April socks done!

I had to take a week off knitting, and the two weeks around that week I barely knitted, since I have this weird radiating pain from the outside of my shoulders. I still managed to finish these though! And I'm very happy with them. I don't know what yarn this is, as it’s the oldest sock yarn I had in my stash (hence why I chose to knit with it now). Still the same pattern as Februari and March, and the same as May will be (which I just started on! Handdyed yarn!)

Thank you and see you on the next update!

I need a little advice from the knitting community on here about how to proceed with my jumper.

The vision was to knit a black jumper with different coloured stripes in green, yellow and blue using leftover yarn from socks I knitted previously.

When knitting the blue stripe I realised that the blue colour wasn't contrasting enough with the black to really pop. All three sock yarns have a nice little gradient going which looks really nice for green and yellow but the blue yarn has some really dark bits in it that don't contrast much against the black. So I undid it and used some red yarn that I had left over. Unfortunately this doesn't have a gradient, so I am not convinced it really works. I am a bit torn about what to do now.

PHEW.... just over a month of work but it's done 👏 As usual at the end I feel like a couple colors could have been changed but... I'm not doing this one again lmao

Okay! Due to (totally unexpected) popular demand:

CMYK Test Print PATTERN - pay what you want, a tip would be appreciated but no pressure!

needle felted sardines

This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that's brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!

do NOT get into fibre arts!!!! you try one and then all of a sudden you have 10 hobbies and wanna try 10 more

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 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.’

"Cunt" filet crochet piece, with a size 1.10 hook and 100% cotton yarn, inspired by this pinterest post

do not repost

made more cross stitch patterns ✨ check em out here

"The Last Parrots" - fiber sculpture with found drawer by Carol Eckert

So I'm trying to make folk linen pants from sowing to sewing.

Second post (here's first)

It's been about 60 days since sowing (it's 22nd of June). It's looking so pretty and started blooming about 55th day. I've been watering it one or two wheelbarrows of every 2 weeks, which I thought would be too little but it's growing pretty good. It's still not that high (about over the knee) and I doubt it'll get much higher sadly. That means lower grade of fibers but whatever. It'll be fine.

Every now and again there are parts laying down and I've been seeing some hares running about so they probably hide in it tramping down the plants. But it gets up no problem so all good. Maybe next time I'll put up a little fence around it.

Also idk when should I harvest it bc all the info is about oil flax, not textile flax, and even then it's contradictory sometimes. But either way it's around 100-120th day, so we're still only halfway.

Next up I need to start thinking about scuthing it, and it requires some equipment. But it's easy enough to build on my own probably. It should be something like this flax-brake:

And then this kind of metal comb, which I'll make just by densly putting nails in a blank:

So yeah, that's the plans for the near future. Here's a bonus flax video if you stayed till the end ❤️

I made a pillow!

It took four months of non-stop cross-stitching, but I finally finished a pattern I bought from @8pxl a little bit ago, and tonight in a bizarre burst of productivity I finally sewed a back to it and stuffed it into a cute little pillow! It ended up being pretty much perfectly sized for a neck pillow, but I'm a bit worried about it getting dirty that way.

I highly recommend the patterns from 8xpl's shop, there are SO many gorgeous ones to choose from. I might end up getting another one soon o3o

no one knows how much it hurts when a little thing dies. when a bug runs its fate is already decided. what made him know he could get away with hurting me? he made me small enough to forget i was ever a person. i forgot and forgot under his boot.

—insp by this post from @sweatermuppet

Still a wip

Finished photo on my profile

One of my favorite things about learning about traditional textiles is the little ghosts they left in the language. Of course the ghosts are there, now that I know to look for them. Once upon a time, half the population spent a majority of their day making textiles. Spinning, at the very least, has been a part of humanity since the Neanderthals. That kind of knowledge doesn't just disappear.

A heckle was a device with sharp metal spikes, and people drag flax through the spikes to separate out the fibers from the chaff. When you say someone heckled a performer, you think you are being literal but you're speaking in an ancient metaphor.

When my grandpa says "spinning yarns" to mean telling stories, he knows that one's not quite literal, but its vividness is lost to him. There is no image in his mind of rhythm, muscle memory, and the subtle twist that aligns clouds of fibers into a single, strong cord.

When a fanfic writer describes someone carding their fingers through someone's hair, that's the most discordant in my mind. Carding is rough, and quick, and sometimes messy (my wool is full of debris, even after lots of washing). The teeth of my cards are densely packed and scratchy. But maybe that's my error, not the writer's. Before cards were invented, wool was combed with wide-toothed combs, and sometimes, in point of fact, with fingers. The verb "to card" (from Middle English) may actually be older than the tools I use, archaic as they are. And I say may, because I can't find a definitive history. People forget, even when the language remembers.