From Ashes Creative @fromashescreative - Tumblr Blog

"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"

Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'

This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'

Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.

Anyway how are all of you doing.

systlin

I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.

systlin

'machine combing shortens the flax fibers by several inches'

This right here is part of why modern linen is a pale shadow of historical linen. Legitimately it cannot be properly replicated by machines. It HAS to be made by human hands if you want the best quality.

sketch-a-bsinthe

literallymechanical

Rocket scientists who leave the rocket industry keep thinking everything is a rocket and it's kind of adorable

literallymechanical

"We can honeycomb this to reduce the weight" sweetie no that's going to be twice as expensive to manufacture and we are not launching it anywhere.

literallymechanical

"If we use titanium instead of steel we'll save a bunch of weight" baby you need to stop worrying so much about your weight! And maybe worry more about what happens to titanium when you expose it to deuterium plasma.

charyou-tree

oseberg-shipper

One of the things I love about watching people make art on the internet is clocking the way they use the tools they know. The way a nail artist makes miniatures is completely different than the way a polymer clay artist does the same thing. How a whittler and a painter approach printmaking.

Consider the ways in which you are a rocket engineer.

songbird-duchess

Beliefs around crafting

Sometimes when I sit and I knit I hear my older cousin’s voice in my ear warning me not to pull too tight. The yarn can feel I’m nervous and whatever I’m making will fall apart if I knit while nervous. You have to knit with calm confidence or you doom your project.

Sometimes when I’m sewing I feel my aunt’s hands guiding mine and telling me to remember to thank my thread because this thread has gone through so much to become the thread that holds my project together. And you need to thank the things that hold you together.

Sometimes when I’m embroidering I remember my mamaw’s warning about how you always embroider the eyes last if you’re embroidering an animal or person. The eyes bring the piece to life and once you stitch them they can feel. And being stabbed with a needle over and over is very unpleasant.

Sometimes when I’m braiding my hair or a cord or a length of dandelion for a crown I remember the old whispers I grew up with: don’t think bad thoughts while you braid, you’ll braid a curse into your hair and you’ll have to wash it thrice to get it out.

We had beliefs about baking, cooking, cleaning, sewing, weaving, singing, dancing, playing, joking. Every craft and skill the people in my family taught me came with a lesson or a warning.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Idk why I’m posting this. Been missing my family a lot lately, most of these women have passed. I guess I just needed to speak their wisdom into something. Has anyone else heard these?

#makers #crafting #superstition

everythingwsnormalhere

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU HATE THE NEW UPDATE REBLOG THIS POST

[ PT; please for the love of god if you hate the new update reblog this post ]

I am organizing a lights out protest on tumblr, from March 20th 6AM UTC until March 21st 6AM UTC. It is best if as many tumblr users as possible can join this protest, as a mass downtime in users is the only way the tumblr staff will listen to us.

If you cherish this hellsite, participate. Do your bit. Every person counts.

Thank you for reading, and to @staff @changes: give us our tumblr back, or the people will migrate somewhere else. This is a threat.

writingdose

Reblog if you do NOT want the new Tumblr update

Apparently, from what I hear people say, in the new Tumblr update, if someone reblogs your post and adds a comment of their own, that reblog is counted as a new post and it belongs to the reblogger. Not you. You, as the OP, do not get the notifications if someone else later reblogs from the person who reblogged your post with their own comment. You can’t see what comments people leave on the reblogs of the post you originally made unless they reblogged directly from you.

If this is actually true, it will just open doors for harassment. And also it takes the credits away from the OPs. Tumblr’s etiquette has always been “reblog don’t repost”. So this new update, if true, contradicts the whole core values of Tumblr as a community.

Respectfully, we don’t want this @staff @support @tumblr @changes please listen to your users.

I’d also like to clarify that this is what I hear from what a lot of people are saying, and it bothers me. But if I got anything wrong, I do apologize.

stjohnstarling

Alright so given the disaster happening to the basic function of this website right now, I want to mention that one of the major projects I’m working on is figuring out how people can change how we use the internet, in order to have communities and subcultures (and art) that don’t make us all completely miserable:

Why I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the California condor.

Up until the mid 2010s, there was a thriving discussion around how the arts should work in the 21st century, using the internet in positive ways to further human potential. People experimented with different ways of organizing communities online and the internet’s various potentials as a creative space. This discussion ended not because these problems were solved, but because the structure of the social media-driven internet became so suffocating, it seemed to preclude any hope of other possible ways of living. I see no reason why we are not capable now, in this era of mass dissatisfaction with the way the internet works, of trying again.

At the moment I only have the first part up, which is a pretty broad overview. I’m working on a follow-up about how all of this would work practically, by doing a case study of how sci-fi fandom started in the 1930s. It’s pretty good and you should check it out. ✌️

stjohnstarling

On top of the way you expect them to have broken things, I think there are reblogs that aren’t showing up in the notes of this post:

“Huh, that’s weird,” I said, “This post only has 18 reblogs, I should be able to see who creekfiend reblogged it from in the notes.” So then I went to @creekfiend’s blog to see where they got it from.

This reblog 👆is not in the notes. Neither is wherever starfoozle got it from.

This post (at time of writing) has almost 400 likes with only 18 reblogs, which is such an unbalanced ratio it makes me think there are likely other reblogs also not showing up.

This is going to make it completely impossible for me to track which ways of promoting my writing are working. This is a nightmare.

stjohnstarling

GREAT

stjohnstarling

Alright so given the disaster happening to the basic function of this website right now, I want to mention that one of the major projects I’m working on is figuring out how people can change how we use the internet, in order to have communities and subcultures (and art) that don’t make us all completely miserable:

Why I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the California condor.

Up until the mid 2010s, there was a thriving discussion around how the arts should work in the 21st century, using the internet in positive ways to further human potential. People experimented with different ways of organizing communities online and the internet’s various potentials as a creative space. This discussion ended not because these problems were solved, but because the structure of the social media-driven internet became so suffocating, it seemed to preclude any hope of other possible ways of living. I see no reason why we are not capable now, in this era of mass dissatisfaction with the way the internet works, of trying again.

At the moment I only have the first part up, which is a pretty broad overview. I’m working on a follow-up about how all of this would work practically, by doing a case study of how sci-fi fandom started in the 1930s. It’s pretty good and you should check it out. ✌️

sheisraging

If you send feedback via Tumblr's feedback form (which you SHOULD do), you will get an autoreply telling you to leave a comment on the changes.tumblr.com blog (which you should also do!). Just make sure you're actually doing it on the reblog of this post from changes since, due to their own shitty update, they cannot/will not see the SIXTY THOUSAND NOTES that this update has generated, 99% of which are negative.

annaplexis

How to fix a dropped stitch in knitting

In stocking stitch, it’s even easy to pick up a dropped stitch without a crochet hook 🧶

To frog or not to frog: that is the question If you are just learning to knit, I would advise you not to be too perfectionist. In the very b

theprofessional-amateur

I am reading an interview with a historian that set out to weave the type of textiles that was sold to plantations for use by enslaved people using period appropriate looms.

But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself...

The great challenge of our work as scholars—at least, those who are interested in historical reconstruction or the histories of any craft tradition—is that almost none of what we want to know is written down—because it didn’t have to be and it didn’t need to be articulated. So to be in a situation where expert weavers had to talk to me like I was a child was one of the best things that happened to me in the course of my research for this book.

theprofessional-amateur

“But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England's leading manufacturers of low-end woollen cloth for enslaved w

For my textile, weaving, historic textile, history enthusiasts

The interviewer is also a weaver!

theprofessional-amateur

SW: ... That’s really awesome. You’ve taught this class now for two semesters. What have you learned from your students?

SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.

And this took me in new directions in my own research. You might remember a discussion of sewing labor in the final chapter of Plantation Goods and the implication of a cloth’s width for a woman’s work routine. If you know how to cut the pieces for a shirt from a 32-inch-wide piece of fabric, it is going to mess everything up when you’re given a bolt of 28-inch-wide cloth. I had seen letters from slaveholders in the 1830s and 1840s complaining about the narrowness of the cloth and how enslaved women didn’t “understand” these fabrics. This wasn’t transparent to me as a historian. Only with students talking about the expertise involved in cutting cloth into the components of a garment did I realize what a difference it made when, say, a New England weaver was haphazard and turned out fabric four inches narrower than the usual variety. That error would reverberate in the lives of people 1,000 miles away who might face extreme forms of violence because they couldn’t meet their daily production quotas. Or they might experience other kinds of privation—a lack of rags for postpartum women, for example—because a wider fabric left scraps while a narrower one did not.

your-url-is-problematic

@jackironsides I think you might like this

jackironsides

I do, thank you!

tiktoks-i-enjoyed

The art of mindless embroidery.

by @ toolbburs (no pronouns in bio).

shamebats

Tiktok post by @ wynunlimited.