Pinned for my own reference)
hello vonnie
ojovivo
noise dept.

Product Placement
RMH
cherry valley forever

if i look back, i am lost
Not today Justin
🪼

titsay
wallacepolsom

No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

izzy's playlists!
$LAYYYTER
occasionally subtle

Origami Around

Kaledo Art
will byers stan first human second
Keni
seen from Canada

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@thisiswhyitscalledadropspindle
Pinned for my own reference)
Beaded Berries // Levchuk Art
I made a quilt! I even finished making a quilt! Let's not talk about how long it was in progress, haha. Basically, back when I was using more quilting cotton for book covers, and before my taste in book covers had really settled out, I bought a lot of fabric, and... preemptively cut it down into cover-sized pieces. I wasn't sure what to do with it, but really didn't want to just toss it, so last year when I was seized by an impulse to experiment with english paper piecing, I went for it!
I even made a plan, before I began, I was sooo serious about this. And just like cross-stitch, i barely got started before i forgot how to count and had to rearrange some pieces on the fly
I knew i wanted to go small and just was making a lap quilt, but I was working on this for... a while. I had some times at work where I was listening to long meetings and had to stay awake, and when it got chilly, getting cozy and stitching things definitely was appealing. And once the end was in sight, i was definitely able to accelerate
(and then i took the quilt with me to shop for backing, and let the quilt store lady convince me to add more hexagons, to get the most out of my backing fabric) (objectively correct, but a cruel thing to do to a person 🤣)
I also signed up for a longarm class because I passionately hate quilting on my home machine, and decided that I really ought to try handquilting once before I settled on longarm as my likely favorite method. And a friend suggested I try preserving the irregular edge, and I found a method (using facing rather than binding) and was like haha, how hard could it be? :V
Anyways, even though I was starting to girlboss really close to the sun, it all came together in the end. I spent less than a day hating it and regretting everything, which is a real record for me and quilts! It suggests I'm getting past the tantrum stage with a craft I do want to conquer, haha. Naturally, I'm finishing this just as the weather warms up too much for a lap blanket to be appealing at work, but shhh, it's fine!
I just had to collect all of these responses together in one place
Edit: And one from my friend, who doesn't have a tumblr (yet)
#i keep waiting for someone to address the '18th century looms were huge' claim#like sure some were#but the fact that textile mills had been invented doesn't mean that all home weaving ceased#indeed people still weave for fun or profit in this the 21st century#smaller looms were still being built and used in the 18th century just as smaller looms are still being built and used today#and that's without considering the existence of inkle/tape/band looms which were/are used for making narrower woven ribbons for trimming etc#small 18th century looms absolutely exist
there are thousands of notes and a few people ABSOLUTELY addressed this xD
I wanna add mine! But it still has some assembling to do before I can move on to the next step
...Okay this place *is* better than Reddit.
My wife did a lot of hand crafts while we were dating. After we got engaged, my father piped up that at least she didn't have a spinning wheel. We put it in the doorway the first time my parents came to visit.
Her loom is packed away at the moment so she can work on an uncountable number of knitting projects and metalwork at the moment.
Crafty friends, it is February. Spring approaches. And in the spirit of spring cleaning, I have decided that I will be doing Frog or Finish February (I don’t know if that’s a thing or something I’ve made up) and invite anyone who wishes to join me!
The aim is to go through my knitting wips and, as the name suggests, either frog or finish them throughout the month. Clean slate for March!
I don’t tend to have a lot of wips on the go at once, but I do have some abandoned wips that need dealing with. And I have a pair of socks I haven’t touched in over a year that is so close to being finished it’s frankly ridiculous they’ve been sat like that for so long
The frog pile!
Two scarves and my handspun cardigan
And the finish pile!
Two pairs of socks and a sweater. I would like to finish the sweater before next weekend, I’ve got a sleeve left to do on that, so it’s taking priority over everything else.
The main reason these socks have been sat so close to finished for so long (other than that they were in storage for a few months) is the state of the yarn.
This is a mess
The ultimate adhd mood: put it off for a year and a half, finished it in an afternoon
I love them though. The main colourway was a yarn I picked up from @mothyandthesquid at a yarn festival in 2024, the contrast was some leftover yarn I had of something I dyed forever ago
Holy fuck you illegally downloaded a cardigan
@inkthusiasm
Another crochet skirt ❤️ made the maxi skirt using pix.zel’s maxi skirt pattern🪲 I started this back in February or March I believe! I started a new job so this went on the back burner but I finally got the motivation to finish it for my birthday! Super happy I did <3
Tiktok post by @ wynunlimited.
I have several dresses made using this method
Some more fibre craft memes!
It took me five days to drum card the rest of the Gotland wool roving I dyed. My hands and grip strength would call it quits after about four ounces a day.
But I got it all carded, the batts are rolled and safely tucked away in a big box awaiting to be spun. (It reminds me of a big box of weirdly colored cinnamon rolls when I open it.) So that makes 17 batts boxed up, plus one batt I’ve already predrafted, to go with the three batts I’ve already spun. My knee is happier having had a bit of a rest so I will be breaking out my wheel again. Only this time I will be more cognizant of the fact that I’m still recovering from a knee injury and won’t spin for hours on end without a break.
Picture descriptions: a large cardboard box filled with rolled batts of Gotland wool in the gradient of dark blue to light blue to green/teal to brown; close up shots of the rolled batts; various shots of the different batts
I've long been looking for what I think of as a "scrapbook quilt" design for a long time, a pattern where each block would use the fabrics of a previous quilt I've made, as a way of remembering even the projects I give away.
Someone in a Facebook group I follow posted about postage stamp quilts, and a light bulb went off in my head. I can use even the itty bitty pieces from old projects that aren't good for much else. I can do it a little bit at a time so it's not as intimidating to sew everything together. So when I've been getting bored of half square triangles for my tree of life quilt, I've been making postage stamp blocks.
for when the tv knitting needs to be a shape, I have been referring back to this pdf for years for basic garter stuff. also handy when designing your own lace rot 😊
Knowledge for the knowledge hoard!
The same person also made one for center-out shawls!
For the knowledge hoard!
Favourite & Queue on Ravelry The only thing more mindless to knit than plain top-down […]
I truly hate to tell you all this, but the reason needle sizes are numbered that way (smaller numbers = bigger needles) is BECAUSE SOME ASSHOLE HAD A 1-INCH DIAMETER CYLINDER AND LABELED HIS NEEDLES' SIZES BY HOW MANY NEEDLES HE COULD SHOVE IN THERE.
Like, 24 24-gauge needles can fit in a 1-inch cylinder. 18 18-gauge needles can fit in a 1-inch cylinder. Wrong and horrible. The worst possible way to measure a needle. Good night.
this is how shotgun shells are made apparently and then needles got made that way too
Wires as well
That is so unnecessarily imprecise.
It’s not actually that imprecise from a low-tech perspective though? How else are you going to measure the difference between a 6 vs a 9 gauge needle without some highly precise measuring equipment? This is cheap and replicable, and isn’t it easier to make a big cylinder to match a specific diameter?
I'd measure the diameter of the mold used to make the needle and label the molded needles accordingly but however people want to do it is fine I guess
Stacking circles inside circles doesn't measure things all that precisely. To give a super exaggerated example, a 1-guage needle via this method could be 1 inch diameter, .51 inch diamater, or anything in between. You can nearly double the size of a needle at that scale and still have the same gauge.
Obviously most needles are smaller than that and the margin of error is thus smaller, but it's still so unnecessarily imprecise when you can just measure the diameter of the molds and use that as your standard. If you want to measure them at home by chucking them in a ring you still can. But the measurement standard should be diameter-based.
It seems weirdly imprecise because it's not true. I don't know where this rumor comes from, but that's not how needle sizes came about. As I understand it, they come from wire gauge sizes, where you make a wire thinner and thinner by repeatedly pulling it through smaller and smaller holes in a draw plate:
They're numbered in order from largest to smallest because you do them sequentially, making the wire slightly thinner each time, and the gauge # is just the number of holes you pull it through.
Notably, in every gauge system I'm aware of, the size-0 wire or needle is still much, much less than an inch across, because it's a wire or a needle, not a piece of rebar.
My best guess about the "number of wires/needles that fit in a 1in cylinder" things is that someone who was confused about gauge numbers had a 1" hole, noticed that they could shove a little more than 20 24-gauge wires in it, jumped to the conclusion that this must be how it was defined, and started confidently telling everyone that this was true.
Do you want me to use historical knitting knowledge to make this a little bit worse
I must know how historical knitting information can be anything but a benefit.
And now I'm thinking about the Terrible Knitters of Mold or whatever it was, the women who hand-knit REALLY fast using knitting sheaths.
Right! so this post is about sewing needles, where gauge/diameter are slightly less important than in other types of needle, such as medical needles or knitting needles. There's of reasonable amount of wiggle room in crafting a sewing needle, a very ancient technology that can really be made any old way (it doesn't even need to have an eye - it can just be a poky thorn or animal quill that pokes thread through holes.) And the technological innovation of the metal sewing needle being made from drawn wire and the points ground on a grindstone is supported because we know that's how they did it and because that's the easiest way to to make long thin pieces of metal, so needle size mapping to wire size (and a higher number being number of draws through a plate) makes sense.
A historical forerunner of knitting, nalbinding, involves a single bone needle that looks like this, which is a tool that a reasonable competent handcrafter can make from bone.
The modern practice of fast knitting, however, requires at least a pair needles whose diameters exactly match, and for a lot of knitting work, require a set of needles that exactly match.
Sewing needles are tremendously low-tech tech. As I said, the eye is optional. It is not-impossible to make a bone, wood, quill or ivory needle with very little technology, simply by whittling. The introduction of metal wire-drawing techniques made them easier and better-quality, but you don't need to start with fine metalcraft to sew. (although sewing does FEEL like that. If You Wish To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch Sew A Single Flipping Button You Must First Invent the Universe.)
Knitting needles are pickier in their production than sewing needles. It is annoying and difficult to make four perfectly matching bastards. Also, since knitting makes its own fabric as it goes, it's very useful to have a fixed idea of the diameter of the needles, because that determines the properties of the resulting fabric.
So knitting needle popularity and knitted textile volumes are strongly (but not universally!) linked to the development of drawn-wire metal manufacturing, and the rises in popularity of knitted textiles follow the rise of drawn-wire metal manufacturing. European depictions of Knitting Madonnas show Mary knitting in the round on long metal double-points.
(also, for the record: knitting needles used to be called "pins," in English, which made a bit of sense because, like pins, they don't have eyes. But they also make stitches (like needles). At any rate, English now calls them "needles.")
So why aren't knitting needles - which you'd think are more closely linked to wire gauge - numbered "backwards" (higher number -> smaller needle) like sewing needles are?
Well, regrettably, they used to be - and that's how you'll find needle sizes described in (for example) early 20th century European knitting patterns! the oldest methodologies of knitting terminology corresponded in some ways to "draws through a plate", though it's hard to find out more about that (a historian who cares could do that) because standardised wire gauges weren't common, knitting patterns were secretive, the textiles themselves haven't survived, and people didn't think it was very important. Various countries and artisans used different numbers to describe wire and needles, and there were no consistent gauges for any.
That's why, today, a serious knitter will have a helpful tool to measure needles, detect what size they are, convert between USA and metric needles sizes, and also helpfully measure the gauge of the knitted material in cm or inches to compare against the expected fabric gauge in the pattern. To measure your needle, you pass it through the hole and see which one it matches! Here's a knitter's gauge:
You'll notice that a modern knitter's gauge recapitulates two tools from further up the thread (ha) - it resembles the wire draw plate, used for making wire, as well as the more engineering-looking wire gauge! This is because, again, it's one of the more efficient ways to measure this kind of material item. But you'll note a few other things. One is that there are quite weird numbers on one side. The hole at the bottom, labelled "9.00 mm" on one side, clearly refers to the current standard 9mm knitting needle. In the US, this needle is called a size 13... and in some mysterious measurement called GWR, it's 00.
This harkens back to when knitting needles were connected to wire-drawing and the numbers ran "backwards". I don't know precisely what GWR stands for, but it's known to be connected to that, and thus some kind of "gauge wire reference."
A blogger who has looked at old knitting gauges connected Chamber's Bell Gauge with a knitting pattern, which begins: Take steel pins No. 13, Chambers' bell gauge...
Here's Chamber's Bell Gauge for sizing knitting needles. This gauge was created in the UK in 1847 and became almost the knitting standard - and the numbers go backwards. You can see that a size-1 knitting needle is the biggest, and indicates the size of the wire used to start making knitting needles! and the more "passes" make a smaller needle.
The USA was sort of a Wild West of knitting gauge for a very long time, either using artisanal English gauges (as steel needles tended to come from England anyway, but that's another post) or random individual manufacturer's sizes determined largely by wool size. This is a topic of great interest to people who like historical fashions and designs, and collectors of knitting gauges. An in-depth post below calls gauges, fittingly, "Rosetta Stones". Here's a proprietary measurement system of unclear age - a historian could make a guess - but look at the absolutely fabulous materials the needles could be made from! Bone, steel, applewood, celluloid, and NON-INFLAMMABLE (as celluloid was apparently that much of a problem.) There's a separate scale for your steels. There's a proprietary metric AND the metric system.
Early North American Knitting Needle Gauges Part 1 – Early Days and the Sizing Challenge – Webster's Knitting Needle Notions
And what that little card shows is that, at a point that we can only narrow down a little bit, "imperial/USA" knitting needle sizes swung 'round to recapitulate the metric system: bigger needles have more millimetres, and are thus a higher size-number.
But the UK didn't do that. Look at this gauge from part 2 of the post: Early North American Knitting Needle Gauges Part 2 – The Big Firms in the USA – Webster's Knitting Needle Notions
It has English sizes going backwards. Because of wire.
By WW2, there was a burst of innovation, from which the USA emerged staggering and blooded, with a single unified knitting-needle size, agreed-upon as a shared industry standard by needle manufacturers. This happened overnight and possibly as a result of a drinking session.
With the USA having pinned (ha) a measuring system down, and Metric ticking along in blissful and inarguable perfection, the Old English measurement, or GWR, based on the "backwards" wire scale, started disappearing.
Today, we tend to measure knitting needles as either Metric or USA, and patterns note both:
But if you're interested in historical knitting patterns, which use either "old English sizes" or an equivalent, those go backwards - and link directly to wire gauge.
This is part of the underpinning tradition of knitting being a direct conversation across the elders of human history (if you wish to knit a mitten, you must first reconcile the generations) as well as a pitched long-distance psychic battle with the pattern designer.
I hope this helps nothing, and confuses you more. Kiss!
Heads up if you're a sewing hobbyist...
Buy those patterns you've been thinking about while you still can.
The legacy sewing pattern brands Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls, and Vogue, commonly referred to as the Big 4, have been sold to a liquidato
This is a motherfuckin' GAME CHANGER
The “Big 4” sewing patterns are saved. Simplicity, McCall’s, Vogue & Butterick get new life under Rubelmann Capital.
SCA Thirty Year Tapestry Project
(1995-1996)
The Barony of Adiantum (Eugene, OR) created a Jacobean style tapestry to gift to the Kingdom of the West depicting a "Tree of Life" showing the kingdoms and principalities of our organization as they branched out from the first kingdom, the West. It was presented at the SCA's 30 Year celebration event held in An Tir (1996).
All of the yarns used were hand spun and dyed using natural and period dyes. An army of 50-60 volunteers spend about a year carefully stitching the tapestry itself. It was an incredible project to be a part of. These photos are scans of film photos taken to document the project.
Annathea Yarnspinner spun most of the wool yarn we used.
These show a day-long session of dying the spun yarns. First picture shows Catriona of the Fields preparing an indigo dye bath. Next, as yarn came out of the bath it was hung on a line to dry. You can see yellow yarns (done with onion skins) and blue done with indigo. The green was achieved by overdying indigo on the onion skins yellow. Pictured are: Catriona, River, Baranne, and Annathea.
Here are some of the variety of colors we achieved for the embroidery of the tapestry. We had a very impressive color palette to work from.
Here is one of the MANY group embroidery sessions. This is in Madelynn's living room. Pictured from closest and clockwise: Fearga, Annathea, Marian, Alys, Raven, River, and Meagan.
All total there were probably hundreds of sessions like this with 50-60 people working on it overall. It was taken to various events and people would work on it while other things were happening (such as court). I think we all got at least a few stitches into it.
Here is the finished project as it was being prepared to be presented. Then baron and baroness Ambrose and Marian presented it with much ceremony to the king of the West. He was moved to tears (the good kind) when presented with it. It still resides in the Kingdom of the West.
(my Facebook Archive originally posted 10-18-2013)