mooncustafer

[mooncustafer]

groovy

#I could pull off this look

[mooncustafer]

The Yellow Dress (The Wardrobe Room, Stratford-on-Avon), 1948 by Dame Laura Knight (English, 1877–1970)

[mooncustafer]

[mooncustafer]

s is for slug

[mooncustafer]

So I've been making marionette puppets of my neighbors (I'm taking a class) and let me tell you my landlord/building manager was SUPER not prepared to see the wooden version of him (he lives on my floor) when he came in to fix my stove

Anon no offense but I think I would call the police if I found out one of my neighbours was making wooden puppets of me without my knowledge

[mooncustafer]

When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

[mooncustafer]

FUCK YEAH I DID IT

[mooncustafer]

My latest project is one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes. Pattern from Feminist Cross-Stitch by Stephanie Rohr.

[mooncustafer]

Dracula cross-stitch sampler pattern

Since I've had time on vacation, I finished up a cross-stitch pattern I started a year ago in the first Dracula Daily round, based on the words Dracula uses to greet Jonathan Harker when he comes to the castle: "Welcome to my house. Come freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring".

I wanted a sampler for my front hall, but all the patterns I could find were very Hot Topic Goth. Nothing wrong with that, but my goth aesthetic is more "creepy thing found behind the wall in an old attic", and I wanted a pattern that my aunt wouldn't realize was anything out of the ordinary. I was looking around for inspiration and stumbled on an 1871 sampler by 12-year-old Jemima Clements in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It's a little bit early for Dracula but the aesthetic was spot on, so I spent a long time squinting at a zoom of the best download of it they had to copy the wolves and the letters, and then left it for almost a year because I got frustrated trying to figure out how to get a good-formatted pattern out.

When we came up on a year I transcended frustrated and went with the good-old fashioned grandma method and transferred my pixels to a spreadsheet. So on the off chance you want a creepy Dracula sampler for your front hall, I now have it in .pdf and a downloadable Google Sheet. The .pdf is formatted to print on legal paper, but it will be a bit small that way; you are welcome to fiddle with the spreadsheets to get it the size you want.

PDF of the pattern of the Dracula quote ^this will not work if your browser redirects to https because my webhost messed that up, but it should work if you force http

Google Drive link to a shareable/downloadable Sheets file

The pattern uses 7-10 different thread colors; I don't believe in locking in brand-name floss, so the pattern includes color description and it's up to you to find stuff in your stash that looks good together.

I could not come up with a decision on the border, so the options are:

Make all the flowers plain lavender

Use a variegated purple for the flowers

Pick 4-6 different shades of lavender/light purple and alternate them - this is most similar to Jemima's border

Use the "allium flower" pixel art pattern I coded into the pattern (recommended only if you recognized the allium flower pixel art pattern I used.)

[mooncustafer]

My girl got her gift so I can now post it.

Fische

[mooncustafer]

Cross stitch raccoon, 1965.

(source: Cooper Hewitt)

[mooncustafer]

My latest New Scientist cartoon.

#crime pays but botany doesn't

[mooncustafer]

FWIW, "mauve" was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.

It was an eye-popping magenta purple

HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey ...

...which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.

(This dress is labeled "mauve" as it is the color the above becomes after fading).

They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.

Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.

[mooncustafer]

[mooncustafer]

Box

Turkey, Ottoman, circa 1640

Wood

Tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, wood, ivory and bone inlay

LACMA

[mooncustafer]

Bothering the beast

[mooncustafer]

Drama! Cats on a Ridge of a Roof at Full Moon by Fedor Flinzer (1832–1911). Source.