The world isn't over yet

oh

my

god

Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.

Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh

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I’m hyperventilating.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

This is INCREDIBLE.

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.

Okay so on a purely technical level, this is not that difficult, you just gotta come at it a little sideways.

The background of this sucker is just rows of 1.5″-wide fabric strips. I can’t remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6″ strips, one row 4.5″ strips, one row alternating? I don’t remember exactly, it was a while ago. That’s not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. It’s not hard, just tedious.

The fish are a lil different. I can’t draw, there is a disconnect somewhere and my hands are stupid, so I figured out probably fifteen years ago that tracing was the way to go. For this, I legit just yanked several photos of fancy-looking goldfish off the internet and traced over ‘em in Photoshop.

Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid ‘em out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of ‘em.

This woulda been WAY easier with Heat ‘N Bond, but I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. From there I just used just about every fancy stitch on my inherited sewing machine to make the fish STAY WHERE I PUT THEM, and also look good.

I have since learned this is called “raw edge applique” but whatever. It’s fun, it’s neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, it’s how I’ve gone from this:

to this:

(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because I’m the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)

The back is plushy as hell and looks like this:

EVEN MORE GORGEOUS AND LOVELY IN PERSON.

AND IT’S WASHABLE 

awheckery is too modest to mention it, but the quilt is loaded up with real specific meaning – I’m Chinese-American, and there are eight goldfish on the quilt and a ninth on an accompanying pillow.  Nine is a homophone in Chinese for “always”, “gold” is a metonym for wealth and prosperity, and “fish” is a homophone for the word for abundance, so putting nine goldfish on something for a new baby is a lovely Chinese way to wish them good luck and abundant prosperity in life.  

And the pillow shown above is symbolic, too!  You’ll notice that the two ships up top.  My family is ethnically Han Chinese from Hong Kong, so  awheckery put a distinctive Chinese ship up there, and my husband is Norwegian, so that’s a Norwegian schooner.  And then the three whales underneath are me, the husband, and our wee little whale.  

Please note that I did not know ANY OF THIS WAS COMING.  They just FIGURED THIS OUT ON THEIR OWN and by polling friends in our shared fandom, and one day the quilt with the blanket showed up at my house, and I  screamed so loud that my husband came running.  And then we got the pillows a little bit later, and I may have screamed again.   awheckery is one of the most talented humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing or meeting.  

I’ve told OP that if my house is ever on fire, I’m grabbing the kid and the quilt in that order.  The husband can go find our wedding photos.  

Quote from @SwampAdvice on Twitter (written by frequent collaborator on The CryptoNaturalist Podcast Leslie J Anderson).

and after looking at the first one again it is also, a beatle photo

i don't wanna feel sexy like tv. i don't wanna feel sexy like little black dress. i wanna feel sexy like high note during karaoke. like just got done writing 14 pages of poetry. like let me show you this scarf i've been knitting. i wanna feel sexy like hand on the back of the headrest while you parallel park. like did i tell you about that time i saved a baby bird. like don't tell her but i've been sneaking money into her purse.

i don't wanna feel pretty like expensive. like high fashion. like paid to be here. i wanna feel pretty like a bird in a puddle. i wanna feel pretty like streak of dyed hair. i wanna feel pretty like calligraphy, like new leaves, like a skinned knee bleed, like a dog running at full speed. i wanna feel pretty like lying next to you. i wanna feel pretty like the new album just dropped, i wanna feel pretty like a shower, i wanna feel pretty like a stone wall all covered in moss.

i keep saying body neutrality. that feels negative - no bad things, no good things, just body. but i mean - my body is neutral like a flower is neutral like an oil slick is neutral like a day is neutral, too. my body is neutral so a kiss can feel like lightning so a dance can feel like a hula hoop so a walk to get coffee can feel like - god, i'm so happy to just be around you.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Back when the East India Trade Company still existed and was busy stealing countless valuables globally for the Queen, there was a big trend about the nobility being able to afford all these fancy new exotic spices like paprika and saffron and, yes, pepper. So all the English rich bastards were going "Look how much better we are than the commoners, we have sugar."

And then the East India Trade Company kept existing and stealing countless valuables globally for the Queen, and that means that after a while, spices life saffron and paprika and, yes, pepper, were affordable for the commoners to be able to use, because spices were a status symbol, and you wanted to show off to your other little feudal slaves how up with the times you were by cooking curry.

The rich nobility immediately ditched all seasoning ever because now the commoners were doing it, and they couldnt be seen doing the same thing commoners were. So now they didn't ever season anything, because the inherent taste of a food was sacred or whatever, and you were debasing that chicken by putting some leaves on it.

Then the Puritans happened and they moved to America, and we all know that Puritans never let themselves or anyone else have any fun, because that means they'll go to Hell.