oh yes lots of fruit around here

Mittens: Perfect Fit Mittens by Left In Knots

Flowers: Easy Crochet Flower Pattern by Crochet 365 Knit Too

I also made the following adjustments to the flower pattern:

With the large flowers, I made a magic circle and then 12 HDC into the centre to make the yellow, rather than starting with a chain as written. The petals then followed instructions as written.

For the smaller flowers, I did 8 HDC into the magic ring, and only four petals, though still following the same method of construction.

This was such a fun project to work on, though admittedly at times frustrating. I made a lot of small mistakes early on in the first mitten, and had to keep undoing rows to start over, as there was no way I could find to course correct and just continue from where I was. Thankfully, once the first was finally done and I had a better idea of what I was doing, I got the second done in 2 days!

The flowers weren't originally part of the plan if I'm honest, but I could tell once the first mitten was finished that they'd need some embellishment. My first plan was to embroider on a bunch of smaller flowers and leaves, but it turns out embroidering over crochet is rather difficult to do neatly, so I pivoted to making some crochet flowers to sew on instead, and I'm honestly so glad I did - this little flower pattern is SO quick and easy to make, so learning how to make them is definitely going to come in handy for future projects!

We may be slowly coming out of mitten weather down in Australia, but you can bet that next year I'll be churning these out to keep everyone I love extra cozy!!

Bonus photo of them fresh off the hook and resting on top of a very patient Magnus:

I wanted to combine the blues of this yarn with the purples of the one on the far left to create something a little like a night sky, so I did a free hand warp that alternated between the colours and then wound both yarns on the shuttle to complete the effect in the weft.

And I went back and forth about how to incorporate the silver starlight, before I finally settled on the last minute almost sashiko style stitching you see at the ends of the scarf in the image above. This was hand stitched once it came off the loom and woven into the tassels to make it even more seamless.

There's a little of my singing in the video below, but I must say that I'm very untrained and my lung capacity isn't the same as it was since before Covid! You can watch the video on mute if you don't want to hear it.

The days that followed the crowning of the king were long and warm. Yet Frodo felt a chill as he watched his cousins playfully arguing over the packing of their ponies for the journey home.

He still couldn't reckon with how much they had changed. He remembered a time when Pippin would look up at him all starry eyed whenever they went tramping about the Shire together, but now he could barely keep up with her.

Frodo thought that it must have been all the time he spent apart from his cousins and the rest of the fellowship that made him feel at such a loss. He had been so single minded in his quest and in the notion that he wouldn't make it back, he never considered what would happen if he did.

Yet there was still no accounting for the chill in his bones or the melancholy he felt as he realised just how much his cousins had grown in his absence.

When he heard the king calling his name, he looked over to see him approach with the queen on his arm, and almost forgot to bow.

"Please, Frodo," he murmured, as he reached out and lifted him up by the arm. "You know there's no need for that between us."

With a little smile tugging at the corner of his lips, Frodo replied, "If only I had known when we first met. I might not have been so rude to you."

Strider laughed. "We are a long way from Bree. And I was not a pleasing sight in those days."

Yet now, he and his lady were resplendent in the morning sun. The light was captured in the silver white of the king's crown and the woven fabric that was draped over the queen's arm.

When she saw Frodo looking at it, Arwen stepped forward and offered the weave to him. "I hope that this gift may bring you comfort when the memory of fear and darkness troubles you."

Once it was in his hands, he saw that it was a scarf of startling beauty, made in the colours of an early evening sky. Pale blue with hints of purple the same shade as the queen's dress. And shot through the ends of the scarf, like starlight dancing across the dark waters of the Great River Anduin when it seemed as though all hope was failing, were long and delicate threads of silver.

Frodo had a faint memory of waking in Rivendell all those months ago to Arwen weaving in his room. He could see the shape of her through the canopy of his bed, singing gently to the rhythmic sound of her work as she brought a tapestry to life with practised ease.

He was laying under a blanket that she made when word came of his imminent arrival. Ever curious as the nephew of a storyteller ought to be, Frodo asked her about it, and she explained that her kin had been weaving from the fibres of the wood since they set foot upon these lands.

He had carried a phial of the light of Eärendil’s star all the way from the lady of Lothlórien's hand to the very depths of Mordor. Yet he somehow he felt that the scarf was too fine a gift for him to accept.

When he said as much out loud, Arwen shook her head. "It is only small in light of all that you have done. May it keep you warm on the journey home and every journey thereafter."

Shine forever

Beacon of light

Blaze in the air

Vanquishing night

Live forever

Held like a breath

Deep at the core

Wandering the empty road

In twilight's silver shade

Following the hidden paths

Lonely and afraid

Let sunlight free the heart

Forever bound to roam

And let the waking morning find

The weary traveller home

(And let the waking morning find

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow

Stretching unending for mile after mile

Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon

Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moody’s League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think what’s more likely than ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didn’t know any such antiracist thought existed’ is that ‘the legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existed’.

can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharky’s minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking people’s cats

Anyway, I’m so tired of how “of his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought. 

Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really don’t think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as ‘unconscious bias’ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job 😭

Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ‘normal people not kings of men’ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of Númenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramir’s entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the ‘childless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gates’ bit.

Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a ‘birthright citizenship’ as a consequence of a person’s actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day ‘migrant criminality’ discourse, how can you say he didn’t anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration 😭

(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the Fëanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls don’t jump up my ass 😭)

Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Men™️ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. It’s not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic! 

Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean ‘he did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm’??? 😭The legendarium isn’t a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that “his time” kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didn’t. 

And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didn’t have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does ☠️

Anyway I think where the fandom focus on “unconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.

Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when he’s hit. Which is to say, the insistence on ‘Tolkien was of his time and his time was bad’ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about ‘the time’ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today. 

On a vaguely related note, I also think ‘this fandom gives grace to the author’ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket you’re in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and it’s doubly baffling considering that he isn’t exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades. 

Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of ‘grateful to the author for this wonderful world’ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going ‘why the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?’