LSG Tangential

Introduction:

Embroidery is a craft that uses thread to decorate fabric (and other materials). It’s a great way to spruce up a garment, customise objects, and to hide mends you’ve made!

Embroidery is usually done with embroidery floss, but depending on the base material you’re working on, you could also use yarn, ribbons, or plain old sewing thread. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Embroidery is easier to do on taut fabric than limp fabric. That’s why most people use embroidery hoops. While not strictly necessary, a hoop will make your life so much easier.

Using the right needle will help, too. Use a crewel needle if you’re working with embroidery floss, a chenille needle if you’re working with ribbon or yarn, or a tapestry needle if you’re doing cross-stitch embroidery on open-weave fabrics.

While there are many types of embroidery from all over the world, this post will focus on some basic stitches you can use in your own work.

Basic embroidery stitches:

For a more thorough overview of embroidery stitches, check out these embroidery tutorials by Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘n Thread.

The following images show some of the most basic stitches:

(Image source)

The 16 stitches in the images above can be combined into any shape or form you want. You might recognise some from my hand sewing post: embroidery is a type of hand sewing, after all.

You don’t need to know all of these to be able to make beautiful things. Even just one of these is a great start for a project.

This sampler by Sew Nancy shows how these basic stitches can be used to outline shapes or form flowers, for example.

(Image source)

Fiorelila used a combination of the stem stitch, satin stitch, lazy daisy, and french knots to spruce up this sweater:

(Image source)

And this person used lazy daisies to add some flair to their jeans:

(Image source)

Embroidery for visible mending:

Embroidery is a useful tool to hide mends you’ve made, or to even accentuate them if that’s your style. This is called visible mending. While this is a topic that deserves a post on its own, here are some quick examples:

Like this fix by Redditor Takemythyme who embroidered a rose over a hole in a knit fabric:

(Image source)

Or like how this person has spruced up their jeans repairs with embroidery:

(Image source)

In this example, The Woolery Guy chose to use flower embroidery to make a hole in a knit fabric look like it was there by design:

(Image source)

For more examples, check out Pinterest or VisibleMending.com.

Conclusion:

Embroidery is a useful skill to give new life to your wardrobe. You can use it to give some flair to items you’ve grown bored off, or even to mend your clothes.

Once you’ve got a few basic stitches under your belt, the possibilities are endless. Be creative and have fun with it!

Just

People claiming pink and magenta are different colours are simultaneously right and wrong depending on the context of the discussion.

This is a Common Pink, dianthus plumarius:

This is the source of the word pink, and so ostensibly this is the colour pink. Somewhere in the realm of #f463dd, situated as expected between red and purple, rather than above red, albeit far closer to the red side of things.

Or is it?

Setting aside the question of colour reproduction in digital photography for the moment, different contexts mean different things.

So let us turn now to magenta, the colour formerly known as fuschia. Magenta covers any extra-spectral colour that lies between purple and red, without appearing green. It is a combination of red and blue that is situated too far red to really "look purple."

So the flower above is definitionally magenta, despite being the literal first example of "pink."

Or is it????

Let us now turn to the People What Decide The Colours, which is to say, optical scientists.

Their conclusion?

Pink and Magenta have huge overlap, but pinks extend far warmer, and magentas extend far colder. This is absolutely a terrible diagram, but I think it gets the gist across.

Now, getting back to the question at hand.

Some pinks ARE light reds, but others are light magentas, and others are light oranges! However, "pink" as a generic term includes light reds but is significantly broader than only light reds.

So, while pink includes light red, it is not the same as light red.

This current Republican controlled Congress and Republican controlled Justice Department haven’t prosecuted one single person in regards to the Epstein Files.

in most every society and economy, children have no rights to bodily autonomy. a child must be educated in their body and their rights to it to know that their body is being abused by a parent or family member. they must know how to speak about it to report it. they must TRUST someone to do so.

that person must then trust their report. then intervene. the family must believe the victim - and more importantly, they must care. they must care enough to remove the abuser and block contact with them.

this is difficult if they are financially or physically or otherwise reliant on the abuser

the abuse must not be normalised in the family. they must have resources to call on. education to engage with. there must be help available for them to ask for. everyone must care.

for all of the above, people have to be able to talk about it. express it. discuss it. and yes, make art about it.

all these pressure groups are always concerned with western family values, and "family values" say "protect the children", but the people who are meant to "protect" those children are typically the patriarchs and matriarchs who supposedly do so by having absolute power and control over those kids

when family matters above all, when the priority is always to "keep the family together", "protect the family unit", when protecting kids is thought of in the same breath as keeping them together with their parents or grandparents or other blood connections, what do you do when those people abuse?

and don't get me wrong, the reason that giving those kids over to the state is because the state will also allow those children to be abused. many foster parents are abusers, and children's homes and young offenders' wings and other institutes are rife with abusers. you're just not related to them.

no matter where kids go, they don't have rights. their words aren't respected. they're treated as talking points and possessions to be passed around at will - they have no agency, no autonomy, to the point that a child WANTING autonomy or agency is literally treated as a joke

god forbid any of us talk about that. the world would fucking crumble if we started talking about incest and incestuous abuse as a pillar of our society, constant and continuous, committed by parents and grandparents, siblings, loved ones, and not by some stranger danger creepy distant uncle