sorrelspinning

[sorrelspinning]

this came to me in a dream

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Full Bloom

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Link below~

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I've been slowly working on coding my own neocities website bc my tutorial link list keeps breaking bc tumblr, and it is the absolute worst thing to fix repeatedly. Have found that 1) I actually really enjoy coding now and 2) I maybe have too many things to say about wool.

Also 3) I have backed myself into a corner and the only out is to define medium wool, finewool, longwool, and 'other' in a way that makes sense to beginners but also is like... accurate. and i have been stuck on this for some time now

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aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa

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Jeny’s interlock cast off exactly mirrors the long-tail (and the backward loop) cast on AND is a very good stretchy bind off.

This baby sweater is knit bottom up, but I made the sleeves top down, picking up stitches around the armhole, so to get the same edge on the ribbing, I did the long-tail cast on on the body and the interlock cast off on the sleeves.

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WIBTA for posting my cross stitch of someone else's pixel art? 🪡🧵

Yea this is more low stakes but like also uh... So basically I follow this artist and they make really, really good pixel art. They also have a shop that sells their art and in particular cross stitch patterns for some of their pixel art. Problem is, the pattern and the original art don't match completely, like the colours and slightly off and there's less colours and detail overall in the pattern being sold

Thing is, I really, really liked one particular art and I wanted to stitch it. But I don't like the pattern the artist is selling. So I pulled up one of those pattern converting websites and made a pattern based off the same art, but with more colours so it looks more like the original.

I'm already partially stitching the work and I want to post it online when I'm done, but uh, that sounds like a bit of a dick move? Like it's the artist's art and they clearly had a shop selling a pattern so it seems kinda dirty to wave around a work that I did without paying them. But on the other hand, the artist didn't create this specific pattern I converted to include more colours. Of course I do plan on giving them credit for the original art, but would that be enough? Should I add a link to the shop/leave a tip?

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No see results, we die like artisans

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stuck in the time loop but i just use it as a free day off. im not even trying to get out. i am teaching myself to knit. i am crocheting. i am cooking. not even doing anything crazy. just escaping capitalism for a week. day 375 and im not sure what lesson it's trying to teach but i've taught myself to hand make lace so all is well

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some Florida wildlife (alligator, manatee, gopher tortoise, anhinga, "palmetto bug"), interlocking crochet

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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Crochet Flower Patterns // Tanitka Lace

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It's interesting that crochet is regarded as much easier to fix mistakes, while knitting is very difficult to fix mistakes. I think that's true only when you're a novice--it's easy to just undo stitches with crochet by pulling the yarn, and more difficult to tink back or frog part of jt and put back on the needles.

But once you're comfortable fixing stitches in knitting, it's really not so bad. Laddering down allows you to fix stitches many rows ago, and if you can stomach it, you can undo big and complicated mistakes with some surgery. But with crochet (at least as far as I know; I welcome correction from more experienced crocheters) you can frog, but... that's about it. Want to fix a stitch 10 rows back ? Either make peace with it or frog 10 rows. I find crochet less fixable than knitting by far.

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support human artists and stand against generative AI 🖤 buy a wallpaper or leave a tip / twitter / instagram / shop 

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every time someone says ‘oh, you knit? do you like it?’ i have the marrow-deep urge to tenderly take their face in my hands and press my lips to their their eyelids and telepathically transmit the full overwhelming awareness that i carry just beneath my skin every moment of every day of how important fiber crafts and textiles are and historically have been to humanity. every stitch i work is a thousand billion stitches that have already been worked and will be worked in the future, from the farthest reaches of prehistory until time immemorial. every spindle i spin is spun with the same flick of uncountable fingers from ages past, all united across history in the deceptively simple movement that has shaped history, and art, is the context within which every single person on earth has ever lived their life and lives their lives still. everything from our phones to our homes is given shape and form by the overlooked but utterly important textile arts.

‘of fucking course i like knitting, you jackass,’ i say gently. ‘i wouldn’t do it otherwise.’

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Learning how to weave! After a brief attempt at card weaving, I discovered pick-up weaving and immediately switched over to weaving with a heddle. And since I need to make everything as complicated as possible, I'm working on creating my own patterns as I learn.

Still figuring out how to maintain an even tension when I move my set up around. Ultimately, I'll get a loom and that should solve most of my issues. They're a tad wonky, but I'm pleased with my patterns and excited to come up with more! :))