#skill sharing

[tea-and-antlers]

Listen this will feel a little scary and a little bad to you but if there is one thing I learned in 8+ years of community building it is that you have to offer your skills and brag about them in the same breath. Not unwarrantedly but in ways that enthusiastically allow for dialogue and exchange.

This can look like "Oh I can fix that, I have a sewing machine and I'm really good at hemming." Or "I can help you write that, I get a lot of joy in reading job descriptions and putting together cover letters based on it. It's like a puzzle!" Or "Oh man I love to cook and bake, I would love to make a dinner for you and your family and bring it over, " And even "I can take you to an appointment, I have a liscence and I can go shopping while I wait. I love to shop."

Even if these things are annoying. Even if these things take up time, and you do not get paid for them. If you want a community that flourishes within itself we must all be willing to offer something, anything, with joy and enthusiasm.

You need to have both the confidence and the warmth to show people that acts like these are not favors, they are how we support one another and how we form communities that are safe and accessible yes but also joyful for everyone involved.

As we are honest in the things we cannot do we must be honest in the things we can.

[kieraoona]

Surviving, community, and you!

Ok folks....it's going to be a rough time for everyone for the next while.

Stuff is going to seem really insane, people may get tired, angry, or afraid.

We will all hear crazy stuff on the news. The current administration in the USA will make everyone exhausted (for both Americans, and everyone else, especially countries the orange guy wants to annex...but we won't let him)

So we all need to take care of our communities as best we can.

Check in on your friends

Try to reach out to LGBTQIA friends, and especially trans folk to see how you can best help them

Reach out to your BIPOC people Encourage creativity and art

Showcase Make do and Mend tactics to help save money in the longer term

Share recipes and skills

Teach and learn skills to repair our stuff

Learn how to knit, crochet, embroider, paint or sculpt

Live! Even if just out of spite.

On the skills front, if anyone has sewing questions, reach out to me here, on Bluesky, or YouTube and I will try to help you, or even make little videos to showcase and help you with a specific question or repair, as best I can. I try to make all my sewing resources as free and as open source as I possibly can. I also have some free wartime knitting books, and other patterns and resources on my Linktree which goes to a google drive, as well as free on my Ko-Fi

[b33tlejules]

How to rhargent in 10 easy steps (aka the b33tlejules workflow as of 2/1/25)

inspired by @reapersmarch 's post here

step 1: find some lesbians on pinterest

step 2: trace! but only for initial guidelines. tracing isn't evil and it will not kill you, but it will be noticeable by artists who recognize your reference.

step 3: flip canvas and retrace your own sketch with more accurate character details (hair, proportions, facial expressions, etc)

step 4: lineart <3333333 my favorite <33333 linework is like breathing to me sorry if you struggle i am not among you.

step 5: add base values, and on top of that add two layers of light tones (soft light blendmode) and two layers of darker tones (hard light blendmode). vaguely reference the reference photo for light direction and shadows. keep it loose and blobby. The blue is there mainly for fun but what I'm really looking at is Value.

step 6: blend! keep some spots solid for sharp contrast and blend out where light occludes. I make it up 99% of the time. just do what looks good idk. added a bg so the values are closer together.

step 7: my 2nd favorite!! duplicate all of the layers and flatten them into one solid image (minus lineart). Slap a gradient map down on that bad boy and bring the % down to around 50% if you wanna keep the blue.

Step 8: Turn down the opacity a bit of the above layer

Step 9: add the Original Colors Of The Characters (Rhan's medium skintone, argent's silver skintone and pink dress) back on top of the color layers and set the blend mode to overlay or some shit. boom. Then make a new layer on top of everything and throw colors everywhere until it looks good.

Step 10: Crop it! You're done! Yippee! Rhargent completed!

[petula-xx]

I wonder how many people around the world this year have discovered that their 'prepper shed' full of ammo, weapons and tinned food has been completely useless after a catastrophic flood.

Helping each other out, skill sharing, pooling resources, team work and community mindedness are proving pretty useful for survival right now though.

[fayeandknight]

I'm a huge proponent of sharing skills and knowledge, particularly of the how to do things for yourself variety. And when I share these with others I try to do so in a non judgemental way. A phrase I use a lot is "If no one taught you, how would you know?" And I mean it in the most genuine way. I understand that there are a lot things people just aren't taught anymore and I strongly feel that it is unfair to judge people for not knowing skills they were never taught.

All that to say one of my coworkers came in yesterday and asked how bad it was to drive with a flat tire. My immediate reaction was !!!! because it can lead to damage that's very costly especially given that a fix, even a temporary one, is relatively easy most of the time.

So I told my coworker I can help as I have a pack that supplies compressed air, can jump start a car, and has USB charging ports. (If you don't have one I highly recommend it. I got mine on sale for about $40 and it's come in handy more times than I can count.)

I asked what their tire pressure should be and they weren't sure. No problem, let me show you how to find that information. (There's a sticker inside the driver side door that lists front, rear, and spare tire pressure.) Then I walked my coworker through attaching the hose, how to set the pack to the appropriate number, and from there it just runs. It has a nice digital display and stops when it reaches the set air pressure. Very easy.

When we came back inside another coworker said they thought their tires might need air but wasn't sure. I took them out and explained how to find what their tires should be at and how to use a tire pressure gauge. We did end up putting air in one of the tires.

Back inside a third coworker admitted they had a tire that definitely needs air but they were embarrassed to get it fixed. So I went through showing them everything and filling their tire. This coworker told me their dad had told them how to do all this but the advice was hard to listen to. And I responded that I'm always happy to help. What I wanted to say is that I'm happy to explain things in a friendly way because things taught when the learner is made to feel like shit rarely stick in a helpful way. But that's too heavy for a light learning experience.

At the end of the day a different coworker started to complain to me about how younger people (they and I have about a decade on the majority of our coworkers) don't know how to help themselves. And I did my best to spin it as yes it's a shame they weren't taught these skills but fortunately you and I know them and are able to share them going forward. This stumped them for a bit before they eventually agreed with me.

I don't really have a neat way to wrap up this post. So I'm just going to reiterate that I'm always happy to pass along knowledge, provide assistance where I am able to, and ultimately help people help themselves in the areas I can.

[fanficfanattic]

I was trained to clean by an absolute madwoman. But I know a lot of people who did not get that education. So this link is for you!

Midwest Magic Cleaning’s intro to housekeeping.

[creamteaanyone]

So, I’m making an extremely specific cosplay for an upcoming con. (The character is in this outfit for maybe two minutes at most).

As I had a free weekend a few friends and I had a highly successful evening of crafting and altering pieces. Yay us!

But no matter what I did my homemade hat (cylindrical cardboard box with a peak made of another cardboard box) would not stay in one piece and the beautiful 3D printed emblem wasn’t staying put either.

So I asked my dad for help. For context he is a DIY fanatic. He looks at the pieces for 5 minutes and then declares he needs to go to his shed, reappears with a leather punch, garden twine and a tube of bathroom silicone sealant. 30 minutes of work and he’s attached the emblem and the peak to the body of the hat securely.

Anyway, all this to say, never doubt the application of seemingly unrelated skills to fandom stuff!