farts 'n crafts

Bookbinding: How Dare You!? / Cheng He Ti Tong by Qi Ying Jun

I also made this for @spockandawe for an exchange! But I wanted to bind it myself, too. Would you believe I made it halfway through this novel before realizing it was by the same author as Are You OK? (the author's name is different on different platforms I guess?) I was like "this author's doing some very neat stuff with transmigration ... hey, wait a sec!"

Since the concept of this novel is transmigrating into a transmigration novel, I made a triple-layer cutout cover. The outermost cover is the "original" novel, followed by the in-universe transmigration novel, and finally the actual novel, where instead of a proper cover design it gets a hastily-written* sharpie title on note paper.

I was going to put more colors in the endbands and fewer in the splatter-painted edges, but it turns out if you only use brown paint for splattered edges ... even if it is a very nice brown in other contexts ... it looks like the book is moldy. So I added some blue too and at that point I thought a multicolored endband would be too much.

My laser printer can't print to the edges of the pages, so for the floral background, I printed just the border on my inkjet printer, and then printed the text of those specific pages afterwards.

There is a typographical easter egg! If you've read the novel, you can see if you can figure it out (it's present on one of the pages pictured here).

the face of someone contemplating bad decisions

he didn't do it, but I didn't leave him alone with it either

anyway I'm branching out on this new project and there isn't any teal OR purple, look at those autumny colors

No specific patterns or designs, theoretically fiber craft agnostic, hopefully a good mix of being encouraged to try new things without being overly prescriptive about it.

Please play along if you’d like. Interpret the entries in whatever way makes this process most enjoyable for you.

#fiber arts bingo <- tag that I will be tracking

I have finally (finally!) gotten the latest warp off my loom and it's time for something new. I have a sectional warp beam, and need a spool rack.

So! A spool rack! The center post rotates so you can load the bobbins onto the steel rods.

Unlike practically every other woodworking project I've done, this actually took me less than 2 hours, and it looks halfway decent! I splurged on poplar instead of cutting down 2x4s and it's so nice to work with in comparison. The spools are also diy, made from cardboard mason bee tubes and "craft disks" from amazon.

I can't believe it took me TWO YEARS to get a ~3 yard warp off the loom.

It's going to be a bath towel. Hopefully it will take less than 2 years to hem it, but since my hemming box includes my previous 2 projects from that loom I'm not optimistic.

But I want to make something cute with hearts on it. I found handweaving.net and I've been scrolling through it's patterns and all of the heart patterns want a) 4 or more shafts and b) not the biggest fan of them, this is purely a personal taste thing.

So I doodled a little chart

First thought: yes, "weave a more complex pattern manually for a few rows" is absolutely a thing people do and it works and you can do really complex designs with it.

Second thought: doing it this exact way (using just 1 weft yarn and altering the plain weave shed to make the pattern) has some, uh, challenges. That the weft floats (bits of weft yarn going over at least 2 warp yarns - in your pattern the weft goes over up to 7 warp yarns at once) are very long so the hearts may fall apart a bit. If you weave at 10 dents/threads per inch, for example, then the floats are nearly an inch long and might move around or snag on stuff rather than lying flat like you want. The middle of the heart isn't woven at all, just a layer of warp threads and a layer of weft threads on top of each other, so that whole area of each heart will be quite weak and the threads will be likely to move around so it might not look much like a heart.

You can still do it and see what happens! But another method to stabilise the design abit more would be to weave "overshot", which is a common choice for big patterns like this that could otherwise fall apart. Overshot means that you weave plain weave all the time right through the pattern (you can use your shuttle for this) and you add a second thicker weft yarn to make the design (you would thread this through with a needle). The thick overshot weft covers up the plain weave so it looks solid, even though it's just weft. And because there is a strong stable plain weave cloth everywhere with no warp floats, the long weft floats don't move around nearly so much.

But since overshot generally refers to this technique controlled by the loom's threading, searching for supplementary weft will give you some more useful techniques for doing it by hand.

It would be kind of a pain as an all over pattern if you aren't used to it, but it's great for borders or scattered motifs. You have complete control over the pattern, and can do any number of different designs.

You can just paint circles. And still make amazing art.

Things that have always stopped me from trying to art:

I can't understand shapes and perspective

I can't understand shading and lighting

I can't make faces or human bodies because I don't perceive them really (every face I draw is the same face, because that is what my face blindness sees)

I can't think of scenes to make

I don't understand "simplifying" what my eye sees into the mushes that artists make (For example, were to try to draw a tree, it would take me 50 years because the only way I could interpret it would be to draw every single individual leaf, exactly as it appears, which is impossible)

Today I learned that I don't have to do any of those things in order to art.

I could just paint circles forever, and that would count as art. As cool art.

I would personally be happier with squares. But still. I could just. Draw shapes and paint them in, and it would count as art.

I think I am a fan of this category of art that looks really neat with my glasses off! Also I really don't know anything about painting-painting since I figured I'd never do it, so I have many things to learn. But it was fun! I'm going to make another one.