ugh

the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: i was on committees with the duke of norfolk. and they beheaded me.

Part 1

6. TOS Men's Uniform:

Here we have 1. Quite a severe curve 2. with a zipper in it 3. an invisible zipper at that 4. with pattern matching through the zipper at the collar

5. in velour (slippery). Woof.

You have to hem *everything* eventually. Hemming isn't optional. (If you don't hem your cloth, it will start to fray. There are exceptions to this, like felt, but most cloth will.)

The type of cloth you choose for your project matters very much. Your clothing won't "fall right" if it's not the kind of stretchy/heavy/stiff as the one the tutorial assumes you will use.

Some types of cloth are very chill about fraying, some are very much not. Linen doesn't really give a fuck as long as you don't, like, throw it into the washing machine unhemmed (see below), whereas brocade yearns for entropy so, so much.

On that note: if you get new cloth: 1. hem its borders (or use a ripple stitch) 2. throw it in the washing machine on the setting that you plan to wash it going forward 3. iron it. You'll regret it, if you don't do it. If you don't hem, it'll thread. If you don't wash beforehand, the finished piece might warp in the first wash. If you don't iron it, it won't be nice and flat and all of your measuring and sewing will be off.

Sewing's first virtue is diligence, followed closely by patience. Measure three times before cutting. Check the symmetry every once in a while. If you can't concentrate anymore, stop. Yes, even if you're almost done.

The order in which you sew your garment's parts matters very much. Stick to the plan, but think ahead.

You'll probably be fine if you sew something on wrong - you can undo it with a seam ripper (get a seam ripper, they're cheap!)

You can use chalk to draw and write on the cloth.

Pick something made out of rectangles for your first project.

I recommend making something out of linen as a beginner project. It's nearly indestructible, barely threads and folds very neatly.

Collars are going to suck.

The sewing machine can't hurt you (probably). There is a guard for a reason and while the needle is very scary at first, if you do it right, your hands will be away from it at least 5 cm at any given time. Also the spoils of learning machine sewing are not to be underestimated. You will be SO fast.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

I keep seeing people say shit like “I don’t like Biden” or “I don’t think Biden is fit to be president” and—

WHY????

Like really, give me a reason. He’s old? Okay. So is Bernie, who the left was simping for four years ago. Most of our presidents have been. You have to be 35 just to be eligible to run. Barack Obama was our youngest-ever president and the work he did and wanted to do was deeply hobbled (in part) by his lack of age and experience. Youth is no guarantee of innovation.

So what’s next? He voted for bad things fifty years ago. Okay. I was a good little Christian girl who was going to get married, have five kids, and vote Republican (but only if my husband said it was okay for me to vote, of course) TWENTY-FIVE years ago. If I can make the jump to being a happily-childless queer socialist Jew with Evil Pronouns in 25 years, I think Biden can go a hell of a lot further in fifty.

So what else? WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH HIM?! He’s done a hell of a lot more good than any other sitting president* in my lifetime, and I lived during the Clinton economy, so that is saying something.

He had a goddamned respiratory infection at the debate. And he was ceaselessly gaslighted with a tactic called the Gish Gallop—pulled STRAIGHT from Russian propaganda. And he has a goddamned communication disability called a stutter, you may have heard of it. It’s hard to mask or cope with your disability when you’re sick with something any one of us has had.

In contrast, he was debating a convicted felon who openly supports Russia and uses their tactics, who has a plan to make the country into an oligarchy headed by a dictator. And a man who has been seen to have serious symptoms of cognitive decline. He regularly says stuff that sounds a fuckton like word salad. If I encountered Trump and didn’t know who he was I’d be concern about potential dementia in addition to his thoroughly rotten character.

This is being organized by The Heritage Foundation. A right wing organization that worked with Trump during his presidency.

For more information here’s a video that goes in depth about it https://youtu.be/9k3UvaC5m7o?si=ef6LxmOit5txAhyt

Saw a couple being interviewed in a Tr*** saturated county, and even though they agreed that he is an awful person, they still plan on voting for him.

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

Read banned books!

Do you know where you can get free books (and movies, audiobooks, and cds)? Public libraries.

“The dishes were only bland soups and maybe some moldy bread”

I’m studying English language and literature, not History, but like… Pork vs Pig… Deer vs Venison… Cow vs Beef… May give you the idea THEY FUCKING ATE MEAT AT LEAST GODDAMIT

And not even like we do

Where’s the feast with venison? The ridiculous amount of salmon and other fishes? The little gardens full of spices? Or the trade of exotic foods? Slaughtering season was celebrated in some places not that much ago (like… I saw one when little), why not portray one?

And more importantly

WHERE’S THE CHICKEN WITH HELMET???

Medieval people loved their spices; The Forme of Cury has a lot of flavours I’d associate more with Indian food than anything else. Even if you weren’t a wealthy seasoning-loving king like Richard II, you could still have garlic, onions, and herbs.

Here’s a link with more info. Apparently the dish is called Singing Chicken… But that’s a chicken with a helmet

that clearly showed the people of the time valued color, had style, and only occasionally made horses look like a dog made out of play-doh. even people who didnt live in a castle still had access to paint to liven up the plaster walls of their homes, brightly dyed fabrics and flowers were as available to them as and they sang, constantly. what we assume was a life of toiling in the mud from dusk till dawn the whole year was typically a relaxed paced life of 10 hour a night sleep in a comfortable bed where work didnt start untill you had your flagon of ale and a song with your buddies as you walked to the field, you sang as you worked, took three ale breaks from work while singing, and then you sang as you walked to the tavern so you could sing while you played nine mens morris or cheated at mancala because you thought the miller was too soused to notice. we barely know any of the songs they sang and humanity is less for it, a scant handfull of them do remain and its just beautiful to hear what a table of tavern patrons would break into song about to prove they werent too drunk for another round song and story were all day every day, theres a reason the most well known middle english text was canterbury tales- whose narrative was that a selection of travelers on the way to the same location had an ongoing bar-bet about who could tell the better story, asking bartenders to judge the complexity of these stories, all of which were absolutely valid as just shit you would say to another drunk in a tavern, would give modern soap operas a swift kick in the pants and its sad that it takes a historian to tell you just how crass and lowbrow humor they were on a similar vein to how so many people somehow forgot that shakespear was lowbrow humor for the commoner and not somehow too sophisticated for rubes it wasnt just bards who would own an instrument, instruments are wood, leather, string, bone/horn, or even clay… those are all commonly available and affordable if not straight up FREE items to someone in the medieval world so a hefty chunk of the population would have an instrument and know how to use it, anything from a wood flute to a simple drum to an ocarina. many designs were even specifically for travel so you could always have it at the ready

But yeah, I know that some people get exasperated by the number of songs that Tolkien has in his books, but I really think it completes the world. It makes it feel fleshed out and more enjoyable and individual in its own right but also ties it to history. Singing is such an accessible pastime and I really don’t think people in fantasy do enough of it. (And as a bonus, Tolkien also gives us some Middle-earth lore in his lyrics. Which is great for the reader and also reflects how important an oral information-sharing tradition is within the world itself.)

I studied late antique textiles in undergrad. Late antiquity is a weird period with multiple different scholarly definitions, but the gist is that it’s the transition period between the ancient and medieval worlds. Christianity was a thing, but people were also still heavily influenced by older stories/mythologies/religions (the vast majority of textiles that survive from this period come from Egypt because of the climate, so in this case it’s Greek and Roman traditions that still hold influence).

Anyway. The textiles from this weird nebulous period of history are straight-up gorgeous, and not just to a nerd of my particular type. Take a look at Dumbarton Oaks or the Met’s collections and come tell me that ancient/medieval hand-woven textiles were all rough and poorly made. And you know why people spent so many hours making these beautiful things painstakingly by hand? (Every single step of the process, by the way - shearing, carding, spinning, dying, all before you get to the actual weaving. This stuff was incredibly skilled, intensive labor.) They did it because textiles were incredibly important. We don’t think much of them now that they can be mass-produced, but there was a whole Thing with the Virgin Mary spinning and metaphors about her weaving Christ on a loom, and textiles were used for protective magic, and they were part of everything important in people’s lives.

There were dyes that were prohibitively expensive, yes - Tyrian purple is literally still so expensive that we couldn’t buy a big enough sample to test our actual antique textiles against effectively. In the Byzantine Empire, it was controlled exclusively by the imperial family - hence the whole royal purple thing. But guess what? There are so many purple textiles, because people used other things! Madder and indigo! Both affordable! Mix them together and you get a very pretty color. Change up the mordants you use to seal the dyes and you can get a whole range of different colors out of one plant!

And people took these things and they wove them into literal artwork and wore it around on their clothes. They had hangings on their walls for decoration, sure (and also insulation and noise control), but they also had curtains! Textiles separated rooms the way wooden doors do now! The reason I have a weird thing for liminal spaces is because textiles were associated with them, and they were given power. The hanging in your doorway could protect your home from misfortune. Protective symbols around the neck and sleeves of your tunic could keep you from getting ill. And all of these things were pretty and colorful and painstakingly crafted by laypeople and professionals alike, and they were everywhere.

Basically, the ancient and medieval worlds were alive and full of color and magic. Not gray stone and plain cloth and misery.

"Every time someone steps up and says who they are the world becomes a better, more interesting place." 🫶🏳️‍🌈