UrhoKraftila

UrhoK's craft-related endless tumbling

[stitchposts]

I love browsing random blogs. If you've been in my notes at all ever I've probably been on your blog a time or two and scrolled a few minutes. It's an excellent way to get posts or ideas or whatever from outside of my general orbit, because they're not my usual circles.

This also means I can see exactly which terfs try to sneak in and follow me because they like my embroidery art.

It's thankfully been quiet the last few months which is nice because so many other things in my life are stressful and awful, but I don't quite think people here know how intense the terfs got for a bit. I didn't talk about the worst of it here in order to not give them more attention. It turns out when you publicly post "traditionally feminine" crafts online you attract a lot of weirdo nutjobs who try to predefine who you are. I basically had to systemically track down terf circles over a few days and block every single related instance I could find. And while I was strict before that, the connective tissue of how they found me really came to light. The people who they found my work from don't care as much. Very notably, a strong contingent of fucking harry potter roleplayers who believe you can separate the art from the artist, or who try to uplift "women's crafts" and curate pages relating to that.

It's not fucking subtle. I'm done with hp or allowing it near me because no matter what caveats get protested on these blogs it all leads back to terfs trying to grab my shit because you don't think it's a problem. My art is going to be interpreted and projected on online, sure, that's normal and that happens! But like fuck if I'm going to allow you to more easily clip it to hang up on your digital corkboard.

[mildmayfoxe]

GOODBYE CUM USA!

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

[callali1y]

me: it's just like really weird and upsetting when someone is trying to find out my deadname, yknow?

chill af short dude i met weaving gold on his badass loom: oh yeah no i understand completely. do you want that baby or can i have it

me: oh yeah for sure man

[lil-leviathan]

Done with the weaving! Tomorrow I'll get them made into keychains, I hope the sunset band isn't too wide for my hardware.

[tooth-fairy-yooko]

my dad said I shouldn't use the English language as i please well wait until he sees how crazy style epic mode I've been englishing as i interweb

[tooth-fairy-yooko]

there are two notes on this post (excluding the third im adding now) and youre both of them so thats actually incorrect

[ebonyheartnet]

[martinkhall]

100,000 by July.

[tooth-fairy-yooko]

you've failed. i win another round, tumblr.

[worlds-of-garnet-ink]

by the END of July :)

[tooth-fairy-yooko]

you are giving me another chance to win. this post isnt going to get 100k notes man

[thatwasfunnypleaselaugh]

@type-blaze0 you know who to summon

[type-blaze0]

They didn't say this july, By the way. But fine.

Ahem, celebrity moots, your presence has been requested by @thatwasfunnypleaselaugh. If you have any complaints, bring it up with them.

The celebrity moots in question: @teaboot @king-of-oreo @bubble-official @evil-bread-offical @skeletal-spire-man

And those whose presence is wanted as well @walmart-the-official @offiiciallybavaria

Also, @left-lateral-incisor @aka-edmond i remember you two liking to spam things.

[king-of-oreo]

I’m not even kidding I thought this post was a 10k in the beginning

[princessnymphae]

@do-not-u-dare @berdlylover68 @tired-shipper @shenanigan42 @no-one-offical guys pleaseee we have a goal to reach

[trueishcolours]

Cloak Project (Cloject)

Since so many of you were kind enough to take an interest in my first post about the Cloak Project, I thought I would post a Clupdate.

My Friend Who Knows About Sewing offered to help me make a mockup of the cloak and donated some of her own stash for the purpose. She was concerned that, since the pattern I planned to use was not intended to be lined, it might not be able to support the weight of the velvet and brocade that I plan to use.

Here's our mockup. The outer is polyester suiting, pretty heavy, and the inner is some stinky muslin (unwashed, still smelt a little of chemicals, pretty thin).

The shoulders turned out more structured/tailored than I expected, meaning that my friend's concern was unfounded - the weight of the fabric is distributed very nicely.

However, it's got less of a circular drape and more of a tube-like appearance than I'd hoped. Almost like a priest's vestments. Or like this statue of St Cuthbert from an exhibition on the Lindisfarne Gospels that I saw one time. So, go back to the drawing board to look for another pattern? Cut the cloth out in more pieces (with extra seam allowance) to create more movement? Hope that different fabrics will drape better? I would expect velvet to do so, but the brocade will have a similar heavy stiffness to the polyester suiting...

It might also hang better if I made smaller, tidier seams. I was hot, tired and trying to get it done, and trying the techniques for the first time, so I can probably do a better job. But on the other hand, the brocade loves to fray, meaning I'll need to leave a decent seam allowance. And these are quite thick, heavy fabrics.

I experimented with a French seam. Cool technique to learn!

My friend thinks that the French seam will be too bulky given the thickness of the fabrics we're working with, and that something she called a felled seam will lie flatter. The trouble is that the best way to finish it invisibly is to hand-sew it so that you can avoid catching the outer layer of fabric. I wanna machine sew because LONG, my friend is a hand-sewing propagandist because it's more mindful and you have longer to spot and avoid mistakes and something something about not having to lay everything out flat that I couldn't follow.

Oh, I also think that if I go with this pattern I'll want to tailor the shoulders more to my measurements since they are so fitted. My friend says this can be done on the project as we're finishing it rather than having to alter the pattern.

Now to source some velvet!

Any advice on this or on the draping question welcome!

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

TT post by @ crafty.lad (he/him).

[dangerphd]

using a pin loom as a takadai to weave a band for a deeper understanding of how that technique works:

[dangerphd]

for those asking...

it's a pin loom subbing for one of these, using warp thread weights to tension rather than the friction from the foam:

and following the directions from Dorothy Wood's chapter on kumihimo in the Knotting & Braiding Bible:

...and the foam disk is really just subbing for a takadai:

[crap-userrname16]

[not-available-for-comment]

Haven’t had a chance to watch the tutorial yet, but I’m seriously considering making this for my gf’s niece

[tsulasgi]

ᏦᏍᎪᎯᏁ ᏕᎭᎷᏱ ᏔᎵ ᎢᏯᎦᏴᎵ ᏔᎵᏍᎪᎯ ᏑᏓᎵ

Tsosgohine dehaluyi ta'li iyagayvli talsgohi sudal

June 30th 2026

🏃 barely made it but I made it 🩷💜💙

Cherokee double wall basket

[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[benegesserwitch]

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

[costumersupportdept]

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

[synebluetoo]

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

[moiraecrochet]

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

[the-fibre-stuff]

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

[swords-n-spindles]

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

[iplaywithstring]

I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).

[lilja4ever]

Jingyi Li, Chinese. 1999/2026. New Heaven 03, filet lace and leather.

[omittedharpy]

every blanket i have ever made, in roughly chronological order, earliest from 2023

[sunflower-on-fire]

knitted my first pair of socks and i dont have anyone to tell about it so im leaving them here!!

[urhokraftila]

My local weaver's guild has a beginner weaving class starting at the end of July, which is a really good time for me.

Sounds like the aim of the class is 1 guided project, and (optionally) a second at whatever difficulty you decide.

Just over a two week class period, with online instruction (live instructor leveraging prerecorded vids she made, to avoid stuffing webcams in odd places). Total instructional (or at least, live instructor on call the help) time is ~20h.

Something 'round $400 all up, including a 2½ week rental of (what I think to be) an 8-shaft Ashford tabletop loom (18" width). (guessing based on image comparisons between the class description and The Woolery's listing)

What's tumblr think, does this sound worthwhile?