ily, menswear guy

Ghost Patterns // Living On The Rainbow

A Treasured Treasury of Beloved Characters (2024).

Wool felt, cotton lawn, strawboard, embroidery & poly cotton thread, recycled PET stuffing, armature wire, plastic eyes.

Here is a collection of characters I met when I was small, all of whom have stayed with me every day since. They are housed, stitched and squished in this felt book, akin to their arrangement in my brain.

Posters available here.

OK I've taken pictures before ironing bc who knows when I'll get round to ironing. Some months ago I fell down a weekend research hole with some antique needlework books and read a Bunch about jacobean embroidery.

And then I drew a rocket. All the stitches are found in actual 16th century embroideries. The flame and tree of life are my own interpretation of designs that were a common motif.

I tried so many different things in this piece, and I can't decide what my favourite part is.

going to start researching sheep breeds that are like endangered or need conservation and then seek out their wool to use, preferably buying directly from the herders, so i can support them

i found a farm that has Navajo-Churro sheep and sells their wool as roving and yarn directly to the public, along with several other uncommon breeds :) website here

holy shit theres a lot of small farms out there with heritage breed sheep n other animals selling their fiber!!

re: your tags, totally fine to reblog!! there's a whole database of farms im looking at now on the Livestock Conservancy website!! here's the link, all you have to do is select "yarn" or "fiber" from this drop down menu

and it'll give you contact info and websites to A BUNCH of small farms selling their heritage breed fiber directly!! you can also look up by animal breed if you want a specific kind of fiber like, say Navajo-Churro

it's AWESOME!! many of these farms seem to be certified by the Conservancy and the Conservancy itself seems to be like a good nonprofit

I highly recommend the Shave Em To Save Em thing from the livestock conservancy!!

SE2SE is amazing, and they also have a great Facebook group where you can ask questions and see other crafter’s work. It’s also a BLESSING during lambing season, bc people will post tons of pics of cute lil lambs frolicking and being happy babies in the fields. You can even find fleeces that have been roo’d, not sheared, for breeds that do that.

Fibre crafts are 50% soothing repetitive action and 50% "God Fucking Damnit"

Wearing and eating hay

Wake up babe a new open access review about Ice Age fashion just dropped.

Paleolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress (Science Advances 28 June 2024)

This article uses the spread of bone awls and needles to trace the evolution of clothing from simple, minimally protective coverings to finely tailored, insulating garments across the geography of the Last Glacial Maximum. Not surprisingly, needle use is associated with cold climates and the need for warm, fitted clothing. But the wide variation in needle size, including very small ones for fine, delicate work, along with frequent discovery of shell and bone beads showing use wear consistent with rubbing against clothing, shows the evolution of clothing into dress. Bodily adornment transitioned to clothing to mark identity and status.

Fig. 4. Puncture marks consistent with leather hole punching on a bone fragment at Canyars, Catalonia, dated to 39,600 cal B.P. Scale bars, 1 cm. Photos: L. Doyon, F. d’Errico.

Fig. 5. Morphological variation in the size and shape of Late Pleistocene eyed needles. Scale bar, 1 cm. Modified from d’Errico et al.

Fig. 2. Nassarius kraussianu shell beads from Blombos Cave Still Bay layers, southern Africa, dated to approximately 73,000 to 70,000 years ago. Arrows indicate use-wear facets. Photos: F. d’Errico [modified after d’Errico et al.]

I'm really surprised how many young fiber art people don't know that they can get pattern books from their local library. So as a PSA:

Your local public library has pattern books! They have crochet, knitting, weaving, and quilting pattern books! If they don't have the book you want, or the craft you want, you can ask for us to get it for you! It's free!

Botanical Embroidery Hoop Art

Raccoonique on Etsy

See our #Etsy or #Embroidery tags

Here's a little embroidery piece* vaguely inspired by the Hungarian Kalocsa style embroidery, and not so vaguely inspired by Dandelion from The Witcher books and the many ways his name has been translated.

We have Buttercups, of course, for Jaskier (Polish), Pasque flower for Kökörcsin (Hungarian), Larkspur for Rittersporn (German), Marigold for Marigold (Czech), and Dandelion (English). Also Cornflowers for his eyes 😅

*I only just started to learn the ins and outs of embroidery, so this has many issues, but I'm still kinda proud of it.

I went to the county fair and there was a doll sized quilt show happening in the fiber arts hall?!

Visible mending made easy: fall edition

New to sewing? Want to learn embroidery? I've got some beautiful stick-and-stitch patches that make it easy as pie. And right now, that pie is pumpkin.

When you're done stitching over the pattern, you just put it in water and wash the patch away.

Get cozy. Get spooky. Get thee to my Etsy shop.

Seriously y'all this stuff is SO COOL and ACTUALLY WORKS

Donielle Showvay's Knitted Lord of the Rings Lap Blanket Featuring The Tree of Gondor - Yes, There's a Pattern! 👉 https://buff.ly/3cDXFa4

(...I really don't want to hunt that up typo just now. I'll fix it when I fix it. The Tose Lace Kitting Book, indeed.)

Which is beyond the point. The point is, the patterns are live! Go forth and knit pretty laces!

So I work at a library and about a month ago I helped a little old woman who is legally blind figure out how to listen to our audiobooks on her tablet. We got to chatting and I mentioned that I always listen to audiobooks while I knit, which made her very excited and she told me all about the afghans she used to make when she could still see. She was so sweet and I was so glad to be able to help her figure out a way to still enjoy books without being able to read.

Yesterday I answered the phone at work and when I said my name the woman on the other line got so excited and said “Madeline?? You’re exactly who I wanted to talk to! This is Marie, you helped me about a month ago. How late are you working today?” It was her!! And about an hour later she and her husband showed up, and she was carrying a huge stack of old knitting patterns for me, and her husband brought in a few boxes full of yarn. They couldn’t stay long but I was so touched that she remembered me, and I struggled to not just flat out start crying when she handed me the patterns. When I looked through them later I realized it was her entire personal collection from over the years, including all her personal notes and drawings and even some photographs of her finished pieces. No one in my family knits, and to have someone pass on their legacy to me like that was incredibly moving.

This isn’t what I usually post here, but with life being especially dark lately I wanted to share a moment of happiness and a reminder that a bit of kindness goes a long way ♡