hello darkness, my old friend

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

We can tell youth that they are basically “rapists waiting to happen” (anti-rape initiative), or we can tell them that we know they would intervene if they saw harm happening to someone and we want to help empower them to do that (bystander intervention). The kids jump in with both feet for the latter! It was amazing to see children (and young boys in particular) excited to do this work and engage their creativity with it. Also, studies show that not only do they go on to intervene, but they also do not go on to sexually assault people themselves. Bystander intervention also takes the onus off the person being targeted to deter rape and empowers the collective to do something about it. It answers the question in the room when giggling boys are carrying an unconscious young woman up the stairs at a house party, and people are not sure how to respond and are waiting for “someone” to say or do something.

Section 28 banned the mention of or "promotion" of being gay within schools and ushered in decades of silence and violence in this country. Its impact is currently unrecorded, but keenly felt. With the UK currently banning the discussion of being transgender in schools, libraries and other public spaces, along with the bathrooms guidance, we run a risk of repetition. We need statistics on what Section 28 did to two generations of queer people.

Please sign if you can, it needs 100,000 signatures to be considered. Non-UK residents please reblog.

Using your fabric efficiently? Makes total sense. No objection to that.

But specifically designing patterns such that every single part of a length of fabric is consumed by it? You're setting people up to fail. For one, you can really only do this with patterns made mostly of rectangles and right triangles, which can only make a very narrow range of garments that simply do not play nice with many people's bodies (especially bodies with lots of curvature). For another, a zero-waste pattern is also a zero-error-tolerance pattern. One wrong cut or measurement and the whole thing's toast. The wiggle-room that a more standard pattern allows also allows you to fix problems when they occur.

If you make a zero-waste garment and never wear it because it looks bad on you? That's not actually zero-waste. If you start a zero-waste garment and can't complete it because you made one little mistake? That's not actually zero-waste.

But more importantly, the whole idea of 'zero-waste' as a desireable outcome is antithetical to the methods and traditions of sewing. It's a form of functionless, guilt-driven, aesthetics-first minimalism that has no place in actual sewing practice. The scraps of fabric left over from cutting a pattern are incredibly useful. Larger pieces can become parts of new projects. Smaller pieces can become patchwork. Even really tiny scraps can become stuffing or batting or kindling or any number of other things. Home sewing has always been about not wasting things, but the way to not waste things is not by piously making only garments that suck, it's by repurposing, reusing, and recycling everything you buy. Once that fabric reaches your house, 98% of its environmental impact has already happened.

But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.

If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can't. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.

It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don't even make them. And it's not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.

All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.

I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren't enough lefty desks--and there never were. Some classrooms didn't even have a single one.

I could go on.