[my box]

Early designs for Studio Gainax's Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

When i started i was going off of diagrams from old websites, and struggled a good bit. I hope this post will help you get started! Feel free to ask questions!

This video shows the very basics (not in english, but quite clear). This video explains how to read patterns before you start doing it backwards, mirrored and upside down (which is what i did!).

Basic tools; the beauty of tablet weaving is that you need minimal supplies to get started.

Cotton yarn (I use 8/4)

Cards (thin cardboard and a hole punch will do)

A chair or door handle, to tie the threads to

A belt, to tie the threads to yourself

A shuttle (you can start with a pencil, old credit card, ruler, your fingers,... i use a bone folder)

Variables to understand before trying to use a pattern

S/Z card slant or threading

The direction the cards face

Forward or backward turns

ABCD or DCBA

This video (mentioned above as well) explains these variables and how to read different patterns you will find. There is no universal way to write a tablet weaving pattern, resulting in different patterns directly opposing one another (& lots of frustration on my end </3).

General tips from me, a novice

Start with a thin band

Start with a simple pattern, where the cards all turn forward for the whole band, like this one

Then move to a pattern that alternates forward and backward turns, this one is simple but very pretty

After that, try a pattern that has you divide the cards into groups, like a ramshorn or dublin dragons

Be sure to use contrasting colours (in hue and/or tone). A black and white filter can help you here

Get some bag clips to prevent tangles (ikea!)

Always turn the edge cards in the same direction. This gives a neater end result. The edges can be the outer two cards, or a group that forms a decorative trim

Personally, i like looping the thread around a door handle instead of tying it, which makes untwisting threads very easy

You can eventually omit the written ABCD on the cards, but it is a good crutch to lean on when learning

I use some scrap wood with bolts that i tie to my belt, making it a little easier to manage tension and move the woven band along as i go

Finding patterns

I use pinterest for the most part. Twisted threads has many patterns, with a built-in program, but the search function is not great.

I made you four pinterest boards; for the sake of simplicity, the patterns are all GTT which means tablets face RIGHT, S/Z refers to the THREADING direction, use ABCD, forward turns the tablets AWAY from yourself (forwards = D over A)

Level one: all forward turns

Level two: alternating forward and backward

Level three: groups of tablets that turn differently

Level four: a fuckton of tablets with complex patterns

This video made me understand double-face weaving, this one is shorter and easier to follow. Double-face is a fun technique but i would reccommend getting good at following a regular pattern first.

My main mistake when i was starting out:

Whether the slant is S or Z, the cards should all face the same way. For some reason, I made the S-cards all face right and the Z-cards left. Simple, repetitive patterns will turn out fine but anything slightly more complex will be distorted, and you will be frustrated:

Your first few projects will likely be messy! Don't be too discouraged. Here's a couple of my firsts:

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

To me, she was this little girl, too young to shoulder any of it. Today, I know I wasn't equipped to handle it either, but I had those 3 additional yrs, and I just had to try and save her.

In the end, she saved herself, of course. And oof, is she strong. I still know her, and she's this absolutely radiant person now.

Back then, she'd cling to me. Every day, I would write a diary entry style blog post, all very cryptic, cringy and emo, and she'd leave these long messages discussing them with me, bc being the younger one, she obviously thought it was all very brilliant and a complete revelation. She would turn to me with all these questions abt life and people.

And then one day, she asked me what to do if there ever came a day she couldn't bear it anymore. And sleep-deprived, on a 4 week fast, in the midst of my final exams, I said something that's really not all that clever or extraordinary, but that's still the thing I'm most proud of to this day. Just bc I'd never read or heard it anywhere before. I said "you buy a train ticket and then you message me and I'll come and get you and we'll run away together and figure it all out". And I meant it.

In that moment, typing it out, I allowed myself to hope, too; and I made myself that same promise, that I would run away somewhere if life became truly unbearable. That I'd figure it out. For the first time in my life, I decided that the one thing I would never take away from myself was a second chance. Or a millionth chance.

You have what amounts to a extremist purity cult whose beliefs align nearly precisely with those of Conservative American Christianity in terms of sexual purity politics (admittedly with some additional flourishes that I’ve watched develop in real time), but is mostly composed of minority members whose sexual-and-gender identities are opposed and oppressed by Conservative American Christianity.  Additionally, their tactics also mirror religious pro-censorship groups (such as Warriors For Innocence), but their rhetoric is entirely secularized and derived from leftist theory.

1. Legality based arguments where they’re very stuck on the idea of Age of Majority. Usually these people believe that it’s pedophilia if an 18 year old dates a 17 year old because they view age 18 as a hard and fast line from childhood to adulthood.

2. Psychological-readiness based arguments are a lot more subjective. These people often use arguments about differing life stages as a reason to call something pedophilia. Some even bust out that “peoples brains don’t fully age until 25” factoid. For this group, age gaps are a real no-go, even if both partners are legally consenting adults. The acceptablity of age gaps varied.

3. Physical appearance based arguments are focused against people who like young looking or young acting characters, even if those characters are adults. These people define pedophilia as an attraction to the perception of youth. This belief is strongly correlated with anti-DD/LG posting.

4. I’m having trouble naming the fourth category. It’s based around an argument of sneaky pedophilia or maybe an uncovering of the fan creators hidden desires? These antis argue that aging up characters past canon ages and shipping them is pedophilia because they believe that the shipper REALLY wanted to ship the child but didn’t because they were worried it wasn’t socially acceptable. In this instance, the character is portrayed as an adult by fandom and there is nothing childish in their appearance or mannerism. Because the character was depicted as a child in canon, however, the anti believes that the character must always be depicted that way in fandom and that only tricky pedophiles would be interested in exploring that character’s future.

Because, yeah, a 20 year old is an adult, but they have the Adult Free Trial, which gives you some, but not all, of the perks and responsibilities of adulthood. They’ve barely had any time to be an adult. And if a 50 year old is dating them, it’s probably for an underhanded reason.

But then you could get into the “What if they don’t realize it? What if they genuinely want to be a good person, they were just raised to expect this?” And then the fault would be on society and not the 50 y/o, UNTIL you tell the 50 y/o. Then whether they change or not is on them.

And you could also get into the “if they’re ‘attracted’ to children, but they know it’s wrong, and are seeking help/make sure they only interact in a safe, respectful way, are they pedos?” Etc.

Are there valuable conversations to be had about why an older adult may choose or even prey on younger adults when they could conceivably be dating people closer to their own age? Sure. But you do those conversations no favors by pulling the ‘pedophilia’ card on people who’ve never expressed an attraction to children. And, especially when it comes to shipping, all you accomplish when you do something like that is start a shouting match where one side is defensive because an extremely charged buzzword has been pulled out over a fictional ship that didn’t even involve children, and the other side just starts calling everyone involved pedos or pedo-apologists and absolutely nothing of any worth to anyone comes out of it.

Buy those patterns you've been thinking about while you still can.