about life

our ancestors and our decendants and our friends, all connected with golden threads. // terf & tradwife blogs DNI.

[alwinfy]

the etymology of the word 'blog' is insane

[alwinfy]

blog is a contraction of web-log.

log as in a record of your posts, but more generally as a record of events that happened. as in a 'logbook', a record of the speeds of a ship. log-book as in 'chip log', a piece of wood they tied to a rope to measure speed with

web as in the world wide web. as in a huge interconnected woven web of connections, but with computers and networks instead. the use of web in this context as such a metaphor was coined less than fifty years ago

the tendrils of history reach back so far and so close at once, and all so we can coin silly terms like "blogosphere." do you see me. everything's connected

[alwinfy]

and somehow we're all still here on this site, leaving little bits of wood in each others' spider webs to remember one another by

[goldennthread]

the fuck is this banner at the top. oh my god.

Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website to its version as of 12:00 AM on January 29, 2025. Information on this page may be modified and/or removed in the future subject to the terms of the court's order and implemented consistent with applicable law. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from truth. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.

Health Disparities in Suicide

This page details health disparities related to suicide.

[monetizeyourcat-blog]

on the fourth of july, remember that american independence was a land grab

you hear this a lot, but what does it mean, specifically?

the pre-1776 americans who came from a sex, race, and class background that enabled them to participate in the conventional history of america sought to buy into aristocracy as a system of production. they were the youngest sons of minor aristocrats, the children of men with rank and no land, successful but socially limited military officers. there were people other than white men in america, but our history is not defined by them, they were not in power, they struggled to survive and their voices are faint and hard to hear. even the reality of working-class life in america among white men is largely silent; children read thomas paine’s agitation for the bourgeois revolution in america but nothing about his labor agitation in the us and england, nothing about his work as a corsetmaker or his parallel struggles to break into the bourgeoisie personally and defend workers as a class. we learn about the composition of washington’s teeth.

more people know washington had teeth extracted from slaves than know he was rich, and had an obvious and immediate material interest in the revolution as a wealthy planter.

george washington was arguably the richest man in america. not in money, although there is that. he was rich in land; he was a successful surveyor, planter, and politician. “politician” makes sense to us, and while it meant different things in the 18th century (and certainly he would have rejected any attempt to identify him that way) it’s something we can comprehend pretty well.

the planter class were slaveowners. this was a universal fact of revolutionary america; there was nowhere near enough ‘free’ labor in america to maintain their massive, highly inefficient cash crop farms. expanding the population of slaves in america was a major priority to intensify production.

before the cotton gin made cultivars of cotton that grew outside of fertile bottomland economically viable under even plantation slavery by reducing the titanic amount of labor necessary to make their bolls usable for fiber, the major cash crop of america was tobacco.

in america, because of peculiarly american mythology, we tend to believe that in the late 1700s and most of the 1800s people didn’t understand crop rotation or soil nitrogen. even in the context of european agriculture this is incorrect. soil nutrition was an incomplete science, and the primary fertilizer in the west was not an efficient nitrogen source but bone meal, yet american planters understood the basics of crop rotation and fertilization. they simply refused to use them because they would have driven up costs.

the rudiments of the agricultural revolution were things that wealthy american planters chose to forget. this is why america is larger than europe and has only been a food exporter in living memory - not because it is infertile, but because its economy was one of indifference to fertility, and this set down powerful cultural roots and industrial norms. the dust bowl was a product of this history as much as anything.

in slavery times, wealthy american planters planted a crop of tobacco on every surface available to them on good land - and they could tell if land was good for tobacco by means of both common knowledge about agriculture and surveyors’ trade secrets. a good way to tell in virginia was to count the pines.

they continued to plant tobacco season after season, crop after crop. the land was never given rest, never allowed to lay fallow. no land capable of raising tobacco was used for anything else; food and feed crops that would have partially restored soil were grown on bad, rocky, marginal soil.

in a few years, the best land used this way would become utterly infertile, and would be allowed to revert to barrens. the semi-indigent white smallholders of the antebellum south filled this vacuum, and in struggling to make do with an agricultural technology adapted for intensive, land-destructive agriculture, degraded soil still further.

the planters who had used up land then acquired more. land was cheap; formally it was necessary under english law to acquire title from natives, the english system of transfer of title was not a native institution and was easy to use to steal land. the american mythology includes a story about settlers buying manhattan for $50, and a riposte that this represented an easement and not a permanent purchase to the native lenape. there are also stories about natives selling land they did not own. these are both applicable in some cases, inapplicable in others; the interface between white settlers and natives was unstable and heterogeneous. in most cases, white title to land under english law was only ever ambiguous at best, and the land bought in this way rapidly became incapable of supporting people outside of the deformed european style of agricultural production prevalent in america. even if the system were not rigged against natives, economic pressure would still have created a comprador class which sold out and moved north and west, and this would still have intensified political struggles among natives and between natives and white settlers.

these conflicts, and legal hassles for the british government, lead to the proclamation of 1763. we hear mostly about it forbidding squatting - white settlers moving over the mountains and claiming land without title. in the american popular imagination this is what the revolution changed.

the reality is that the main thrust of the proclamation of 1763 was that the purchase of native land in america by private agents was forbidden, and all such purchases had to be formal purchases by agents of the crown itself. to a planter class whose bloated, vampiric way of life depended on shady and frequently illicit private land deals between themselves and natives, this was a deadly threat. from the word go, it was challenged by planters - who, being sustained by the legal system in a basically predatory life, in general took pains to be literate in the formal law of england and keep copies of significant precedents in common law courts - using a forged version of the pratt-york opinion.

the pratt-york opinion held that the british east india company was within its rights to purchase land from princely states in india. it held, unambiguously, that its decision did not apply to america, and american skeptics always expressed scorn and ridicule about the idea it suggested of dealing with indian “princes” and “governments”. (after the war, john marshall made it clear that there was no homology in the eyes of anglo-american law between the formal, legitimate governments of the raj and american indian nations.) but when you think about it, the same logic was really at work: the british east india company was an agent of the crown in its own right so its expropriating land from natives was in the crown’s interest even without its formal say-so. and so in a sense were american planters agents of the crown in this capacity. if george washington, the richest man in america, was not an agent of the crown in north america, who even was?

forged versions of this opinion, which clipped off language making it unambiguous that the decision was inapplicable to america, circulated widely. they are in evidence in the personal effects of washington, jefferson, lewis and clark. whatever the crown said, the land grab would continue, be damned any border or line. more land was needed so more land would be taken.

before, during, and after the revolution, washington was a surveyor; he wrote down the characteristics of land which white people had seen but had not investigated in depth for its suitability for plantation agriculture. he took the best land of the west for himself. it was not considered unseemly or ridiculous that he would do this even while on campaign; it was a necessary part of his profession and a universal behavior of the plantation aristocracy.

the use of land in this way continued after the war, and especially after the war with tecumseh’s confederacy was won at tippecanoe; land was close to free for the first white people to survey it, and cheap as dirt for the rich planters that came after them.

this is how americans became rich. this is how american capital came to exist. this land grab logic extended into the west, and this is part of the reason oregon was settled so far in advance of the great plains - the thick, dry grasses of the modern breadbasket of the us were not suitable country for cash crops, and only at its southern margins did plantation slavery ever successfully advance.

it is sometimes treated as inevitable that this should have ended, that plantation slavery reached its zenith before the civil war and the civil war was part of its decline. but this country was literally founded by people who stole land to farm so intensively with slave labor that it was destroyed for agriculture for generations - and those people would never have imagined most of what we think of as ‘the south’ being subject to their economic system. it was not suited for tobacco or long-staple cotton. but american and european industry, whose hunger for production was insatiable, found a way.

this form of production followed exploration, opening, and exploitation of native nations distant from white settlement by a diverse class of explorers and outdoorsmen. it followed that exploration and opening more or less everywhere. when we read histories of the rest of america we encounter other, less discussed cash crops, far outside of the main area of plantation slavery: ginger, indigo. (ginger in particular was a cash crop because of british merchants’ penetration of markets in china.) the same economic logic that applied in plantation slavery applied everywhere, and while some crops were limited by the absence of free labor, enormous families and punitive economic policies against the indigent were tailored to minimizing that. the same economic idea - land is limitless and can be destroyed without consequence, and labor can be someone else’s problem - underlay everything america did. it underlaid acquisitions of millions of acres of land with no conceivable economic use to agriculturists.

it underlies, in distant echoes, the modern american system, where the acquisition and mortgaging of domestic land is one of the primary ways capital disburses to the middle-class; where intensive use of land in existing settlements under gentrification follows a predictable pattern of exploration, exploitation, expropriation, and transfer to large investors. state violence is not the end-all and be-all of this legalized theft but it is always present and always on the side of capital and its agents.

and the american innovation, the core of the american experiment, is that if you have enough money you’re as good as god’s vicar on earth. it worked for washington and it works for your landlord.

happy fourth of july, everybody!

[nunchler]

obviously bigotry isnt rational but "women are naturally worse at spatial reasoning and math" is a wild opinion to have when women have historically been the primary textile producers in a lot of societies. have you ever seen a tablet weaving pattern

[grison-in-space]

do you have any idea how much calculus goes into making a new sewing pattern. how much math goes into knitting. it's amazing.

[musicalhell]

Have you seen lacemaking in action?

[kirkyardbones]

I will always bring up the connection between textile manufacturing and our modern computers when I can.

This is jacquard fabric:

For much of its existence, the fabric had to painstakingly handwoven due to the complexity of the motifs that characterised jacquard weaves.

In 1804, the Jacquard punch card was patented, which enabled manufacture to be done at a fraction of the speed:

However, the above cards inspired a connection between the mathematic patterning of the jacquard cards and the idea of a precursor to our modern computers, by none other than Ada Lovelace.

There are similar concepts underpinning other forms of needlework/handicrafts - needle lace and bobbin lace is made to pattern sheets that were originally done by hand, before becoming digitised such as in the Leavers Lace machine.

This is genuinely a fascinating rabbit hole to go down and I highly recommend researching it. Math is the foundation of so much of sewing, needlework, and tailoring, and should be understood as an intrinsic part of those crafts.

[dreamingdormouse]

This! Is exactly what I do!

I'm the head of the Outreach Committee at my fiber arts guild (as well as being vice president) and while we ALSO do demonstrations at historical events, my focus has been bringing in the connections between Fiber Arts and STEM subjects, ESPECIALLY at schools!

Last spring, for example, a nearby middle school had a STEM day and invited us, so I went to the school and set up a display of various Fiber Arts tools and materials, all of which I could use, and a prompt by each one explaining how it uses math or relates to science or whatever, with notes/script I had written out for myself to explain how each one is connected. (The pictures I've included are from the same setup at a different event; I'm not putting up pictures with middle schoolers in them and I didn't catch any before/after.) I had:

A display of silk in different forms ("hankies" or unspun stretched out cocoons, handspun yarn from hankies, rough spun yarn from leftovers, beautiful slippery shiny reeled-and-thrown yarn) and a story about how sick silkworms led to research by Agostino Bassi and his very early work on the Germ Theory, who inspired Louis Pasteur, who inspired Joseph Lister (Science, particularly medical science)

An 8-shaft table loom, with a set of simple punch cards showing how a Jacquard loom would work, and how those punch cards inspired Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and how the more complex punch cards were widely used right up through the 60's and 70's (Technology)

A spinning wheel, with a mark on one side of the large wheel so you can see when it had made a complete circle, a bobbin that spun faster, and a discussion on how gearing ratios change the work you do (Engineering)

A display of knitting projects, with a book on fitting different motifs together; for instance, if you have a motif that repeats every 24 stitches, it would be best if your sweater was a multiple of 24 stitches around. But what if you also have a motif that repeats every 7 stitches and another motif that repeats every 15 stitches? This book gets around that problem by having EVERY motif be 24 stitches, but it still brings up the issue. Also, a pair of socks with a ball of similar yarn next to them, so we can talk about different ways to estimate whether or not you've got the right amount of yarn to make another pair of socks. (Math)

As a bonus, an interactive set of drop spindles attached to already-spun yarn, so the kids could spin them themselves without having to worry about messing up the yarn or dropping the spindles on the floor. The spindles were different weights and sizes, so the kids could see how that affected the length of time the spindles would spin. (more Science - physics this time!)

I didn't even get into the math of warping a loom, which usually takes me a couple of pages of scribbling notes and calculations, multiplying by ends-per-inch, adjusting for percentage of shrinkage and percentage of take-up and how much loom waste to allow, and margins of error, and stuff like that.

Oooh I SHOULD'VE brought my tablet loom. I'll have to work that one in.

[magdaleneanthony]

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Walsingham. I took this photo of a shrine devoted to her in St. Magnus-the-Martyr in London — kneeling here, I had an immensely moving personal experience with Our Lady. The prayer to the right of the statue reads:

O Mary, recall the solemn moment when Jesus, thy Divine Son, dying on the Cross, confided us to thy maternal care. Thou art our Mother, we desire ever to be thy devout children. Let us, therefore, feel the effects of thy powerful intercession with Jesus Christ.

Make thy name again glorious. Pray O Holy Mother of God, for the conversion of England, restoration of the sick, consolation for the afflicted, repentance of sinners, peace to the departed.

Mary, Mother of God, Our Lady of Walsingham, intercede for us.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

Don't handle wildlife (or their leavings) without respiratory protection and proper hand hygiene.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

(Also, covid can make you feel off by giving you anxiety and PTSD just from getting infected. Couldn't be you repeatedly catching and spreading covid over and over "harshing the vibes" though. It was the fact that there was some response to a pandemic in 2020. Yup.)

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

The levels of traditional Chinese architecture by 扇子有画

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

Lol, "and then by accident you become the emperor"

[emperor-gaozu-of-han]

🤷‍♂️ happens to the best of us

[museaumofnaturalhistory]

Meet The World’s Most ‘Safeguarded’ Tree—A Jurassic Survivor Thought Extinct Until 1994

The Wollemi Pine’s bark looks like bubbling chocolate—but its real secret? It’s a 200-million-year-old survivor from the age of dinosaurs.

Meet The World’s Most ‘Safeguarded’ Tree - A Jurassic Survivor Thought Extinct Until 1994 - by Scott Travers Contributor I write about the world of biology.

Forbes - Innovation - Science

Hidden in the remote canyons of Wollemi National Park, in New South Wales, Australia, is a tree so rare & ancient that its exact location remains a closely guarded secret.

The Wollemi Pine (Wollemia Nobilis), a conifer in the 200 million year-old Araucariaceae family, thought to have vanished from the planet - until a chance discovery in 1994 rewrote botanical history.

Since then, this prehistoric survivor has been at the center of 1 of the world’s most intense conservation efforts. Its wild population, numbering just a handful of trees, is strictly monitored, with measures in place protecting it from poaching, disease & environmental threats. Even those permitted to visit the site must undergo decontamination procedures, ensuring that this Jurassic relic remains untouched by modern dangers.

The Wollemi Pine Was Discovered In 1994—Purely By Chance

In September 1994, David Noble, a field officer with the New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service, was trekking through a deep, narrow gorge in Wollemi National Park. As an experienced bushwalker & canyon explorer, he had navigated the rugged terrain before - but this time, something caught his eye. Towering above the dense vegetation was a tree unlike anything he had ever seen. Its dark, knobby bark, which looked like bubbling chocolate and its fern-like foliage were eerily reminiscent of fossils he had encountered in books. Curious, he collected a few samples and took them back for identification.

What followed was one of the most shocking botanical discoveries of the century. Experts confirmed that the tree was not only a new species but also a completely new genus – Wollemia - a rare example of a “living fossil” (something like the Gingko biloba). With close relatives dating back to the Jurassic, the Wollemi pine had defied extinction, surviving in isolation within this hidden canyon, completely undisturbed.

The Wollemi Pine Is The ‘Botanical Equivalent Of A Small Dinosaur’

Noble took some samples to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, where they were examined by botanists Wyn Jones & Jan Allen, who recognized the significance of what they were looking at. They handed it over to Carrick Chambers, the then-Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, who claimed that it was the “botanical equivalent of finding a small dinosaur still alive on Earth.”

It’s not every day that a tree from the dinosaur era is found alive & thriving. It is a direct link to the ancient past, giving valuable insights into plant evolution & resilience.

The 1st order of business, after realizing there were only 100 trees in the wild, was securing their survival. Conservationists quickly restricted access to the site, ensuring that the trees would remain undisturbed. The exact location of the grove was kept confidential, and only a handful of researchers were allowed near it.

Strict biosecurity measures were put in place to prevent the introduction of pathogens, particularly Phytophthora cinnamomi, a deadly soil-borne disease that could wipe out the fragile population. Anyone permitted to visit had to undergo decontamination procedures to minimize the risk of contamination.

The Wollemi Pine Today - From Secrecy To A Symbol Of Conservation

Despite its fragile status, the iconic tree has not only survived but become a global conservation icon. Recognizing the need to safeguard its future, conservationists have worked ensuring that young trees now grow in botanic gardens & private collection the world over, far beyond the remote canyon where they were 1st  discovered.

The Wollemi Pine Is Now A ‘Diplomatic Gift’ & A Symbol Of Resilience

Over the years, the tree has taken on a new role in global diplomacy, symbolizing resilience, longevity & the importance of conservation. Seedlings have been planted in prestigious locations, including the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Kew Gardens in London & other protected sites around the world​.

These young pines act as ambassadors for biodiversity, reminding us that some of Earth’s most ancient species still need protection.

Wollemi Pine - A Future Beyond The Wild

In 2005, the Wollemi pine was made commercially available, allowing individuals & institutions to own & grow this prehistoric marvel​. The idea was simple: by putting the pines in backyards & botanic gardens, conservationists could reduce the risk of illegal poaching while securing a future for the species outside its vulnerable wild habitat.

Though the commercial partnership officially ended in 2010, many young trees continue to be cultivated worldwide. Today, owning a Wollemi pine is not just a novelty - it’s a small but meaningful act of conservation. Meanwhile, in its native habitat, the species remains under strict protection. As of 2021, only 46 adult trees remain in the wild, accompanied by many dozen juveniles​. Conservationists closely monitor the population, implementing biosecurity measures to shield the trees from disease, climate change & wildfires (the 2019-20 wildfire in Australia destroyed several Wollemi pines) – all of which pose a constant threat​.

What began as a secret discovery deep in the canyons of Wollemi National Park has now evolved into one of the most remarkable modern day conservation stories. While the species remains critically endangered, conservation efforts have helped secure its future beyond the wild. The Wollemi Pine now grows in gardens, research institutions & protected landscapes worldwide - but its survival in the wild still hangs in the balance. For a tree that coexisted with dinosaurs, that’s not a bad comeback.

The story of the Wollemi pine speaks to the amazing resilience of life on Earth. But it is also a reminder of how delicate and irreplaceable our natural world is. Take the free Connectedness To Nature Scale to learn how important nature is to you.

Scott Travers : I am an American evolutionary biologist, based at Rutgers University, where I specialize in biodiversity, evolution & genomics. Drop me a note, here. Thanks for your readership & support.

[blumineck]

The Royal Armouries let me play about in their armour!

(This was a set from someone similar in size to me, but it wasn’t exactly correct in all dimensions. Real knights often wore armour that was made to measure, which would allow for a slightly better range of motion. However, for a video game or film character that has looted armour, then something that fits as well as this would be a best case scenario, so it still tells us a fair bit!)

[headspace-hotel]

There is a lot of information out there about weaving, crocheting and knitting, but relatively little about spinning.

Which is a shame, since spinning is really where the "resource provided by the earth" tangibly becomes "object with a use."

Aspects of spinning, such as the amount of twist and the length of the fibers, are impactful upon the thread or yarn created, but lots of fiber crafters don't get to directly play with those variables...

It is so strange how textile production is so utterly dominated by very few fibers, when so many are possible. Industry keeps coming up with new ways to transform bamboo or something into fibers, which is all well and good, but we have yet to run out of easily usable natural fibers that have worked for thousands of years.

Dogbane—Apocyonum cannabinum—was called "Indian hemp" because it was used by Native Americans for ropes, cords and textiles. It's incredibly strong, soft, and easy to collect large amounts of it. But hardly anybody uses it.

[bookwyrmbran]

As far as yarn construction (twist, fiber staple, ply, draw, etc) goes, may I recommend the Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs (Sarah Anderson) and Yarnitecture (Jillian Moreno)? @dirtypuzzle mentioned SpinOff and Fibershed in the comments and those are great magazines and ways to find local groups as well. I've read some great articles on prepping and spinning flax, hemp, cotton, and silk on there in addition to the more popular fleece/fur/hair fibers.

For those especially I can't over-recommend the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook or the Field Guide to Fleece (Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.) An awful lot of excellent fiber breeds and species are now unknown, under-used, and in danger of going extinct; Shave 'Em to Save 'Em and the Livestock Conservancy in general are good resources for finding local people working with those. There's a chiengora (dog wool) group on Ravelry that's great, too, and lots of easily searchable info on raising silkworms at home and spinning from hankies.

There really is a dearth of information easily available on most plant fibers, I too would love to see more of it for like... almost everything, really. At a guess, most potentials get ignored at an institutional level because they're a pain to grow and process in bulk, which in turn means there's little if any data on how they stand up to modern washing and drying and detergents. Bast fibers tend to be a pain to prep as an interested individual (and often smelly!) and can be hard on the hands while spinning, especially those with extra long fibers. Even so a lot of people would spin old/new/ignored plants if they didn't have to process raw plant into spinnable fiber. I suspect that and not knowing which plants might be good options are the biggest obstacles to at least hobbyist experimentation.

[dirtypuzzle]

Here's a blog post where someone attempts to process and spin milkweed stalks. Keep in mind, milkweed stalks produce a bast fiber whereas milkweed fluff can also be spun but makes a brittle yarn by itself and is often mixed with wool or cotton, though I would assume you could process the stalks and then spin the floss into the fiber from the stalks. Spin Off talks about it here. Milkweed also sustains monarch butterflies, which have been having a rough time. You might have some skin reactions when handling milkweed though, so keep an eye.

Fibershed did a spotlight on dogbane, nettle, and milkweed in comparison to hemp and flax. They talk specifically about Native American techniques and current cultivation of all three, particularly dogbane, and ways to spin yarn and make rope. They aren't super in-depth about processing the fibers, but it seems like it's because they have more tutorials/guides on other pages. Bast fibers all have a similar retting->drying->scutching->hackling->spinning (you also have to ripple flax at the beginning) process, generally speaking.

Of course, flax is a really accessible plant fiber to spin yourself! You can plant it yourself, buy unprocessed flax (locally or online), or buy processed but unspun flax. If you're interested in the whole process, this book is the flax bible: Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich. There are a lot of youtubers who go through it all, too.

If you're interested in kudzu, then may I suggest Oigawa Kudzu-fu Studio! They're located in Japan, but they have helpfully created an English website, too, where they go over making kudzu-fu (Japanese name for the cloth from kudzu). And if you ever find yourself going to Japan, you can take a class from them.

On Oigawa Studio's info page, they also mention that they work with ramie (plant in the nettle family), linden tree (basswood), and wisteria, so do with that what you will. I assume a lot of those resources are in Japanese.

Finally, hemp. Laws around if and how you can plant hemp, even for personal non-THC uses, vary wildly from state to state and country to country, so do your research. I'm not super familiar with it, and in my state I literally can't grow any of it at all without applying for a permit, so it's not really worth it for me.

[headspace-hotel]

I've seen a lot of these online resources! They're great starting points. I've also done quite a bit of work with spinning various fibers. I actually made a yarn out of entirely milkweed fluff, though it was too fragile to be very useful for anything, it was a fun learning experience and I'm sure it would work great blended with other fibers.

This is my personal experience with dogbane:

I tried retting, but instead of making the fibers easier to separate from the cuticle, it seemed to make them even harder to clean off. What little Ive been able to read about Native American practices of prep suggests that there was no retting process at all, the fibers were cleaned by scraping.

This was roughly what I came to on my own. I have a sickle-shaped chip of reddish chert/quartz, about as long as my palm, and I just pull the fibers against it so the dry flakes of cuticle come off.

My other tools are: a cheap grill brush, the kind with metal bristles, a hair brush with the stiffest hard plastic bristles I could find, and a round rock I took from some decorative landscaping. The grill brush is for combing out the fibers and for using with the hairbrush to agitate the fibers like carding wool. The round rock is for beating the fibers while they're wet and twisted into a tight bundle, which helps them separate into finer threads. Right now I am experimenting with whether boiling the fibers helps any part of the process, and it's inconclusive so far.

A couple reasons why dogbane might be hard to market as a fiber include: the plant while alive is toxic to humans and animals including dogs, as the name suggest, and secondly, the fibers are orange.

I don't know if the color is genetic or caused by growing conditions, since I have gathered some fibers that are a blond color or even nearly white, but most of the dogbane plants i've professed have had orange fibers, ranging all the way into a deep copper shade.

The colors are honestly really beautiful, but I imagine dyeing the dogbane other colors might be difficult.

[dr-dendritic-trees]

I would actually suspect one of the reasons these resources are scarce is a really boring one.

In my experience, from talking to other spinners, very few spinners like processing fibre. Most people would prefer to buy it ready to spin, if given the option, and since its a hobby, they have the option. But only if they buy commonly used commercially viable fibres (which tend to be wool and silk and a little bit of flax.

People who really want to do the full process are actually very rare and you will probably be very popular in fibrecrafting spaces if you are publicly interested in doing it.

One (1) guy showed up to our weaving guild and mentioned in passing that he enjoyed processing wool and suddenly he was the most popular person in the room. It was very striking.

One the other hand while you're absolutely right that historically there's been a premium placed on white fibre, there is a rapidly growing interest in naturally coloured fibres so that coppery dogbane I've seen in your photos is probably increasingly appealing right now.

[headspace-hotel]

Wait really?

Processing and spinning fibers is like the cocaine of fidget toys. I can't get enough of it. I've legitimately been late to class because I couldn't peel myself away from my fibers

[tumorhead]

I am a big fan of Sally Pointer's Youtube channel. She does historical + PREhistorical(!!!) crafts (European cultures mostly), including wild-foraged fibercraft. She studies artifacts and does recreations. Something about using techniques from the Neolithic and such gives me feelings....also I definitely wanna make some cordage from plants I've got growing....it doesn't look hard just tedious.

I love boring my husband by watching videos about making string.

[gemwel]

A really good way to determine what kind of fiber a plant will produce is to smash the plant (with a rubber mallet) or pick it apart (with your fingers) and see what kind of fibers you see.

Here, we can get long fibers from common mallow and short fibers from the local stinging nettles (which don't really have long fibers). The palm trees also have interesting short and long fibers, but they seem to be fragile and prone to breaking. Most plants have fibers in the outer layer of the stems/branches that can often be picked off. There is also a (mostly inactive) plant fiber group on Tumblr.

For extracting plant fibers, rubber mallets and/or a pasta machine are good for the hitting/squishing needed to start the process. Then there is retting (rotting in water/dew, usually for 7-14 days), cleaning (you can make sodium carbonate from baking soda for this or use dish soap/laundry soap), then maybe more hitting/squishing followed by combing (you can use actual hair combs for long fibers or dog combs for short fibers) before spinning.

Some fibers (like cotton) can be spun directly from the plant. But once you start looking for fibers, you will find them everywhere as they are usually essential to plant structural integrity.

As a bonus, plant fibers usually work better for clothes in hot areas.

Lots of interesting resources in the thread above I will need to check out, but definitely things are biased towards wool spinning at present (my local shop just looked at me strange when I asked about tools for plant fibers and suggested wool stuff).

Finally, processing plant fibers can make a huge, potentially stinky mess, so it is often best to do the initial steps outside.

[medievalistsnet]

Self-Paced Online Course: Olga of Kiev and the Rus

Olga of Kiev and the Rus

This self-paced course is an introduction to Olga of Kiev, medieval ruler of the Rus. Learn about her impact in the history of Ukraine, Chri

[apoptoses]

Hans' gold pourpoint lives rent free in my mind because his decision to wear that for the majority of kcd2 says so much about him and his image he's trying to project.

Because the thing about it is that it's pretty obviously a reconstruction of Charles de Blois' pourpoint, which exists in the musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs de Lyon.

It's made from cloth of gold brocade- the only kind of fabric of the period that would shine in candlelight the way Hans' pourpoint does. The ground of the fabric on the extant pourpoint is ivory silk. Hans' changes colors depending on the lighting- sometimes in Trosky it looks scarlet, most of the time it looks gold. Either way the weave of the fabric is a combination of silk and threads wrapped with extremely finely beaten sheets of actual gold.

It's theorized that the fabric on the extant example was imported from the middle east. And I cannot emphasize how complex of a weave this is because this is before the invention of the jacquard loom, which functioned with punch cards like early computers. These ridiculously expensive threads had to all be dropped and adjusted by hand to get this pattern.

And the thing is- Hans' is even more complex. It's not a geometric repeat, it has scrolling vines and an intensely complicated pattern of birds and deer which makes it even more precious. You can see it a bit here:

The cost of this fabric would have been staggering. And fabric in the era was narrow, maybe 20" wide, and since Hans is a tall man he would need a good deal of fabric for this. Then you add on the fact that it's all pattern matched so that the design is unbroken by the button down chest, and his sleeves are well matched. And the grand assiette sleeves with their unusual tailoring would take even more fabric to keep everything nicely matched up.

Then there's the buttons all the way down the front and on the sleeves, with button holes bound by hand in what would have been silk thread. It can take a good fifteen minutes to cut and bind a buttonhole nicely, so the time spent on those alone is astounding. Each button would be handmade by stuffing a circle of fabric with wool wadding and binding off the end into a thread covered stump (which takes ages to do well, I've never achieved a nice stuffed button in less than ten minutes).

The chest would have also had extra wool padding in it (meaning extra effort to shape and sew it) in order to achieve the wasp-waist effect that gives him such powerful looking shoulders.

So his pourpoint alone is worth more money than most peasant farmers would see in a year. Even in a lifetime, maybe.

It's finer than anything we see on any other character in the game. Von Bergow's clothes are that of a rural lord in comparison. Even Sigismund's royal attire isn't so obviously valuable.

It's also, by nature of being a pourpoint, a military garment at its core. Charles de Blois' pourpoint has arming points in it even though its good condition suggests that it was worn for some ceremony and then probably never used again.

Then you add his hood. Red dye was common, though certain shades of scarlet could be far more expensive. To my eye the gold design on it isn't just simple embroidery but goldwork, aka more real gold threads tacked down to glitter in candlelight, aka even more money worn on his person.

(How he got all of this stuff takes some mental gymnastics- the pourpoint is too well fitted to not have been made for him. Maybe it did belong to him at the start of the game, was picked up by the bandits and sold along to Trosky where it was returned to him. Even a team of the best tailors couldn't put this together in the hours between him being released from the gallows and him going to meet Von Bergow in his chambers, and I highly doubt he would accept Von Bergow's cast offs no matter how fine they are.)

Which is all to say that by wearing this Hans is trying so hard to assert himself as a man of means, worthy of respect. He wants to be noticed. In a room full of well dressed men you still would not be able to take your eyes off the young man wearing more gold on his back than a country lord would ever dream of owning. He wants to be seen as a man who is ready for glorious battle, a true knight in his beautiful pourpoint.

Although sumptuary laws weren't as punishing as they would later be during the renaissance, it could also be read as him reaching above his station a bit because after all, how is the Lord of Pirkstein out dressing the usurper king? It's something of an insult that Lord Capon walks into a room looking like this when his betters don't even dress with such flash.

And that makes it hit all the harder when, at Suchdol during Von Bergow's interrogation, all the men in the room talk over him as though he's not there. He can wear his fine pourpoint but he's not respected as a lord or a military man. It doesn't matter what he does to project the image of a nobleman- he's still not treated as one. For someone who truly believes clothes make the man and everyone should follow social rules as prescribed this has to be a real kick in the gut.

Hans looks like a prince from an illuminated manuscript but none of that matters to the robber barons he's surrounded by. Just another ugly lesson that the rules of the world apply don't seem to apply when it comes to him.

[dduane]

I find myself wondering about wizards in stories and where they came from and who they were before Gandalf and maybe before or seperate from Merlin. Do you perhaps know something?

Well, answering that query fully would probably require something the length of a doctoral thesis. 😅

Let's get a bit into the etymology first, so that we all know what we're talking about.

The word itself, in English anyway, is relatively new (and only goes back to the mid- to late 1400s.). It's a compound constructed from the Old English word for "wise" and the -ard ending (a conditional possessive/associative suffix that usually means "to have a specific quality"—see the entry over here at EtymOnline for some discussion of this). A lot of the earliest uses of this suffix that have come down to us are pejorative (i.e. dotard, dullard, etc...), and the arguments about just why this should be can get pretty heated: so let's not go there just now. But the inherent conflict between the "wise" part of the word and the "-ard" part is interesting.

In English, then, the concept just starts out as meaning "wise person". (From the OED:)

(Pausing here to note that I wasn't expecting to see the words "Vulcan" and "wizard" come up in the same sentence today.) 😏

...But after that something interesting happens, and the word starts attracting occult associations. And not just occult ones, either: Biblical ones.

This meaning is mostly still with us, and gives us something moderately solid to hang our mythologers' and folkorists' hats on. The interesting thing here is that the 1550-ish connection to the Magi points in its turn back to much older stories about powerful people (usually male) who were associated with some kind of priesthood or official (usually governmental) structure.

The stories of those wizards go back thousands of years. They can be found in such ancient resources as the Egyptian Westcar Papyrus, which tells stories of a number of magic-workers (some named, some anonymous civil-servant scribes). The Papyrus itself is dated back to between the 16th and 18th centuries BC, and the stories in it are supposed to date back to the 26th century BC.

That's pushing five thousand years ago. So wizards (in terms of being folks who people tell stories about) plainly have some staying power. Merlin is a mere babe in arms compared to these guys.

One of these wizard-scribes discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and teaches her paramour a lesson by creating a wax crocodile that drags him to the bottom of a nearby lake. (I'm afraid neither of the cheaters survive the events that then follow.) In another story, after one of a king's barge-rowing maidens loses an amulet overboard and the whole rowing team goes on strike until it's found, the king's scribe Djadjaemankh performs a spell that piles one half of the lake's water on top of the other half, revealing the lost amulet. A third story tells of the wizard Dedi, who (besides being a big eater and drinker) is really good at reattaching severed heads to animals, and possesses various other types of secret knowledge...

You get the picture. The Papyrus is famed for the complexity of its language, for its contents, and their age... and leaves us wondering, "How many other stories like these were out there and were simply never found?" ...No telling.

It wasn't just the Egyptians who had wizard-stories like these, either. The Mesopotamians had two clearly described classes of priestly magic-workers: one group (baru) who were diviners and visionaries, and another class (esipu) whose title is usually translated as "wizards," and who specialized in exorcism and the removal of taboos and evil spells.

For me, the interesting thread here is that these classes of magic-workers were all theoretically under some higher authority's command. In this regard, the concept of Gandalf as being in Middle-Earth on the business of the Valar is sort of an unexpected connection to these older traditions.

...But there's a dark flip side to this very ancient approach. Mesopotamian freelance witches and wizards—practitioners functioning outside of their cultures' "approved" supervisory structures—routinely came from disadvantaged and marginalized groups (foreigners, peddlers, actors, women...) and were equally routinely persecuted and killed by the authorities. ...So it becomes obvious that some of the uglier tropes surrounding wizardry go way back.

...Anyway: wizardry as a concept, and wizards (under various names) as characters, are old: far older than our own last millennium or two. What I've referenced above is just a smattering of what the ancient world has to offer on the subject. (If I started in on China alone, we'd be here for the rest of the month...)

There's plenty more info on this online, once you start rummaging. Hope this interests you in doing that! 🙂

[dvoeverie-stitches]

Turning to Saint Agatha During Tonight’s Thunderstorms

The Torment of Saint Agatha, Hannah Flowers

During our motel stay my hromnička (thunder candle) is in one of my chests at my parents’ home. For the last couple of years I have made my hromničky from mullein stalks, which put off a lot of smoke—hardly appropriate in our current circumstance. But that’s not to say that I failed to bring items to protect against storms as we approach tornado season!

In Central European folk belief (including Moravia), St. Agatha was invoked not only against fire but also against storms and hail. Ethnographic sources record that bread, salt, and water blessed on her feast day were used during storms—thrown into fire, scattered in fields, or cast toward storm clouds—to protect against lightning and to disperse hail.

For the last couple of years I have consecrated bread, salt, and water in a personal ritual on Saint Agatha’s feast day

Agatha’s suffering—especially her endurance under torture—was symbolically linked to: endurance against destructive forces and power over violent, chaotic elements (like storms).

According to her legend, after her martyrdom in Sicily, a deadly eruption of Mount Etna threatened nearby communities. People reportedly stopped the lava flow by invoking Agatha and using her veil as a protective relic. Because of this, she became a patron against fire. In folk logic, lightning = heavenly fire, so her protection extended naturally to thunderstorms.

Martyr→ fire miracle → protection from fire → lightning → storms → hail → crop protection

“A piece of bread was placed on the ceiling behind the beam to protect the house from lightning. The housekeeper sprinkled the holy water in places around the house and poured it into the well so frogs wouldn’t stay in it, and sprinkled the grain intended for sowing in the spring so it wouldn’t be eaten by worms.”

Květná neděle ma Moravě (Palm Sunday in Moravia) by F. G. Waldmuller illustrates the placement of apotropaic items behind the beam (in this case pussy willows consecrated in Palm Sunday).

This evening I found a nice little spot to use as a ceiling beam substitute for the Saint Agatha bread that I brought with us.

During a lull in the storm I left our room quickly “to go outside, sprinkle hátová water in the direction of the approaching storm, and make the sign of the cross.”

Sources:

Od Hromnic až do Tří Králů From Groundhog Day to the Three Kings: Customs and Traditions of Villages in Znojmo (Southern Moravian district in Czechia that my great-grandparents were from) by Jiří Mačuda

Obyčeje a slavnosti v české lidové kultuře Customs and festivals in Czech folk culture by Eva Večerková

[dvoeverie-stitches]

Slovakian Kraslice

ELENA PRANDOVÁ, Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

(The article is prepared from the materials of Adam Pranda, who prepared a more extensive study on this issue for the journal Národopisné actuality.)

fig. No. 1 to E. Prandova's article. Compositions of lilies of the valley - 1. with colored patches, 2. with a top sun, 3. with a divided patch, 4. with patches (end lilies), 5.-8. lily of the valley bows. Drawings by R. Mikulová, 1983, reproduction by H. Bakaljarová, 1984

Our homeland has many folk artists, who decorate eggs - Easter eggs with various techniques in the spring, and some currently also throughout the year. The origin of the decoration of Easter eggs and their ceremonial use was related to the understanding of the egg as a symbol of prosperity. The symbolic color and ornamentation of the Easter eggs related to spring customs has over time been transformed into decor, and their aesthetic function today is also the result of several ceremonial functions from the past. Therefore, even the partial analytical work on Easter egg art, especially about its creators, who create exceptional aesthetic values ​​with a great source of inspiration and a feeling for beauty, will undoubtedly contribute to a comprehensive understanding of this type of folk art.

While the territory of eastern Slovakia can be clearly characterized in relation to the decoration of Easter eggs as an area of ​​painting (batiking) with pins, western and partly also central Slovakia is much more complex and fragmented not only in terms of the spread of individual decoration techniques, but also in terms of the color and use of Easter egg ornamentation. Especially in western Slovakia, almost all decorative techniques are represented (dyeing, batiking with a tube, etching, scraping, pasting with mesh and textile). This conditioned - along with the rich colloquial use of Easter eggs - a great development of Easter egg ornaments and diverse color compositions. All the decorative techniques mentioned have their excellent representatives, who sensitively use the traditional ornamental fund and place it technically perfectly and creatively on the round egg shell.

fig. No. 4. Ornamental compositions: 1. shugona,2. a3. broadleaves, 4. cruciferous broadleaves, 5. shugona divided, 6. sunflower, 7. four-leaf clover, 8. sunflower. Drawings by R. Mikulová, 1983, reproduction by H. Bakaljarová, 1984.

One of the most important and leading artists of batik Easter eggs is Štefánia Dudáková from Domaniž, district Location Bystrica (20 August 1912). As a painter of multicolored Easter eggs, she achieved her first successes as a girl, when girls and women sought her out during the Easter season to decorate their eggs. in that period she did not know rest, as she was "stealing" eggs day and night in order to satisfy the customary need of her own village, but also of the nearer and more distant surroundings. The ornamental decoration of Easter eggs in the period of his youth was

fig. No. 5. Ornamental compositions: 1. ray, 2. head, 3. and 4. arrows, 5. split sun, 6. star, 7. spider star, 8, bow star. Drawings by R. Mikulová, 1983, reproduction by H. Bakaljarová, 1984.

less rich and less complex. The patterns were only complemented by joking inscriptions and wishes of girls to the grooms. Unpretentious and generally used simple inscriptions were common, e.g. Painted egg, I give you Janice, or unversed wishes Happy Easter. Inscriptions were painted[/] mainly on the middle perimeter strips, where the surface was relatively flat and therefore most suitable for writing. Unlike other painters, she devoted herself to her hobby with the same intensity even in her later years. They were helped in their work by their husband and gradually growing children

fig. No. 6. Ornamental compositions: 1. sedge, 3. and 3. rake, 4. rib, 5. butterfly, 6. holly, 7. terminal grass, 8. terminal sunflower. Drawings by R. Mikulová, 1983, reproduction by H. Bakaljarová, 1984.

ry, today excellent Easter egg painters. Her family supported her and was her great moral support. She achieved great success in this artistic expression when she orientated her work more broadly within the framework of cooperation with the Center for Folk Art Production. According to the concluded[/] contract, she supplied 1,400 Easter eggs annually in the fifties, and already 2,400 in the seventies: At the same time, she made comprehensive use of the rich ornamental fund of individual components of the folk culture of the area, which she further organically developed and gradually moved on to painting more

fig. No. 7. Ornamental compositions: 1. large spider, 2. small spider, 3. leaf, 4. forgotten, 5. large grasshopper, 6. large grasshopper, 7. small grasshopper, 8. small grasshopper. Drawings by R. Mikulová, 1983, reproduction by H. Bakaljarová, 1984.

colorful Easter eggs. from the technical and artistic side, his Easter eggs become an excellent example of artistic talent, skill and taste. The drawing of the ornament and the color composition are in accordance with tradition and with the new concept and evaluation of Easter eggs as an artistic expression and not just a colloquial expression

. The basic outline is written with a mixture of paraffin and beeswax in a ratio of 1:1. The mixture is heated in a small amount in a tin container and applied to the surface of the egg with a simple tool produced on the principle of a miniature funnel by a so-called scribe. The pen is dipped in wax, with which wide strips are written according to its thickness. Writing with wax requires a steady hand, because if the wax falls off, the Easter egg becomes worthless.

The colors of batik Easter eggs are limited to a few basic colors, or color shades. In the past, when Š. Dudáková relied exclusively on domestic sources of dyes, she mainly used dyes of vegetable origin. The yellow color was obtained by immersing an egg in a saffron solution, brown from onion skins, brown-red by adding vinegar to a decoction of red onion skins, green from rye decoction. She also used dyes of inorganic origin. Iron in the form of various pieces and sawdust produced a brown color, paper packaging and crepe paper red, "ink" solid color violet-blue. in the 1970s, she started using special aniline dyes, but when necessary she also used organic dyes, which she recognized from her youth.

Š. Dudáková's batik Easter eggs stand out for their precise and clean drawing of ornamental elements, motifs and compositions. They come in one to five colors in combinations white-yellow-pink-orange-burgundy, white-pink-cyclamen-burgundy, white-yellow-orange-red-purple-blue. The traditional Domanish colors brown and green appear sporadically, even in combination with yellow, or with white and red. The artist uses negative and positive methods in batik painting. In the negative method, he creates combinations in e.g. white - yellow - pink - orange - red - burgundy, while the wax is first applied to the white shell and the egg is gradually immersed in a richer shade. In the positive method, the egg is dyed in a dark solution, then wax is applied and the color is removed with a cabbage peeler. This is how a two-color Easter egg is created, while the negative method enables a multi-colored combination, as well as the creation of other variations of ornamental motifs.

Although Š. Dudáková has been influenced by the tradition of the environment in which she lives since the beginning of her creations in the creation of ornamental compositions on her Easter eggs, her work represents an example of the extraordinary independence and originality of a folk creator. He does not transfer patterns from other designs to the ornamentation of the Easter Bunny, but develops the basic motifs in such a way that they do not lose their specific character and their peculiar details stand out. in the work of the painter, the line is the main factor in the composition of ornamental sets and at the same time determines the form and carries the rhythm. Its thickness, determined by the width of the pen, usually does not change for individual Easter eggs, so the color harmony or contrast of the lines is the starting point for the creative effect of the ornamental elements. The lines that remain in the original white, or the lightest color of the shell, usually form the central parts of the whole pattern. Using a clear, sharply contoured line, the artist creates all the basic outlines of the Easter egg decoration. The surface of the egg is divided in various ways, most often symmetrically with an ornamental band - horizontally or vertically. Ornamental bands, which sometimes replace a simple line in the composition, are in the creature

be Š. Dudáková's essential component of the decoration, regardless of whether their role is to frame the central motifs or whether they become determining factors of the decorative solution. Even though the aforementioned delamination bands to a certain extent repeat the elements of the central decorative motifs, they retain their independence and exceptionality to a considerable extent, which testifies to the great creative imagination and combinatory skills of the painter. The used ornamental elements, motifs and compositions can be divided into three groups: geometric (dots, lines, triangles, squares, rhombuses, bands, semicircles, arcs, spirals, spirals, etc.), which develop either into motifs of agricultural tools (forks, rakes) or cosmogonic (sun, stars); plant ones (scales, shoots, leaves, flowers, etc.) are combined into motifs and compositions such as lilies of the valley, hollyhocks, cagání, headworts, grasshoppers), and animal ones into hearts, butterflies, spiders, etc. Š. Dudáková has her own names for each Easter egg and individual patterns (Fig. 1-7).

The headquarters of folk art production recognized the painter's invention, skill, precision and harmonious balance of colors and patterns in the production of Easter eggs by awarding her the title of master of folk art production (1962). Š. Dudáková received many diplomas, [/] medals, awards and public recognition for her artistic work. We will mention at least a few, e.g. in 1975 she received the ÚĽUV commemorative medal for her merits in preserving and developing folk art production and art. Since she passes on her art to the younger generation, in 1979 she was awarded a diploma of the Slovak Central Council of the Pioneer Organization for exemplary pedagogical leadership of the ZUČ circle and the development of artistic values ​​among children, and in 1984 a diploma for exemplary leadership of the ZUČ children's circle at the national competition for the most beautiful youth Easter egg, etc. Master Dudáková's Easter eggs were successfully exhibited at all domestic and foreign events ÚĽUV and Slovak museums, while the artist introduced herself by actively painting them in many cities of our homeland, as well as abroad, where she left the most beautiful business card of our folk art with her artistic expression.

References

Research materials from the field 1958-1983 A. Prandu.

PRANDA, A.: Š. Dudáková born Chelková. Slovak bibliographic dictionary, rkp.; Kraslice, comment to EAS (in press); Kraslice in words. the people. artistic production. Bratislava 1958.

N?rodopisn? aktuality/1988/3

[ltwilliammowett]

This is a very special piece and do you know what it is ?

It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally found it. This is a lamp lifter ( This one above is a lamp lifter made from oak ,from HMS Lyon a 2nd rate launched in 1847)  used to hold a lantern without burning your fingers. Because such lanterns could get very hot very quickly, and to prevent that, the lantern was picked up with it and carried in front of it.

A lamp lifter in use - both pictures are in : The Handicrafts of the Sailor, by Steven Banks

The master mates also used it to warn their comrades when an officer appeared, then they would knock on something and the comrades who might have been gambling could quickly disappear or exchange the game for something harmless like sewing. When exactly these lamp lifters appear is unfortunately unknown but it is assumed since the middle of the 15th century.