand the violence it took to become this gentle?
wallacepolsom

oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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AnasAbdin
will byers stan first human second

pixel skylines

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Acquired Stardust
noise dept.

izzy's playlists!
Monterey Bay Aquarium
sheepfilms

JVL
we're not kids anymore.
$LAYYYTER
hello vonnie
cherry valley forever

ellievsbear

JBB: An Artblog!

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@fernandfog
Do you understand the violence it took to become this gentle?
reblog if you think sign language should be taught as a language in schools.
The Spring Ground
Gouache on paper, 2021
by Kelly Louise Judd
"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.
It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.
You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.
simple as that
It's waterproof. It's windproof. It's lightweight and durable. And it's made from the intestines of two bears, painstakingly cleaned and sew
I really wanted to know more about this, especially how the water proof stitching works. Here's more information on this project, and hopefully more in the future!
This is amazing! I need to make a note to play around with that water proof stitch technology soon.
"Our common language is resistance"
Seen in Athens, Greece
hey bro can i ask you a question that will reveal a deep and fundamental gap in my knowledge of the world
of course bro opening up about your lack of knowledge and asking questions is the only way to fill in that fundamental gap
How non-profits, trusts and cities are converting manicured greens into places where wildlife, plants and people flourish.
it's definitely my predisposition to extreme frugality+redneck engineering, but i'm now obsessed with creating things literally without buying Anything. no supplies no tools no nothing, only the stuff you can just find outside, like Plants, Sticks, and Rocks.
I'm making textiles with nothing but foraged plant materials using no tools except sticks. Nature allows you to do this! There's no rules! I mean okay well maybe there might be some rules sometimes but they're just weak human rules! The plants themselves? They're like "Why sure! You can make yarn with nothing but fibers from the dead stem I don't need anymore, a couple sticks from that tree over there, and your own body and mind! Why not?"
Plants like to give us gifts! And nobody has the power to stop them!
Once you know the ways of the plants, the ways of our capitalist society become silly and hard to understand, sometimes even instilling you with a sense of dread.
I was looking at the textile books in the library to try to learn about plants you can make textiles from. I was shocked to discover how incurious most books are about the origin of the very matter from which textiles are made!
For one thing, there were whole shelves of books on how to weave, how to knit, and how to quilt, but barely a single complete volume on how to create yarn or thread to begin with.
Of the books that did cover how the yarn is created, many of them discussed only wool, and those books didn't concern themselves with how to get the wool off the sheep, or how to find such an organism and enter a mutualistic partnership with it in the first place...
If you know the ways of the plants, you will be almost offended when a book about how to make a thing, starting from the beginning of that thing, tells you immediately to buy something. You don't mean "one or two steps further back in the process of a thing being assembled"—you mean the BEGINNING beginning. You seek to learn how the thing is born from the living Earth, not where to buy a Product in a less assembled form.
Where do Products come from...?...According to the capitalist, consumerist way, they come from other, simpler Products of course, which ultimately are born from Industries. I found a book or two which made some attempt to give a more exhaustive list of possible textile materials, with sub-section for plants, which included: Flax, Cotton, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, and some allusion to other possibilities such as Nettle. This of course is a list of plant fibers for which a Huge Industry exists. Regarding plant fibers for which there is no huge industry, the books either said nothing or said something like "...but sadly, there is no huge industry based upon these plants (so they are not worth talking about any more)"
I found a few cryptic statements saying that the range of plants that could be used for textile purposes is theoretically limitless...but none of the books were interested at all in those theoretically limitless plants.
It's not that only those few plants are really good for textiles and the other ones are inferior, either. I have learned from my delves into the Internet, that many plants now considered totally useless to humans and not investigated for their potential applications at all...have actually been used by some human culture on Earth for thousands of years as a fundamental part of everyday life.
Native Americans for thousands of years utilized plants native to this region for textiles. These ones are among the plants I have been gathering; they are plants that naturally grow here and can be harvested sustainably, in fact in many cases they benefit from being harvested.
Apocyonum cannabinum, also known as Dogbane, is essentially a North American analog to hemp or flax; you extract the bast fiber from the stem by beating it until the woody part breaks into pieces and falls out and the outer bark flakes off. This plant is native to all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii and I reckon that's because of its importance as a textile plant.
I've collected big bundles of the stuff by picking over fields that have been mowed already by a brush cutter; it's so easy, because the fibers are so strong that they are not broken by the brush cutter. Instead, I find mats and bundles of fiber 1-2 feet long stretched out over the ground or trailing from the stubs of stems, often with the woody parts and outer bark already beaten out by the mowing. Simply mowing a field where dogbane grows essentially pre-processes the fiber so your work is half done for you.
It is amazing to me that a person can see how the fibers do that if you mow the plants in the fall, and not immediately think, "We should be making string or rope out of that." Early colonial texts call this plant "Indian hemp" and say it is superior to actual hemp. Likewise what few resources I can find on Native American textile plants, list dogbane as one of the main ones.
So I gather the dogbane. It is astonishingly strong, fragrant when you handle it, and beating the fibers is loads of fun, just a great way to blow off steam. The fibers range in color from almost pearly white to cream to peach to beautiful shades of orange and copper, and have a lovely sheen to them.
After I've beaten the fibers and gotten them to mostly separate I tease them out with my fingers and scrape out all the remaining little bits of bark, and pull them through a plastic comb until the soft and lustrous fibers are separated and all that's left is some nubby bits of lint.
The last picture is what it looks like after combing and cleaning. The color looks more washed-out than it is for real because of my white lamp.
These fibers weren't quite as well-processed so the end result was kind of rough and scraggly, but I experimented by making some string:
All I used to spin it was a stick with a notch in the top so I could twist with my fingers, holding the other end of the stick steady and pulling the strand back towards myself. Whenever I finished a little more I would just loop it over the bend in the top of the stick and keep going.
The other fiber I've been experimenting with is milkweed seed fluff. This one is an interesting one because it was the first material I became interested in spinning, and the first I experimented with to the point of making a yarn. It took a long time to figure it out, I have quite a bit of single-strand seed fluff yarn now, and intend to spin this into a three-ply yarn to make it strong.
I was so happy! My first yarn! Spun with nothing but a stick. It's delicate but it holds together and handles being unwound and rewound just fine, and I think making a 2 or 3 ply yarn would make it pretty workable.
So imagine my surprise when I begin reading about textile arts and the possible uses of the plants i'm working with, and learn that spinning milkweed seed fluff is impossible?
Milkweed bast fiber has been used, like the dogbane bast fiber, but according to the internet, spinning the seed fluffs into yarn is something that cannot be done, because they are too short, smooth, and fragile. Many have tried! It doesn't work!
That was news to me.
As I read more about spinning the more conventional plant fibers, though, I consider what a deep knowledge humankind has cultivated of the ways of wool and flax and cotton, and think...is my total lack of knowledge about spinning yarn, the reason I was able to spin the milkweed fluffs?
Normal people would have armed themselves with the proper tools for undertaking a new activity, but I didn't even bother to look up what I was doing, because MacGyvering cool stuff out of materials from nature you can find anywhere outside is basically half my personality at this point, and makes me feel unreasonably powerful. As a result, I made a technological approach to spinning yarn that was designed specially for the challenges of spinning milkweed seed fluffs, and only later realized that 1) this is not a normal way to spin yarn and 2) i'm not supposed to be able to spin this stuff at all.
And it's because I came at it backwards. Instead of trying to use existing technology to spin milkweed fluffs, I became determined to spin milkweed fluffs and developed my technique based on what would work to do that, without any knowledge of what I was "supposed" to be doing.
If I had been normal about it and thought "Hmm, I should buy the right tools to do this" or even thought "Hmm, I should start with fibers that are usually used to make clothes" this would not have happened.
I'm coming at everything backwards: instead of "Where can I purchase Thing I Want To Work With?" it's "What does Nature provide, and what cool stuff can I do with it?"
I didn't even set out to work with textile materials. It's just that the plants kept giving me textile materials. This hobby absolutely snuck up on me out of nowhere this was not my idea
People have had success blending milkweed fluffs with other stuff, so I'm going to try to blend it with the dogbane next! I am fully going to go all the way and make like clothes or bags or blankets out of this stuff. There is no turning back for me, the euphoria of creation and the profound wisdom of the plants have inflicted a fascination with my task.
What's the staple length of that milkweed please? I am fascinated by it.
You mean like the length of the individual fibers? They're like an inch on average, the biggest seed pods have fluffs a little longer.
Basically the reason it works, I think, is that I'm twisting the strand with my fingers, pulling back toward my body and using the other end of the stick as an anchor point/leverage. There is something about the warmth and moisture of touching the fibers so much that makes them want to bind together more.
There is a lot of twist to the yarn, but it's not a problem, in fact if you twist until it kinks up, you can just...mash the kinked part between your fingers really hard and it'll flatten out and you can keep going. The fiber is springy and pliable in a way that lets you do things like that with it.
Where a lot of people messed up was they tried to card it. All you need to do is spend some time gently pulling the fibers between your fingers to separate the individual fibers in each "tuft" that attaches to a single seed. If you're too rough with it, the fibers will just break and that's not good. But you do kinda have to play with it in your hands? I don't know if it's the oils in your hands or what, but touching it a lot makes them want to mold together to each other more.
I can really see how this material is totally different than anything else you could spin in many ways.
Top: Dogbane bast fiber
Bottom: Dogbane bast/Milkweed floss blend
On a different note I went thru mom and dads closet to find really old clothes to practice sewing and embroidery on, and I am so mad!!!!! at how much more sturdy and robust clothes from the 1990's are compared to today.
I am just staring in fascination at these clothes from a few decades ago like "Wow they are so strong and sturdy...the fabric is such high quality...." What HAPPENED?
Inner bark fibers of first-year grapevine twigs. They can be processed into incredibly fine strong soft strands with soaking, stripping off outer bark and gentle crushing by rolling a round rock over them
Thank you for this.
I have been on a personal quest (that is now in stand by due to life events) about flax. I live in a village that was famous for its flax, hemp and wool fabrics. Its name is literally related to the hemp-farming. And currently, nobody ever grows any of these plants and what I find surprising, with my very limited knowledge of botanics, is that... there are no rest of them either? Even in the first half of the 20th century some people still worked the flax in the traditional way, and now there aren't any carried-by the wind rests anywhere? no abandoned farms where it poorly grows anymore? no decorative reasoning to have them in your garden?
People don't remember, they don't even know. Linen was an estimated fabric and this village had enough to dress its inhabitants and sell the left-overs around. Same with the wool. Only the old people remember because they still worked it. Other villages, with larger textile industries, also have lost this memory.
The moment you look at things the way op mentioned, with the "how do you get this done?" mind, things change. Its value change. I only wish I had more time and more health to really make myself a linen tshirt, from scratch. To make myself a woolen blanket, from scratch. Particularly, I have the wool because my parents have sheep. I could do so many things if I dedicated every bit of time off and energy to it, but alas I can't. I do it when I can, little by little. I envy you, op. Please, keep us posted of your progress.
I'm thinking of this one time time I was bored while catsitting... I went out on my friend's property, found some sticks and rocks, improvised a spindle, brushed the cats, and spun up some yarn. One cat has slightly darker fur, and they are both long-haired and very soft, so I was interested to see what the yarn would feel like.
My original spindle fell apart, and they must have just cleaned the yard because I couldn't find sturdy enough sticks for replacement, so I did admittedly use borrowed bic pens instead of purely natural supplies...
I ended up with a few strands of 2 ply cat hair yarn! It was kind of scratchy and felt like twine. It wasn't the easiest to spin compared to the wool I've worked with, but boredom is a powerful motivator!
I left the yarn with my friend as a memento, but I'm considering making more the next time I catsit so I can try actually knitting something with it.
@headspace-hotel
I have another dopey question about your milkweed experiment if you aren't out of patience yet.
Did the books that claim milkweed is unspinneable mention what tool they were using (drop spindle, wheel etc)? Because I just reread the post and it sounds like you had the spindle in your hand the whole time, rather than letting it hang freely in the air?
That's a specific style of spinning I'm currently failing to learn: supported spinning, and its specifically often used to spin short, delicate fibres, and/or very fine delicate thread, but its not done very often in anglo-european traditions, so I'm wondering if there was some Distinct Cultural Biases in the books you were referencing.
I also wanted to ask how your cat yarn and milkweed yarn have held up? I’ve spun with cat hair “fresh off the cat” before - I just groomed my resident beast and then pulled the hair out the comb and spun with a drop spindle - but I’ve found it’s not held up very well. I knitted a teeny tiny swatch with it and it’s fuzzing and sort of slowly edging towards either felting or just sort of falling apart :(
might have worked better if i plied it, or I might have underspun it bc I was very new to spinning when I did it, but… I do wonder also when people say “you can’t spin with that” whether they sometimes mean “the yarn falls apart very quickly so don’t bother”
Two very good questions from @dr-dendritic-trees and @makerandbean !
First: Yes! I haven't posted photos of my spinning in a while, but yeah, I essentially use a stick with a side branch at the top that I use as a spool. I hold the stick in my left hand and twist the strand together, letting my left hand slide down the stick as I spin, then when the strand is as long as the stick I wrap it around the top and continue.
I'm actually really happy you brought that up, because I had no idea what the technique was called, and had never heard of it before despite it being a fairly intuitive, ridiculously low-tech way to spin that gives you a lot of control over the strand you're putting together.
You basically pinch a big thick tuft of your fiber between your index finger and thumb of your right hand and splice it into the strand you're working on, and as you work you pull the tuft downwards so it slowly distributes all the fibers into a long strand.
This is especially effective when you're working with dogbane bast fiber, which inevitably has a great number of fibers of just 3-5 centimeters, and a smaller but still significant amount of fibers 10-20 centimeters long. The long fibers give the strand a backbone and the short fibers give it more weight and fuzziness.
The staple length you could get from dogbane fiber if you processed it carefully is, I feel certain, longer than any other natural fiber that exists.
Using dogbane, I have figured out how to get an incredibly smooth even thread by twisting the strand, then scraping my fingers up and down the strand to make stray fibers stick up, and untwisting and retwisting it in short sections at a time so the stray fibers get twisted into the strand.
I think it helps the final result to alternate between holding the strand in the hardest twist you can manage and then letting it relax to whatever extent it wants to, and twisting again.
It's slow but I'm getting steadily faster and faster at it, and it feels plausible that a person using this method could produce enough string for weaving into a garment on a Neolithic type amount of free time.
On the second question: I havent actually tried turning the milkweed yarn into anything since I can't knit or crochet, however, I think it would be so clearly better to blend the milkweed fluff 50:50 with another fiber (possibly milkweed bast fiber!) that I haven't really tried experimenting with pure milkweed fluff much more. I will hopefully show y'all how the bast/fluff blend goes!
My experiment shows it's possible to spin milkweed fluff, however I think it wouldn't be sturdy enough for an item for daily wear unless blended. However blending the milkweed and dogbane has excellent results.
I actually did some research online into milkweed fluff, and the main purpose for milkweed fluff in textile-adjacent things is actually stuffing. It apparently makes amazing stuffing for pillows, blankets, and jackets—it is incredibly warm, hypoallergenic, and so buoyant that it can be used to stuff life jackets.
How to Use Dye Plants
Humans have been coloring fabric, fibers, and wool for thousands of years and we can use many of the same plants they used to dye today. Using these leaves, flowers, and roots carries on cultural traditions, deepens our connection to nature, and encourages experimentation and creativity.
Dye plants come in all types. Sometimes you'll use the entire plant, sometimes just a part of it, sometimes you'll compound dyes or overdye to create the color you're wanting. You can dye with kitchen scraps, local plants you can forage for free, or dye plants you purchase. Just be sure you don't use any toxic plants and always research before tossing plants into your dye pot!
Basic Dyeing Process:
Two main ingredients are needed to start dyeing: your fabric/fibers and the plants you're using to color them.
Your dyeing results will differ if you're working with cellulose fibers like cotton, linen, or hemp or if you're working with protein fibers like silk or wool. Your process will also differ depending on what colors you're wanting to create so research specifics for the plants you intend to use. You may also want to mordant your fibers to get deep and long-lasting color.
Mordanting: treating the fiber with a substance to make the dyes last.
Some plants are direct dyes and don't need any mordants to attach to the fiber: indigo (best on cellulose fibers) or walnut, cutch, safflower (best on protein fibers) are a few direct dye plants.
Metal mordants like aluminum, iron, copper, tin, or alum create a chemical bond between the fiber and the dye. This fixes the color so it'll stay put through washing, sun exposure, and wear. Metal mordants can also subtly or dramatically change the end result color which is great for experimenting or more precise color needs. I'm not experienced in metal mordants (yet!) but there's tons of guides online if this sounds like the right treatment for your needs!
Soy milk isn't really a mordant but a binder. It enhances color uptake and makes cellulose fibers act more like protein fibers, but doesn't form any chemical bond between the fiber and dye. If you pretreat your fibers with soy milk and wash them gently you can still have lovely colors for years. This is my favorite method because it's easy and cheap!
If you dye protein fibers you can also choose to skip pretreating. Wool and silk take up dyes pretty well without mordants, they just won't be the longest lasting colors. It works plenty well if you're dyeing for fun or don't mind to overdye your fibers if the color fades too much.
*Don't get too caught up in mordanting and finding the perfect recipe if you're new to this. Half the fun of botanical dyeing is experimentation, creativity, and not knowing exactly what colors you'll end up with!*
Preparing Dye Plants and Dyeing
The specifics on prepping and dyeing will depend on what you're using, but you can generally use fresh or dried plants as long as they're in good condition.
You'll create your dye bath by either simmering the plant material, infusing it in hot water like tea, or soaking it in water for a period of time.
The exact amounts vary but a good rule of thumb is equal weights of your dye plants and your fibers to get a good color. More dye plants = richer colors and less = lighter colors. The dye potential in a plant will also vary from year to year and even season to season. This all just means that whatever you dye will truly be one of a kind.
Once your dye bath is prepared you'll add your fibers to it. Most plants use a hot dyeing method where you simmer the fibers in the dye bath for around an hour or until you're happy with the material's color. Remove it from the dye bath, rinse it, and dry it!
Some natural dye plants to try: eucalyptus, ivy, onion, avocado, elderberries, calendula, madder, coffee grounds. I also have this post listing dye plants and the colors they create if you want to check that out!
Drying wool, silk, and hemp fabrics dyed with madder root (dark pink), avocado skins (soft pink), and red onion skins (green).
Sources: 1, 2
« Flowery stained glass...»
Three Foxes by Maria Strutz
good things will happen 🧿
things that are meant to be will fall into place 🧿
THIS ONE FUCKING WORKS. REBLOG IT.
this for real fucking works
Cold take but all languages are beautiful actually. Every single one. Every single human language on earth is a collection of stories interwoven into the very fabric of the words that are spoken.
“Oh but this language sounds scary-“ have you heard a child speak it while pointing at a butterfly?
“Oh but this language sounds silly-“ have you heard someone’s grandma recite a recipe with such practiced ease it comes off as poetry?
“Oh but this language is really weird-“ and yours isn’t? Everyone’s language is weird, dumbass, it came free with your fucking humanity.
Every tongue that is spoken is a work of art. Every language a unique window into the world.
Isn’t it wonderful?
Joy and whimsy detected! This post is joyful and whimsical!
Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help
“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.
“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.
“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.
Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”
Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.
You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19
I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.
see also: stockholm syndrome.
turns out the kidnappers were more concerned for their welfare than he police.
why are we always covering up for the police?