Conchoidal is a fun word

A group of disabled women trying to sell our art together.

[prisma-art-collective]

Welcome to the Prisma Art Collective!!

We're just now getting set up, and the other girls are still setting up their workstations, so what you'll see most right now is flintknapped pieces from me, Eve.

But in the future expect pieces in all sorts of mediums from Diana, Magdalena, Iota, and Adeline!

We sell most of our pieces through our Etsy, linked below, but we also do commissions and direct sales for those who don't want to deal with Etsy as a platform.

A note on international shipping, we're still figuring out the details on where we can reliably and quickly ship to outside of the United States, so to avoid misleading anyone our Etsy is set to US only. We are still willing to ship internationally, but for now we're handling that off-platform on a case by case basis as we figure out what countries we can manage.

UPDATE: After an absolutely lovely first batch of sales, we have discovered that international shipping and customs forms are way easier than expected, and we now offer it directly through Etsy as well! Thank you for your patience and I hope this means more people get to enjoy our work. Due to increased shipping costs internationally, we cannot offer free shipping on international orders, so expect a price increase of you are ordering outside the US.

Feel free to message us if you have questions, want to discuss a potential commission, or want to buy directly.

We're also all very passionate about our crafts and love to discuss them and their history! So expect a lot of posts about that and feel free to send questions.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PrismaArtCollective

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

kiln guns are so awesome. slag on da kiln?

shotgun that shit off

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

8 gauge btw

[prisma-art-collective]

more industries should let you do your work tasks via specialized firearm i think

[prisma-art-collective]

i do think it takes next to zero effort to check that the people you reblog from arent stalkers, fascists, and harassers

the kinda people who contribute to harassment campaigns are definitionally not subtle, they're trying to be heard, and it takes seconds to make sure you aren't platforming these people

if you think it still isnt worth the effort, that's your prerogative, but dont be complaining that the victims of these campaigns have no desire to coddle or absolve you of your apathy

[certifiedsexed]

you seem really nice and like a cool person to talk to

💀 I'm so used to this website's hate game that ngl, I saw the first part of this in my notifs and immediately got so anxious about what the "but" was going to be but this' actually so sweet. 🥹💞

Thank you, Anon, I appreciate that. :)

[prisma-art-collective]

listening and learning

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

let's do uhhhhh show and tell saturday. can you please show me something interesting and tell me about it? bonus points awarded if it's something you made yourself, I wanna see the things your hands create

[prisma-art-collective]

thought id show the first arrowhead i ever made, with a screwdriver and a chunk of flint i found in a driveway at the age of 18, weird to think how much farther ive gone with this, and that only a few months after this photo was taken id get a job flintknapping for a university

[prisma-art-collective]

so, a lot more things are knappable than people realize

i also grew up in a place that's mostly limestone, the piece of flint in this image is from a limestone bed originally, the vast majority of flint forms in limestone, its just hard to find the individuals nodes and beds

but also, limestone heavy areas also often have sandstone layers, and sandstone and quartzite alike are knappable

not long after this photo was taken, i moved to a place where basalt was the primary stone type, it was knappable, but without heat treatment it was extremely difficult

so a lot of my early experiences knapping was exclusively with human made materials

id scavenge old floor tiles, glass panes, glass bottles, broken ceramic mugs, and abandoned terracotta pots and terracotta roof tiles

if you know where to look there's a lot of options

(there is also the potential to buy some material, chert and obsidian goes for about $1.50 a pound in the US if you're buying from a knapping supplier, and i would be happy to share my favorite supplier, but i understand any amount of money can often be prohibitive)

[prisma-art-collective]

youre welcome also wait PLEASE WEAR GLOVES IF YOURE KNAPPING GLASS

a lot of experienced flintknappers go without gloves or use fingerless gloves for more control but especially when you're learning please use gloves with anything that knaps extremely sharp like glass, obsidian, or chert/flint

i had to reattach my own fingertip in college bc of a flintknapping accident and that was after years of experience, PPE is important

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

let's do uhhhhh show and tell saturday. can you please show me something interesting and tell me about it? bonus points awarded if it's something you made yourself, I wanna see the things your hands create

[prisma-art-collective]

thought id show the first arrowhead i ever made, with a screwdriver and a chunk of flint i found in a driveway at the age of 18, weird to think how much farther ive gone with this, and that only a few months after this photo was taken id get a job flintknapping for a university

[prisma-art-collective]

so, a lot more things are knappable than people realize

i also grew up in a place that's mostly limestone, the piece of flint in this image is from a limestone bed originally, the vast majority of flint forms in limestone, its just hard to find the individuals nodes and beds

but also, limestone heavy areas also often have sandstone layers, and sandstone and quartzite alike are knappable

not long after this photo was taken, i moved to a place where basalt was the primary stone type, it was knappable, but without heat treatment it was extremely difficult

so a lot of my early experiences knapping was exclusively with human made materials

id scavenge old floor tiles, glass panes, glass bottles, broken ceramic mugs, and abandoned terracotta pots and terracotta roof tiles

if you know where to look there's a lot of options

(there is also the potential to buy some material, chert and obsidian goes for about $1.50 a pound in the US if you're buying from a knapping supplier, and i would be happy to share my favorite supplier, but i understand any amount of money can often be prohibitive)

[indoor-1173115411231139-first]

[prisma-art-collective]

i need to get some more antler so i can put handles on more of my pieces

[maidslime]

Film photos of Roxborough State Park from December 2025.

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

let's do uhhhhh show and tell saturday. can you please show me something interesting and tell me about it? bonus points awarded if it's something you made yourself, I wanna see the things your hands create

[prisma-art-collective]

thought id show the first arrowhead i ever made, with a screwdriver and a chunk of flint i found in a driveway at the age of 18, weird to think how much farther ive gone with this, and that only a few months after this photo was taken id get a job flintknapping for a university

[shark-tranny]

mr president they slayed the second spire

[prisma-art-collective]

i couldnt help myself

[prisma-art-collective]

this is officially my first faceted stone

ended up finishing it prematurely, as it fell off the dop (i was at the end of pre polishing the pavilion)

but even still, i love my little prism

[prisma-art-collective]

something you will rapidly rediscover upon learning a new skill is that those teaching it often forget that what is obvious to them is not obvious to a beginner

in related news, our faceting machine arrived, expect cut stones as soon as i can make one successfully

[was-once-somewhere-else]

I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.

[was-once-somewhere-else]

looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago

[totally-a-wizard]

If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency.  It was most likely started as a sanitary concern.  Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.

[was-once-somewhere-else]

this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this

[prisma-art-collective]

I think this is a very, bold piece of conjecture to be stating so declaratively.

For one, the precursor to true glass was fritware (also known as faience in certain contexts), and we have a fairly sizeable body of evidence for fritware primarily being used as a decorative material, often as a substitute for ornate stones and minerals, particularly as a substitute for turquoise in Egypt.

And the earliest examples of true glass that we see are often treated the same way, like a stone. Made into beads yes, but also carved into sculptures and decorative inlays and settings.

Furthermore, the first glass vessels were usually core-formed, which means they were built by coiling heated glass around a core of sand and clay, fusing it, then scraping out the core. This fundamentally creates a porous interior surface embedded with clay and sand, retaining the same problems as unglazed clay vessels in terms of sanitation, albeit not quite as severely.

And notice how I said unglazed, glazing techniques for pottery were developed at around the same time as the very earliest examples of simple glass objects. Glazing provides all the sanitary benefits of glass, while requiring significantly less labor, significantly less fuel, and significantly cheaper materials than glass, in a medium that is also less likely to break. Glass for most of its early history was Incredibly expensive to produce, and it’s not until around the 1st century BCE that that development of glassblowing makes glassware cheap enough to compete with clay goods (and even then, we continue to see plenty of clay, stone, and metal vessels persist).

From the evidence we have, it seems much more likely that the driving force for the development of glassworking in its early history was for its aesthetic and decorative value. Which makes sense, humans like when things look pretty.

And while this wasn’t said here, I feel the need to address it since it’s absolutely everywhere elsewhere in the reblogs of this post: No, glass is not a superviscous or supercooled fluid. It does not flow appreciably on any observable timescales, and plenty of unambiguously solid materials flow to the same or greater degree than it (we are talking nanometers at Most over billions of years, this does not a liquid make)

There is exactly one robust argument for glass glass below its transition temperature to be considered a liquid, and that is when you are discussing its lack of a first order phase transition, a concept that has virtually no bearing on any common definition of a solid outside of that one incredibly technical context, and which has no relation to the myth that medieval glass is wavy and thicker on one end due to flow (medieval glass panes were made by spinning the glass in a circle and then cutting panes from that circles, centripetal force while the glass was still hot is where the swell and waves comes from, and plenty of medieval glass is swollen on the side Opposite gravity)

[astra-the-dragon]

for what it’s worth, Jewish culture has for thousands of years consideres the different porosity/absorbing qualities of earthware, glass, glazed pottery etc to be relevant in its laws around food. some can be cleaned of “meatiness” or not, some can be made ritually impure permantenly while others not. glass is one of very few materials that cannot be considered impregnated by substances placed upon it, even greasy or spicy ones.

until germ theory became mainstream – very recently! – humans simply did not think about hygiene and cleanliness in the same way we do now. a lot of ritual, culture, and myth formed around the observed properties of certain materials. eg pure silver is magically cleansing (before we know it has antibacterial properties).

[prisma-art-collective]

It should go without saying but zionists are not welcome anywhere near this blog. We don't want your money or your engagement, fuck off.

Also he had no way to know this, but it is incredibly funny getting this explained to me when one of the things I focused on when i was still doing archaeology was Levantine pottery from the Iron Age to the Roman occupation period. I chose not to mention this because it is irrelevant to the beginnings of glass working.

Now, if you actually wanted to discuss Jewish contributions to the history of glassworking, there is something incredibly important to mention. That development of glassblowing in the 1st century BCE? That technique was developed by Jewish communities in North Africa and the Levant. But you fundamentally cannot acknowledge that contribution without also acknowledging that many of the Jewish people responsible for glassblowing were Palestinian, the same Palestinians being colonized and genocided today.

[prisma-art-collective]

When you learn the material science behind flintknapping, you rather quickly realize just how much of the world you could knap if you were either very rich or owned a walk-in freezer

[prisma-art-collective]

so unfortunately temperature doesn't just magically make something knappable

even excluding those materials which do not have a solid form, not all solid materials undergo sufficient embrittlement at low temperatures

and even excluding those materials that do not become brittle when cold, not all brittle materials exhibit conchoidal fracture

ultimately thats the property we are looking for here, materials that do not possess strong preferential cleavage and fracture directions and can therefore be fractured conchoidally are those considered knappable

now this is an Incredibly large group materials still, nearly every brittle amorphous material and nearly everything with a glass transition temperature is potentially included, making almost all plastics a potential option

but even crystals display conchoidal fracture so long as their crystal structure doesnt produce definite preferential fracture and cleavage planes, I've been hoping to try out some larger specimens of synthetic ruby or cubic zirconia for their knappability at some point, since they both exhibit some conchoidal fracture

honestly I'd love to someday make a "will it knap" series, i think it would be a fun way to educate people on both material science and flintknapping

[liminal-librarian]

I bet water ice is knapable, I'd estimate at about -150 F

[prisma-art-collective]

i'm actually, quite struggling to find information on the cleavage and fracture preferences of water ice

i assume the temperature specification is to clarify you're talking about ice one c instead of one h

i give it a 50/50, the diamond cubic crystal structure is kind of a grab bag of things that are either strongly conchoidal or exhibit perfect cleavage

my instinct would be to try with one h (normal ice) since so many hexagonal crystals are conchoidally fracturing, but i do still suspect the hydrogen bonding would make things weird

[prisma-art-collective]

People always get confused whenever I say different kinds of glass have different personalities. But this one fought me at every single opportunity.

Glass knife available on Etsy!

[sylithoftheend]

Rites And Rituals

A Guide to the Unreal

Rites And Rituals is a guide to the worlds within, and all their mysteries. 

Rites And Rituals is a set of tools and frameworks to provide you with an understanding of its subject, of yourself, and of the Real. 

Rites And Rituals is a path to a world whose name refuses to leave your tongue. 

Take the road with me?

Rites And Rituals by SliceOfArdath

A Guide to the Unreal. An ode to the Ophidian Toxin within our minds.

Rites And Rituals is released now, go check it out, leave a review if you like it!

[missstrogen]

Go check out my new essay!