forever will be

But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself...

For my textile, weaving, historic textile, history enthusiasts

SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

Absolutely not

You know who would try that shit?

Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?

You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

@witchofanguish it is also used in poetry and plays, ghosts talk like that. Imagine being in a folk story, staying overnight in an abandoned cabin and in the middle of the night there's a knock on the door and a bellowing voice going

LET ME IN.

anyways have mouse

Mantle (Spanish,1804–7).

Silk and metal thread.

normal purse contents (wallet, keys, chapstick, massive wad of trash and receipts, etc)

first aid kit

large quantities of candied ginger

clothespin

fingerless gloves

emergency dice set

mysterious flash drive

carnival ticket (when did I even go to a carnival?)

small metal frog

mystery key (rusted)

tiny goat

eight spools of thread

fortune cookie fortune ("your goals will have you reach new heights")

cursed locket

measuring tape with built in flashlight and screwdriver

$5.13 in loose change

incredibly small snail shell

piece of purple broken glass

three hagstones

compass ring

four old train fare tokens

various acorns

forty-five cool rocks I found

It's a very normal bag sized bag, I swear!

Weirdly enough, the purpose of this purse cleanout was to move stuff from my old bag (the strap was breaking for some mysterious reason that's probably completely unrelated to anything in this post) to a new bag that looks like it should be bigger, but actually holds less stuff. Had to remove some of these items, which is an absolute injustice.

(The rocks are staying, because what if I need a cool rock for something in an emergency? Also because they're getting a nice little polish from jostling around all the time in the inevitable beach sand that ends up in every bag I own.)

Tumblr users over here trying to foil my plans to disappear into the ocean with a bag full of shiny rocks to bribe the merfolk into letting me live with them.

Okay admittedly I have no solid proof that this particular locket is cursed. Honestly it's mostly just wishful thinking. But maybe someday...

I really wanted to get a picture of my other actual, really definitely cursed locket for this post, but I'm currently unable to find it.

Edited to add because Tumblr was really determined to post this before I was done:

Okay it took me forever to remember to actually take pictures, but!

Tiny Goat!

Hagstones, plus bonus purple glass and train fare tokens, just because I think they're neat.

Also, the umbrella thing a few weeks ago proves nothing. The fact that there was an audible scattering of trinkets onto the sidewalk when I opened my umbrella (a small, purse-sized umbrella! a reasonable umbrella to carry around in one's bag!) does not in any way imply that there were too many trinkets in my bag. I have no idea how those coins, rocks, and random bits of broken jewelry got in there. It's an utter mystery.

Old foes

SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP SIMPLE SYRUP

I got some REALLY AWESOME local strawberries from my feed mill, but I absolutely could not eat the quantity of strawberries I got before they would have gone bad and the birds are not huge fans of strawberries. So instead of wasting the last 8 or so, I jam-packed this little container with strawberries, added an equal weight of white sugar, and stuck it in the fridge for about a day and a half.

The sugar leaches the juice/water content from the strawberries and creates a saturated, thin syrup (lower sugar = thinner, more watery, higher sugar = thicker, more like maple syrup). As you can see, the container is not jam-packed with strawberries, they have considerably shrunk in size, as all their delicious, delicious juices are now trapped in a fucking fantastic fresh simple syrup.

What we do is slice the strawberries to increase their surface area, and put in layers of strawberries and sugar. We stir once or twice over the next day to make sure the sugar that sinks to the bottom is given a chance to contact the liquid, and it's done when no more sugar will dissolve in, and the strawberries are all floating near the top.

We then scoop the strawberries off the top, drain the jar into containers (freeze some), and run the sugar sediment at the bottom through a dehydrator to make strawberry sugar.