#fiber nerd

[hearthandheather]

Made this little capelet from some Icelandic wool, perfect for fall. Makes me feel like an old country Nonna while I harvest herbs for drying.

[mythspirationart]

True Blue by Hana Russell

Month of Love, Week 2: Blue (one day late, oops)

8x10 ink with digital color

Inspired by The Wild Swans (or the Six Ravens, Twelve Swans, and a bunch of other bros turn into birds, little sis has to rescue them stories). I absolutely loved this story growing up, and as a fiber nerd was really excited to find out you can in fact make clothing with nettles, though the processed fiber is called ramie.

As an adult fiber nerd, I get really annoyed that none of the stories depict the sister actually processing the nettles. She goes and picks nettles and then boom makes shirts. So, here is her spinning ramie with a distaff. My headcannon is that she weaves the shirts on a little backstrap loom. I might make a series of her actually crafting the shirts, hmm...

Disclaimer: Nettle fiber is retted and won’t irritate your hands when you spin or weave it. However, wild nettle plants are full of ow before retting, and it takes ~20 square feet of very healthy nettle plants to make one shirt. She is also stuck gathering them from graveyards not big farm fields, so she is probably constantly picking nettles and irritating her hands for those seven years. Without cussing out loud. Talk about dedication!

[bomberqueen17]

reply about horsehair

mxbuster replied to this post

Tailoring uses horsehair fabric as a stiffener, as did Victorian crinolines and bustle pads. There’s a contemporary braided trim that’s called horsehair braid but is in fact now synthetic used to make hairpin tabs and such in hats, also edge stabilizing in wedding garments.

OH YEAH i can’t believe i forgot to mention horsehair braid and crinolines. I believe “crinoline” even literally means like. horsehair-and-linen.

There was something I was looking at horsehair braid for, I don’t remember now, a few months ago, and I was like “could i just braid horsehair for this” and i literally did not look into it any farther than that because like why would anyone do that, but I did have a bunch of it in my cart. I do wish I could remember what I was getting it for. I know you use it in the hems of retro-style circle skirts too sometimes, maybe it was for that i was thinking about it. Never did make that circle skirt did I.

[hearthandheather]

Started adding mushrooms to the cape I'm making as a gift. Pretty pleased with how this little guy turned out. Planning to add some cord talismans to the trim!

[hearthandheather]

Working with local fiber, hand spinning the yarn with intention to infuse the final product with a little protection magick.

[mariepaschunderground]

Checking the crochet tag is often the highlight of my Tumblr day <3