Fiber Arts - Blog Posts
Recently, my sister finished the last of a set of Stardew Valley Cross Stitch for me. Today the frame I had made for it was finished and I wanted to share it with everyone!
Crochet mutuals come behold sppspspspsps
My mom made this. She said you guys would drool on it.
Pattern here
"Millefleur," a 78" x 68" wholecloth quilt by Jan Hutchinson of Newton, KS. Longarm quilted.
"Wholecloth" in this case means that she started with one piece of mottled teal fabric and all color and definition in the finished piece comes from thread quilted atop.
Seen at the Pacific International Quilt Festival yesterday
16 frame shooting star animation. January 2022-September 2024 Needlepoint
Frames from my shooting star gif. 16 frames total. Each frame is 8x6.5 inches on a 10” mesh. Designed and animated in photoshop and needlepointed by me. I started drafting this 1/14/22 and finished animating it 9/25/24. It took approximately two years and eight months to finish. This is one of the largest projects I’ve ever worked on and I’m very happy with how it turned out.
Snail hat I made yesterday at work
It's made from thrifted wool that I dyed, a chart from Pinterest, and I just freehanded the shape
The Joan of Arc sweater is complete! Made entirely out of secondhand acrylic yarn. Started April 22nd, finished July 11th.
He can be so cruel
I love sewing because you really feel blessed by like the gods of creativity until you get 1% eepy sleepy and then the devil starts telling you that you can eyeball and freehand very essential steps
To the folks who is responding to my silly little poll about how y'all are progressing on projects during this holiday crunch with "I don't make gifts anymore because they are not appreciated", I am so very sorry y'all have had that experience.
I sometimes think we all have.
I no longer paint, because as a teen I spent months on a painting for my sperm donor in yet another attempt to bring out of him the father I always wanted. He promptly began criticizing everything that was wrong. Heartbroken, I took it back on the pretense I was going to "fix" it. Years later, after I finally ended my relationship with him; I burned it in a ritual as a final break from him.
I never painted a picture again. Rarely drew.
Having someone not appreciate your gift or are pointedly indifferent to it will shatter your soul.
To all y'all who have experienced this, I am so very sorry. I give to you my sincerest love and deepest hope that none of us experience that ever again.
Also, I am so proud of y'all for protecting yourselves! It is not worth the pain and anger to go through that shit again. I know some of y'all have that deep-rooted guilt because you have heard "but <insert excuse>" your whole fucking life until it just sits inside you giving your internal bully ammo to hit you with. (Especially true when it comes to family.) Let me assure y'all, it's bullshit and it eventually goes away.
To those who are planning to give handmade gifts, may each and every onr bring the kind of joy that sets your soul alight.
I've been writing a thing about the connection between fiber arts and activism throughout history for the past couple days
Which one of you bitches was gonna tell me that it can actually be enjoyable to write like this when you aren't being marked for it???
Guy wanted me to make him a queen-size blanket.
some of my favorite woven tapestries, by Cecilia Blomberg:
Point Defiance Steps
Mates
Rising Tides
Vashon Steps
out of print mushroom dyeing guide acquired .. my previous attempts to dye thread haven't been very successful but perhaps this will help
Quilt 1885
Artist/maker unknown, American Made for Sarah Minturn Bacon Edge (American, 1853–1916); made for Jacob Valentine Edge (American, 1841–1913)
Medium: silk and cotton blend satin, silk floss and chenille embroidery, silk cord trim with cotton core, cotton batting, silk taffeta lining
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Howdy, my name is Critter. Have y'all heard of this lil thing called Craftivism? Here are 5 types of Punk/DIY Crafts I think we need to embrace, sooner rather than later!
Crochet/Knitting
Yarn and crochet/knitting supplies are relatively easy and inexpensive to get your hands on, and learning to crochet/knit is relatively easy with video tutorials. Once you learn the basics, you can create patches and clothing items that support certain causes. You can also do yarn-bombing (essentially graffiti using crochet/knitting) as a way to spread awareness about certain issues. Here are the patterns I listed above:
LGBTQ Pride Keychains
BLM Patch
Palestine Flag Heart
LGBTQ Pole Wrap
Womens March Hat
Pins
All you need is something hard and sturdy to act as the base for your pin (bottle caps work best), soda tabs + a safety pin, and some glue to secure everything. Paint or decorate them however you please. Let people know who you are and what you stand for.
Kandi
While Kandi can be a way to express yourself and your identities, it is also a way to make community. Kandi-trading is huge in the EDM scene, and it is a huge part of why that community is so tight. You don’t need to make anything elaborate, especially to start out - just get some cheap pony beads from the dollar store, some letters, make some pretty bracelets. Keep them, trade them, give them away.
Embroidery
Embroidery is a very fun and useful skill to develop, as you can basically put whatever you like wherever you want. Mend your socks, personalize your jacket, make some patches. Stop buying those shitty embroidered clothes from temu or shein and make your own one-of-a-kind pieces. Learning embroidery is pretty easy, just get some fabric, some thread, a needle, and go ham.
Zines
Zines are not only a way to spread awareness about certain issues, but they are a way to express yourself and talk about your personal experiences. I’ve included instructions on how to fold a zine, as well as some examples of zines. If you would like to learn more about zines & their history, I recommend @/decolonizationcoven on Tiktok. If you would like more examples of zines, check about any social media platform, but especially Pinterest. Lastly, if you would like inspiration for zines, Canva has lots of templates of zine layouts that are easy to replicate.
Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you
No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.
ASDFGHJKL IT LOOKS SO CUTE!!!
I went too many days without recreating this goddess among us
(Sign up my for mailing list if you want to buy Moo Deng, in this size or in miniature)
@thescrapwitch you NEED to see this I saw it and immediately thought of you
It speaks for itself, I think
This artist hand-embroiders canvas "notebooks."
Hand embroidered, self drafted, birch tree inspired buttonup shirt.
I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.
When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"
When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...
"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.
"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"
Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."
People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?
honestly yeah, fiber arts is magic. you cast spell of warm gloves, spell of nice hat, spell of stuffed animal.
material component: yarn
wand: single hooked wand or double pointed wands, depending on caster's preference
mechanical component: specific motions repeated in a particular pattern
time component: a while
look seriously the first step in a knitting recipe is "cast on", and then it's a bunch of letters and numbers incomprehensible to anyone not versed in the arcane art. that's a spellbook. yes it's a book of knitting patterns but also. it's a spell book.
there's actually a secret eighth deadly sin and it's exactly like gluttony except for textile projects
Astraeus sweater!! Pattern by Bad Wolf Girl Studios. Knitted up with Malabrigo Arroyo, my absolute favorite yarn.
this one took me 1,5 years details + process under the cut!
I guess that just means it’s time to go back to the craft store! Yay, more materials!
One should always have at least 2 craft projects going. That way, when one of them is messed up and misbehaving, you can switch to another, and let the first one sit there and think about what it's done.