a million stairs and a million stares

I was unknowingly working on a 35 foot long blanket for years

I started a blanket 10 years ago and put it down shortly after starting. It was on 30” circulars and I just kept casting on until I couldn’t fit anymore stitches. I was new to the hobby so I figured it would just be “blanket sized.”

I picked it back up about 6 months ago determined to finally finish this thing. I transferred it to 60” circulars to give myself more working space, and during that transfer I counted 450ish stitches, but that would just be a big king sized blanket right? So I kept going. But after about 9 balls of yarn and only 2 feet in length finished, I gave up and decided I would just crochet the blanket instead.

Halfway through my crocheted version, I ran out of yarn and made the sad decision to frog the knitted project for salvage yarn. After removing the circular needles, I thought it’d be interesting to see how wide the blanket actually was.

After straightening it all out I stared at my work, utterly dumbfounded, that I had been working on a 35 foot wide blanket this whole time. I am SO GLAD I did not finish this project as I would’ve cried at the monster I had brought into the world.

tl;dr - You should really pay attention to the size reference chart on your yarn and count the stitches when free-handing as a newbie.

And finally, the blanket:

Even if we assume Fenoglio felt he had to put this in his book because that was his understanding of medieval-ish societies, once he actually lives there and is confronted with this reality on a daily basis, he still seems downright cheerful about it.

Fenoglio's Inkheart seems to be pretty dark, despite the fairy tale elements, with very simplistic worldbuilding. That's not in itself a flaw; Funkes worldbuilding is also undercomplex, and doesn't take many things into account that would be crucial in a real-world equivalent. Worldbuilding serves the story, and all that.

What is a flaw, however, is that Fenoglio is not able to see past his original vision. He's stuck on how he intended things to be, how it is meant, and is unable to see what it actually is.

An example: He intended for the Speckfürst to be the good foil to the evil Natternkopf, never mind that in reality, they are both pretty shit rulers who neglect their people. The Speckfürst is weak, he doesn't care that the feud is getting out of control, he doesn't protect his people. But Fenoglio fails to understand the problem, even as he sees with his own eyes how dysfunctional this government is. He doesn't consider that his carelessness made his work inherently flawed. Instead, he attempts to force it to work in the way he always intended, he brings back Cosimo, and again, takes not a single moment to consider what would actually make a good ruler in this scenario.

Fenoglio's fatal flaw is, I think the inability to take criticism. He believes he's perfect. He doesn't accept feedback, he never stops to examine his work with a critical eye. Even when he is confronted with a real world full of real, living beings, he still refuses to think anything through. If the story is misinterpreted (or in-universe, if reality doesn't adhere to Fenoglio's vision), that's not due to his limitations as a storyteller, it's the reader who's wrong and misunderstanding him.

This refusal to accept anyone's voice but his own is what prevents him from growing as an author, and it is also why his attempts to 'fix' the story backfire.

Turning a dress into a skirt! That does sound like fun, @muchadoaboutm, how did it go?

every once in a while you will come across a designer who really runs with it, makes it their mission to showcase exactly what one can do with knitting

Scalindra

Sun King

Fairly Squarely

Thrills with Frills

Da Vinci Wings

Tassel Dazzle

Helix Felicis

Batman & Robin

Wizard Lizard

Lindworm

That's not even all of them. I'm not a huge fan of the term fibre art but this really is it. Wearable art. Look at the geometry of it all! The structure, the chaos, the whimsy! God I love modular knitting

So, the individual we're dealing with here is a Roman period mummy that was CT scanned in 2014 as part of the Ancient Lives and the skeleton was determined to be a male, but was originally brough to the British Museum in a coffin that was named and styled as female. The mummy is accession number EA 6704 and the coffin is EA 6703. (Concurrent accession numbers mean they were brought in together and EA stands for 'Egyptian Antiquities' and please be aware that the link for EA 6704 contains images of the mummy for those of you wish to avoid more images of the deceased)

Now a lot of people, in both the comments, the OP, and the book this is taken from are...assuming a lot of things. First of all the tweet and the book it's taken from (no idea which one) say 1960s, and the tumblr comment says 1950s. If we check the museum catalogue entry in the 'Bibliographic References' section it says 'Dawson and Grey, 1968' and is their survey and research of mummies in the collection. It was then further CT scanned in 2014 which confirmed the 1968 analysis. The skeleton, at least, is male.

So why is the above a hot take, and, unfortunately, deeply incorrect?

This mummy, and the coffin it was in, were bought by Henry Salt in the 1820s from an Egyptian seller, which he later sold to the museum in 1835. Given the nature of its arrival, and the complete lack of x-ray ability or Egyptological knowledge (the field of study really only got going in the 1820s when we deciphered hieroglyphs) it was assumed that the coffin, belonging to a woman named Mutemmenu, and the mummy were the same burial.

That's not accurate.

The coffin, styled female and lists her occupation as 'Chantress of Amun' dates to the New Kingdom (c.1200 BCE) and the mummy found within it dates to the Roman Period (anywhere from 30 BCE to 646 CE). This makes the mummy *at least* 1200 years younger than the coffin they were brought in with and therefore doesn't not belong to the mummy. Occurrences like this are relatively common. This is mostly because when these coffins were excavated antiquities dealers just shoved random mummies into random decent looking coffins so they could be sold as one lot. The other option is for the Romans to have reused (again not uncommon) a coffin from an older period and since Hieroglyphs had fallen out of use...no one could read it to say 'hey that coffin belongs to a woman.'

So that's the coffin issue sorted.

Lets move onto the 'breasts', tattoos, and jewellery. I fully understand why people think they're breasts. They look like them, I won't lie to you. Unfortunately, that's not what they are. The 2014 CT scans showed that this individual had a lot of excess skin that before mummification would have meant that the individual was fat. They also had significant tooth decay on one side of their face. Where do you think the embamlers packed out the mummy with extra padding to make them seem more like they did while they were alive? The face, the stomach, and the chest. They're not 'breasts' they're fat rolls. In Ancient Egypt, being fat was a sign of wealth and good fortune. It meant that you had an abundance of food, so officials would often depict themselves with fat rolls and the men with what look like breasts to indicate to people that they were well off. It does not indicate an individual's gender. As the book says, this practice stems right from the Old Kingdom through to the Roman period. It's more common in the Roman period, but I would also state that this is likely a bias in the record as we have more Roman mummies survive than most other periods. It cannot be taken as absolute fact because we're missing data.

Tattoos and jewellery? Well, those, it appears, were taken by the 1830s museum staff, the 1960s scan, and apparently most people in the notes of this post as being exclusively female. Even the OP of the tweet this is taken from seems to take this as a given. Which is deeply strange, because in what world are you guys expecting gender progressiveness from academics in the 1960s? Seriously. You're not even praticing it yourselves because you've defaulted 'male sexed body with jewellery and flower tattoos cannot be male because those things are for girls.' Can you hear yourselves? You rag on archeologists and museums for 'omg they were roommates' and here you are defaulting to 'jewellery and flowers are for girls.' Please.

The 1830s academics did the same thing. They saw the jewellery, 'breasts', 'tattoos' and female coffin and presumed (not being able to read the coffin which said 'Chantress') that the person inside was a woman, and a dancer. In the 1960s, when they x-rayed the body and determined the skeleton was sexed male, they didn't really update any other information so the 'dancer' part was left in. Truth is, we simply don't know who this person was or their occupation. The strapping has been found on some dancers, but it's not exclusive to dancers since it's found on other mummies too. Dancer has simply been assigned to this person based on that and the 'tattoos'. This individual is also covered in gold leaf, marking them out as a high status individual. Dancers were not high status individuals and were certainly not buried with their skin covered in gold leaf. It is important to understand that while the strapping may appear to match dancers from earlier periods, we're talking about 1200 years between those depictions and this mummy. That's like saying someone today wearing something similar to someone from 825 CE have the same occupation despite the fact that there is a huge amount of cultural and societal change between the two. It's not enough to identify anything other than 'might be the fashion of this period', and certainly not enough to pinpoint someone's gender identity. They may have been a dancer, but we cannot prove this and dancing is not a female only occupation.

Tattoos and jewellery were not a female only items. Men wore jewellery in Ancient Egypt and this practice didn't end with Roman occupation. Tattoos were also for both genders (Egyptian definion of gender not modern) and the lotus flower is a symbol of rebirth, it's not consigned to one gender but an extremely important symbol connected with Egyptian mythology. A lot of early research, I won't lie, was extremely biased. It labelled tattoos as for dancers and sex workers only, which reflected the views of tattoos in wider society. A lot of people even today believe that tattoos mean you should be shunned. Thus it was assumed that only women had tattoos. In fact, I can find a paper from 2003 that boldly claims that no male mummies have tattoos (citing a 1988 paper)...then cites several examples of male mummies having tattoos. That's a level of head/desk someone should have caught, because the paper I link for 'tattoos for both genders' shows them from the Pre-Dynastic period (c.6210 BCE - 3100 BCE) on both genders. We also have very few mummies from the Old Kingdom through to the New Kingdom because mummification was still developing, so we don't exactly have a wide data set to say 'men don't have tattoos' thus, I'd take this claim with an extreme pinch of salt since we have examples. I would also state that the caveat is that most tattoos are found on Nubian dancers in one Meroitic cemetery. Something something, sample size.

Fun thing, after that little segue, the mummy doesn't have tattoos. The 'tattoos' are the painted lotus flowers on the linen above the knees that's covering the mummy. Which, at this point, if they're solely on the mummy coverings (we can't check the physical body without unwrapping and we're not doing that) they're more likely to be rebirth symbols and not literal tattoos. Thus taking us even further away from the 'only dancers have tattoos' assumption. The face is painted on too, including side burns and a beard which are what those dark marks are along the side of the cheeks.

That's a beard. It's not the best beard, but it's a very artistic interpretation of side burns.

Likely immitating something like this, which is backed up by the CT scan showing the mummy has short hair on the head and face. It also shows one of their teeth has fallen out and is resting at the front of their mouth, which is pretty cool.

The final thing I want to address is the 'pink' skirt or kilt that was found on the mummy at the time it was accessioned into the BM catalogue. It's not mentioned above, I know that, but it is mentioned in other articles about this mummy. This hasn't survived, so I can't look at it and say what type of garment it was. I don't even want to take 'pink' as the definite colour as we're talking about a c.2000 year old piece of clothing that absolutely will have faded with that amount of time having passed. I would also discourage 'oh they're wearing pink they must be...' because no we're not doing that c'mon people.

I don't think any of it is ok. The public street pictures help identify their neighbourhood - where they are staying, which gym they go to and lead to increasingly intrusive, dangerous and disturbing stalking like Connor being touched without consent and followed to his private residence or Hudson being photographed inside the private gym clearly without his knowledge or consent.

If you call yourself a fan of either or both of them, please don't spread these non-consensual photos and videos and call out the stalkers instead of encouraging their behaviour.

They will be working in Toronto for months, and the situation is already spiralling badly with stalkers reportedly flying in to harass them. They will be forced into lockdown, it will impact their mental health being hunted for pics, and it will burden the production to have to increase security.

this is a trust the process dyejob I see 😅