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@jeansknittingblog
Baby blanket for my sister's coworker! A simple diagonal stripe to show off the new Speckle colorways from Caron Simply Soft. Simply Soft is my favorite yarn for blankets (especially baby blankets) since it's machine washable and dry-able, gets softer after washing, stain resistant, and highly durable. Hope it will get love for years to come!
Risu just sent me this and I am SO DELIGHTED
Archeologists say they have found the world's oldest piece of yarn or cord, making it the earliest known evidence of textile and cord making
Ahhhhhhh!!! Go read it! Go read it!! The cording was plied by Neanderthals!!! The article talks about how we can’t keep thinking about them as being stupid it’s so delightful! In these trying times, let’s read about some joyful anthropological and archaeological discoveries!!!
Read it! The fact that it’s plied is so exciting! For plied cord, you first spin your fibers in one direction (they did it clockwise) and then take that collection of singles and twist them in the opposite direction (in this case counterclockwise). So it’s a process that requires planning and experience. You spin your first bit, you set it aside, you spin your second and third, you ply them. You can’t do it all in one go. And unless this piece happens to be the work of the very first person to spin fibers, and that person was a super genius who not only invented the idea of spinning but the technique for plying, it shows that the Neanderthals were communicating technological skills amongst each other. Which I mean isn’t news in and of itself, but this is just one more piece of evidence.
FERAL FROTHING IN FIBER ARTS THIS SHIT IS SO COOL
Holy shit this is incredible! The puts textile technology at 40,000 - 50,000 years old; the earliest previous evidence we had was 20,000 - 25,000 years.
And also, like the poster above said, this is evidence of *planning*. I was going into the article thinking “hmmm, extremely cool but probably thigh-spun two ply which is a single stage process…?” but no! This is three ply cord! I guess it might be possible to do thigh-spun three ply (be bloody tricky though which would be evidence of skill in itself), but more likely this was a highly skilled multi-stage process.
Holy shit.
My second 6'x6' blanket (feat. Whistler)! It's going to the dog's family because they've been super helpful and supportive of me over the past few years.
ANYWAY you cannot convince me that the air nomads didn’t have any sort of trade good based on the flying bison and aang just didn’t have the time or safety to make and sell any of these while trying to stop ozai. they probably did so much spinning just because drop spindles are super transportable, it’s something to do while flying long distances, there’s always a weaver somewhere willing to buy yarn, and there’s always, always large amounts of shed fur just. around. look at how much came off of appa that one episode. so much fur
so three things happen the summer after ozai is defeated and appa starts shedding in earnest again
aang starts spinning and selling yarn because that’s What You Do and he’s clinging REAL HARD to every possible air nomad tradition because, well, who else will remember these things?
toph hears about this and scruffs him before he can sell too much because she’s a merchants daughter and holy shit aang do you understand what you’re selling?? yarn from the last known sky bison! the avatar’s own spirit guide!! spun by the avatars own hand!!!! what are you doing aang!!!!!! she has to drag katara in at this point because aang is real unhappy with the idea that his normal flying bison yarn of, uh, questionable quality is being sold to exclusive high class weavers so they can make shawls for filthy rich nobles for baaaaaank just on the basis of his name. this isn’t how the monks did it :/ and he doesn’t WANT a lot of money anyway! he’s a monk!! he only asks for what he needs to survive!! anyway katara manages to talk toph around to donating most of the money to reconstruction efforts, charities, and orphanages and convinces aang that having an emergency fund is a good thing and he should keep something. aang accidentally ends up with a reasonably full bank account and is really confused about how that happened, why it’s there, and what he’s supposed to do with it
there is a real weird period of time where it’s In Fashion for high noble ladies to have shawls and scarves dyed the same color as aangs clothes (because that’s how you know it’s made with special avatar yarn!) or have images of appa woven into them (can you imagine a shawl that’s just a full length body shot of appa?? amazing) and all the earth kingdom nobility are just rocking green and orange like nbd. weaving decorative shawls with slubby yarn becomes really in fashion, too, because aang is not great at spinning. he’s 13 and it’s boring, ok?
BONUS sokka is just. so mad. you could have been making bank with appa the whole time we were scrambling around the planet aang? do you realize how much more food we could have had? how many more hot baths?? how could you betray me like this
(probably the air nomads also did a lot of weaving but it was mostly the pregnant nuns and the really old nomads so it’s a little off aangs radar. and does aang eat cheese? it never comes up in series but I would also believe that the nomads made a lot of air bison cheese and bison butter tea)
headcanon accepted re: sky bison products
you said SPINNING on a DROP SPINDLE and i instantly went YES. OH GOD YES.
i bet sky bison yarn is really strong but probably not super soft - we see in the show that the fibers are really long, which lends itself well to strong yarns that can stand up to a lot of wear and tear (silk yarn is INCREDIBLE when it comes to being hard-wearing, and that’s mostly because silk is basically an INFINITELY LONG FIBER). But because it’s so long and comes from such a large animal, it’s probably really coarse and thick.
I’m imagining most of those high-class ladies would be wearing at least one layer underneath their shawls, because bison yarn is probably pretty itchy if you’re used to high quality wool, silk, or fine linen. Especially bison yarn spun by a 13yo who doesn’t really like spinning.
unless of course the air nomads bred their bison specifically for soft fur, but generally when you’re breeding for stuff like that, you need different breeds for different purposes. appa’s pretty clearly a long-distance riding bison, which would probably have been a different breed than whichever ones would have been bred for soft fur. most species of domesticated animal that are dual+ purpose (i.e. meat/milk/wool/transportation) have breeds that can only do one or two of those well, and the others not as great.
the air nomads obviously would not have been breeding for meat, because vegetarians. For long distance travel and a nomadic lifestyle I bet they would have wanted a travel/milk dual purpose breed, but because they can regulate their body temperature with airbending, soft warm yarn might not have been a high priority for that breed.
which is a lot of words to say “appa-fur yarn is ITCHY”
My impression is that the sky bisons aren’t actually domesticated, so much as semi-sentient and choosing to partner with the air nomads, so I don’t think they’d be bred for anything, much less soft hair.
I actually headcanon spinning as something air nomad kids would be taught to do from a young age to burn off energy and stress and make it easier for them to learn to meditate, so I think Aang would probably be decent at making yarn that’s evenly spun, but probably wouldn’t have the experience to make super fine thread.
I would assume that appa has a double layer coat like most high altitude herd animals, so even without selective breeding the insulating inner layer would probably be suuuper soft. just look up qiviut for an idea of how soft and expensive muskox fur can get, and the skeins of bison fur yarn I have aren’t noticeably different from something like alpaca. assuming that appa sheds a proportionate amount of undercoat to muskox or bison (up to seven pounds a year) there is going to be a LOT of snuggly undercoat to turn into snuggly Soft Things
and I’ve seen a couple people say that aang would probably have learned spinning pretty young and be fairly competent at it, and I agree! I def meant the questionable yarn quality to be a statement on his attention span and post-war schedule, not skill (I don’t really know how to spin so idk if constantly starting and stopping and not paying any attention anyway would effect the consistency any? it just Felt Right)
I’ve never spun anything like qiviut - the most exotic thing I’ve spun is alpaca, unless folks think silk is more exotic - so I didn’t think about the double coat! Don’t they usually need special treatment to separate the topcoat from the undercoat, tho? I wouldn’t be surprised if Aang either didn’t know or wasn’t very good at separating from them.
I *do* spin on a drop spindle, tho, and the biggest problem with stopping and starting often is keeping the single the same width, but you have the same problem stopping and starting ANY kind of spinning project. In some ways, a drop spindle makes it easier to control that than a regular spinning wheel - you have a lot more control over the fiber and the yarn you’re spinning, so you can be more precise. My drop spindle yarns tend to be very regular and compact, while my spinning wheel yarns are more varied and lofty.
However, now I’m picturing the moment when you spin your single a little too thin, and the drop spindle lives up to its name - from hundreds or even thousands of feet in the air! Plummetting off the side of the air bison, with the older nomads scrambling to catch it…
I can totally imagine that the air nomads hat special spindles with gliders (like his stick where he glides with) to spin with airbending as a practice for beginner benders, or in a similar stile as the hand spinning wheels from India, but for air nomads!
And wouldn’t the process from start to finish be a good lesson in great fullness? Like how long it takes from baby bison to clothes
Maby even a live milestone. From first bison who chosen you to your first own robe/Stola??
It could even be that the Air Nomad’s robes were MADE out of sky bison fur, if the under coat was a) incredibly soft (I bet they’d wear the over coat too just because they didn’t really care about worldly possessions and comfortability) and b) their only farm animal was the sky bison. That’s what the Air Nomad’s wear, is Sky bison wool clothes.
Also, to the person who said Sky Bisons would only shed about seven pounds a year, I would like to counter that idea with the fact that Appa is GARGANTUAN. He has enough room on his saddle to carry literally six or seven children and their equipment on his back without much complaint, of which these children are not too much smaller than adults. An ox or an Alpaca or a normal Bison are tiny compared to Appa.
Appa’d have a metric butt ton of under fur on his body. I’d say about twenty to thirty pounds of under fur, with more on top, at the very least.
ok so I didn’t know that supported spindles existed and YES, very much yes to those. I love that.
I was actually trying to say that if muskox shed seven pounds we could use that to extrapolate how much appa shed if he shed proportionate to his size, not that appa would only shed seven pounds
ok, adhd rabbit hole time because I just looked up the average size of muskoxen and the approximate size of appa and, uh. apparently muskoxen are 900lbs full grown and appa is ten tons. over TWENTY TIMES THE SIZE OF A MUSKOX. obvs that’s doesn’t actually tell us anything about appas actual height and length but that’s the only solid number the show gives us and thirty pounds of underfur is starting to seem pretty conservative. it might be closer to 120lbs???
which is a weird way to say that I bet the air nomads had lots of crazy air powered spinning contraptions (and I’m still assuming that anything they had that wasn’t easily transportable was dealt with by pregnant nuns and aang wasn’t really introduced to it yet) and they just churned out textiles. literally everything fabric the nomads used was probably bison fur in some way because there was just. so. much. fur.
Textiles Tumblr coming in clutch to build the air nomad trade empire
Back when I was in high school, I used to do a fair amount of chalk typography like this. A few weeks ago I found my old chalk and wanted to do something positive, so I spent my morning making this.
First there was SkyKnit. Now there's HAT3000
[Chunky Hat”, crocheted by Joannastar]
A while ago, I tried to train a neural network to generate knitting patterns by showing it a few thousand existing patterns so it could use trial and error to generate new patterns. I called the project SkyKnit, and its new patterns were… well, they were patterns. But they were nothing like the patterns it had been trained on. The test knitters of Ravelry’s adults-only, often-indecorous LSG forum had to do a lot of debugging to turn them into reality and, even debugged, SkyKnit’s patterns were strangely organic, prone to weird branching ribbing and organic-looking holes, turning into irregular shapes or even tentacles.
[Make Caows and Shapcho, knitted by MeganAnn, and Lacy 2047, knitted by michaela112358]
Ever since the SkyKnit project, I’ve wanted to do a version for crochet. Like knitting, crochet has strong ties to mathematics and programming, and in many ways it’s more flexible. A crochet algorithm could potentially create even more exotic shapes than SkyKnit did.
For this project, to be dubbed HAT3000, I decided to make some improvements. I would train it on just crochet hats, which ought to be simple enough and similar enough that a neural net might be able to figure out the general pattern and produce functional designs. The LSG forum crocheters helped me assemble training data of 500 vintage out-of-copyright patterns, plus these kind designers contributed their own patterns to the effort: krisitis-patterns, irishlacenet, SierraPelona, fairyhedgehogg, watrpriestess, RachyNewin, agnosticnun, UnplannedCauli, membril, Moogly, and SuviCrochets.
I used Max Woolf’s gpt-2-simple collab notebook to finetune OpenAI’s GPT-2-355M neural net model. It’s pretrained with a bunch of non-crochet knowledge from the internet (fanfiction, recipes, conspiracy theories), but it does have a much longer memory than SkyKnit does, so will have a better chance of being able to figure out how the rows relate to one another. HAT3000 was set up for success.
My first indication that something was going wrong was when the hats kept exploding into hyperbolic super-surfaces.
A pattern would start modestly enough with what could plausibly be the crown of a hat, but somewhere there would be an instruction that made the next row MUCH bigger than the previous row, and then the next row MUCH bigger than that. The later rows would turn floppy to fit all that length in while still attached to a much smaller row, and then the next rows would have to curl even more. Ruffles would turn to tight ruffles, and then to corals, and then to brains.
Here’s one rather innocently titled “Brim Hat Pattern #1708” which Ravelry user Persipan heroically crocheted all the way through the final row (or at least, halfway through that final row; we haven’t heard from them since, they’re probably okay). By Row 9, there are over 1700 stitches. Row 10 has 3500 stitches, took 9.75 hours to complete, and even that is nothing compared to the edging.
Almost all of HAT3000’s patterns did this, eating yarn, eating sanity, becoming more and more hyperbolic, threatening to collapse into black holes… why, since none of the example hats did this?
A few people explained it to me thus: It looks like it’s really hard for HAT3000 to NOT fill the planet with ruffly brains. Basically, since most hats are built from the center out, HAT3000 only knows how to make each circle bigger than the previous one, adding 1 new stitch for every 2 in the previous row, or, for the faster increases usually used at the center of a hat, as many as 5 or 8 stitches for every 1 in the previous row. That would still be okay if HAT3000 knew how to control its increases. Unfortunately, if it accidentally increases too much in 1 row, that excess increase gets multiplied by the next layer, which in turn gets multiplied again. The tiniest instability turns exponentially into yarn-eating disaster. Meanwhile, HAT3000 thinks it’s doing great because the pattern text itself is still very close match to what a human would do. It has no idea that its hat has exploded.
The worst offender is a pattern called simply “The End…” which by my calculations requires enough yarn to wrap the known universe in a ball of yarn about a billion light years thick.
Some of HAT3000’s patterns did actually produce hats, though they tended to all be tiny (probably because they had fewer rows and therefore fewer opportunities to begin suddenly expanding).
Other patterns produced not hats but strange artifacts, purpose unknown. Here’s the full pattern for one, called “Hang in Wind”:
Hang in Wind: Toss the pieces together. This is the windmill: Windmill in Wind: With a 1 cc ball of yarn, ch 14, join. Do not join, twist yarn to form a knot, or cut yarn.
Other patterns were equally inscrutable.
“New theory: HAT3000 didn’t want us to make hats for ourselves. We’re making hats for neural networks. Which are weird and amorphous and have dimensions and connections that humans cannot comprehend and also don’t really have heads.” - ScarlettTanager
One of the most entertaining aspects of the finetuned HAT3000 was how much of its original broad training it retained. Prompt it with the beginning of a story, and it could still add to the story in more or less the same style as the prompt. Hilariously, its strategy was now to gradually work the topic back toward crochet hats. In the paragraphs below, the prompt I gave HAT3000 is in bold. The AI did the rest.
Harry whirled to face Snape, heart beating hard. “Wh–What will you do?”
Snape’s eyes narrowed slightly and he lowered his wand, then stepped aside. As he approached behind Harry, he knelt down to kiss the front rim of Harry’s green-gloved hat as he pulled her closer. Snape slipped on the silk and reached in carefully, then unbuttoned Harry’s green-gloved hat. He looked Harry in the eyes and stroked her crown lightly before pushing on the seam of the hat to attach it. He finished on the front of Harry’s hat with a snap. With a light flourish he tied an extra strand of fabric, then another twist of silk, then another twist of silk.
HAT3000’s terrible crochet-themed erotica was even sometimes crochetable.
HAT3000 would sometimes turn its story prompts into things that were not crochet patterns exactly, but something strangely akin. Confrontations would turn into tightly choreographed fight scenes, the combatants weaving around and around each other. Villagers would build earthworks, walls, and moats in concentric circles. Recipes would turn into round cakes with dozens of stacked layers. Spaceships and adventuring heroes would follow complex and highly detailed routes. The trained model must have been able to draw some sort of connection between these various domains.
What have I learned from HAT3000? Like SkyKnit, it shows what unexpectedness happens when a neural net trainer, armed with approximately zero knowledge of a particular problem, nevertheless plows ahead and throws a neural net at it anyways. And like its knitting counterpart, HAT3000 owes its entire success to the creativity of human artists who took its often nonsensical patterns, fixed the bugs, and turned them into physical artifacts. I’d like to extend a huge thanks to the knitters and crocheters who sacrificed time, sanity, and yarn to satisfy the whims of these very weird AIs.
You can join the conversation, and crochet along, at the HAT3000 LSG thread (if you register first and don’t mind the swearing). There’s also a twitter thread that collects most of the patterns and many of the crocheted examples. There’s a big generated set of patterns here.
I generated far more HAT3000 responses to story prompts than would fit in this post , but I picked some of my favorites to highlight as bonus material. I think they’re fascinating. If you have ever dreamt of a crossover between Star Wars/Harry Potter fan fiction and crochet, well YOU ARE IN LUCK. Enter your email here to get them!
You can order my book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You! It’s out November 5 2019.
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Hi! My name is Janeen. I just found your blog by googling knitted knickers for trans people. I love your idea of knitting knickers for trans women and was thinking of this idea too. Has anything come of this? Did you approach Knitted Knockers about it?
Hi! Sorry it took so long to get back to you, I usually only use tumblr on mobile and it crashes whenever I try to access direct messages.
Although I got a ton of reblogs and likes, I didn’t get any specific advice or volunteers to test them out. I did eventually end up making a pair for my trans coworker, but her daughter “borrowed” them for furry cosplay before she got to test them out. I feel like I should get some more feedback and trials from the trans community before I make a big deal out of things, especially since I’m not a trans girl (and since I’m no longer living near Knitted Knockers HQ), so while I’m still enthusiastic about the idea, it’s kind of on the back burner for now.
If you or somebody you know would like to try out a pair for me, I’d be super happy! If you feel comfortable sending me a direct message/ask with an address or PO box I could mail them to, I could make some in your preferred size and color. Knitted Knockers recommends Cascade Yarns’ Ultra PimaUltra Pima Fine (links for color options). There are also variegated versions of both here: x x
Personally I prefer to order from Apple Yarns in Bellingham, since 1) the owner is a friend of a friend, 2) they have a deal with Cascade yarns so they can sell the pima cotton yarn at a steep discount because 3) Knitted Knockers started there and they also donate profits from pima cotton sales to Knitted Knockers.
Someday I will learn not to watch movies and shows late at night that make me bawl like a tiny baby, but today is not that day.
When you knit and you have a cat
The Bestest barrette model ❤️
Made my mom a new pair of socks! Used the leftover yarn from her birthday socks two years ago for the foot and the cuff is a cream yarn that I bought for her birthday socks this year.
I made a ridiculously tiny pumpkin sweater for my coworker's ridiculously tiny dog. It turned out the perfect size and he likes it a lot!
Butterflies (and a moth) from the Pacific Science Center's butterfly room
Birthday socks for my mom! I gave her socks last year too, so I think it'll become an annual thing.
Devil's food cake with rum fudge frosting and pie crust cinnamon rolls, and a chocolate pecan pie I brought into work. I asked the day and evening caregivers to give some to the residents (I work nights in a dementia care residence), but they just ate it themselves without sharing and left me a pile of dirty dishes and a mug of soured milk that I had to return to the kitchen, and on my way it all slid off the cutting board and I got soured milk and cake crumbs all over the floor. Needless to say, I was pretty peeved and now only my noc shift gets treats!
A flower pot and silk flowers can make a cheap and pretty decoration to hide pads and tampons in a convenient spot. Unless you’re not into flowers, in which case you can fill the pot with rubber snakes or something.
Macaroni casserole Preheat oven to 350 F Cook ~1 box pasta, your choice what kind (I used half gluten-free penne and half elbows), drain Melt ON LOW until mixed thoroughly (doesn’t need to be fully melted)~16 oz ricotta, 1 lb cheddar (shredded or chopped), 8 oz mozzarella, 8 oz cream cheese Add ~3 eggs to cheese mixture, stir until mixed thoroughly Add spices (I used paprika, black pepper, thyme, marjoram, powdered garlic, and parsley) to cheese, mix In 9”X13” pan mix together pasta and cheese Cook ~30 min or until edges start to peel away from the pan, slight browning is present, or a toothpick comes out clean
Bianca approved.
