Notices by elilla&, arm trans women :nkogun: (elilla@transmom.love)

crochet tends to be not as good as knitting for clothes because the material is not drapey, but I don't like how knitting implodes itself if it catches on anything. nålebinding doesn't but it seems fiddly to do with plant fibres. I guess in the end I really need to get into machine sewing to make my own clothes, it's not like there's a big and wearable crochet project that I really—omggg https://www.etsy.com/de-en/listing/1637657575/crochet-backless-cowl-neck-vk-dress

I am kind of 100% fine with the idea of burying myselves into a cave for the entirety of the dark months and do nothing but craft things with my hands until at least the Spring equinox. mostly craft things to protect my old body from the cold

I'm like looking at my own two hands that are now able to crochet and thinking like, what am I going to do with all this power?! :surprised_pikachu:

top all time of r/crochet: I lost my arm so my cousin Kevin crocheted me a new one!

top all time of r/amigurumi: what if we got the mushroom people that are trending and add them thicc butt

saving this pdf on sewing 18th century fitted woven stockings for my own reference
https://www.orbitals.com/self/history/stocking.pdf

also this https://www.marquise.de/en/1700/howto/struempfe.shtml

n.b. that historical stockings were tied below the knee, where the leg is thinnest—consensus is that it's basically impossible for premodern materials to stay up your leg unless your thighs are thinner than your knees. you still need a garder band to tie the top—just don't expect it to tie above the knee and stay there.

the red bastard is back for autumn?! and yes, I am sufficiently traumatised that I will wake up at 7am to the light, distant knock of a woodpecker pecking. and no, little bastard didn't somehow find a way into my living room to eat the last few remaining bee larvae that rest safely in the bee shelters relocated to an indoors shelf. he's not anywhere in my balcony, either. but the tapping continued much longer than usual. somewhere in the attic, I suppose. maybe more bees nested there. in any case it looks like someone (as in 1 specific individual bird) isn't dying so soon from the insect collapse at least :blobcatglaredrink:

@Bruiserzinha @Robotistry I guess those look pretty great, not an easy project for me but at least theoretically doable
https://www.sewhistorically.com/medieval-stockings/

@Bruiserzinha @Robotistry one could argue that the ducks probably are used to human beings as a source of food, the bees think my colourful hair might be a flower, and the bunny was nesting close to me and deciding the noisy human wasn't enough of a threat to deter them.

however these hypotheses are all clearly false and the true explanation is that they all recognise what I'm doing and love me in particular :blobcat_thumbsup:

Lula deu 79% na Alemanha (Berlin 83%, aqui em Colônia 71%).

enquanto isso brasileires que vivem em Israel votaram Bolsonaro 74%. Japão, Bolsonaro 72%. Palestina foi Lula 93%.

hmm I wondered how would you deal with the fragility of knitwear in a practical context. looks like the answer was "wear woven textiles on top lol":

Pair of stockings
1590-1630 (made)
Linen boot hose were essential accessories for protecting men’s fashionable knitted silk stocking from the rough edges inside their leather boots. This pair were cut on the bias (across the grain of the weave) to fit the leg snugly. The seams are edged with a simple, detached chain stitch and each stocking fastens with a braided silk lace and aiglet., threaded through eyelets. The soles of boot hose wore out quickly and would have been regularly replaced, as seen in this example.

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78739/pair-of-stockings-unknown/

my daughter has some embroidered boots that are pretty amazing-looking, but she doesn't wear them because there's an unfortunate joint of hard heel on soft ankle materials that digs into your foot and hurts it over time. wearing thick socks or padding didn't help.

I'm thinking if it would be doable to make her custom-fit boot hoses like the above :thounking: like, the intermediary layer between boot and socks, as in medieval times. if I made it my way I could pad the problem area accurately and to my heart's content. depends on how much leeway the boots have for her foot size, though

I am once again thinking of her :ms_two_hearts: (15th century linen bra and underwear found in the Lenberg Castle https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/18275 )

@Bruiserzinha @Robotistry

cottons holds its own weight in water 20 times. that makes it an excellent material for towels and an absolute shit material for clothes, unless you live in a desert. in summer it clogs with sweat and never dries, preventing evaporation which is how the body cools down. in winter it drenches in winter rain (outerwear) or in sweat (innerwear) and gives you hypothermia. there's a reason why hikers have a saying "cotton kills". the only reason cotton has become the dominant textile is that it can be produced in mass quantity for cheap (by using slave labour in China and soil-eating intensive agriculture).

the problems with cotton only grow worse for form-fitting clothing, because having a textile right next to your skin that also happens to soak in humidity and never dry is a perfect recipe for fungal and bacterial allergies to develop.

@Robotistry @Bruiserzinha

the goal is to dress both plastic-free and animal-abuse-free.

@Bruiserzinha @Robotistry even if I knew how, knitting with linen yarn would be even more expensive than sewing with pre-manufactured linen knit fabric (I looked it up in the past).

home at 22:30!

too tired to blog much about the day but I did manage to avoid being fined—train cops only caught me once and I managed to escape in time, mostly because he was pretty lenient. I stayed with S-Bahnen as much as I could, which took a while but was very chill, weather was good and trains were empty and easy and I got a lot of crochet done, and wasn't inspected again.

also played my flute quite a bit while on train stations and I feel like I found the knack to make it sound gentle and clear, like I've been trying for a while.

also I played my flute late night at the Berliner Park near Oberhausen Hbf, inside a pitch-black grove of trees, and I thought I would play "Tsuki" for the moon again but the moon stayed under the horizon. however, a bunny in the distance started listening to me playing. like I saw their silhouette perking up and standing, ears up turned in my direction, and just staying there, listening, for a couple entire songs.

so I played "Usagi, usagi" in tribute to the bunny and instead of running away from the noise the bunny came towards me, into a bush right next to where I was, where they listened to my flute some more.

that's all

I might have a feeling of loneliness over how humans generally aren't interested in listening to my shinobue but between the songbirds, the ducks, and bunny, my already high levels of disney princess bullshit are of the charts with my flute. like nature herself goes out of her way to remind me I'm not alone, and often

blessed by the algorithm pick today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvN1T9CLDc

I think the first time I personally noticed that something was off with the cognitive metaphors that frame invasive species is when I realised the glee people have when talking about the horrors of kudzu in North America, vs. the absolute silence on the horrors of roses (an invasive species that has damaged old-growth high-biodiversity forests more than kudzu can dream).

it was pretty obvious for me why roses (< Middle English roose < Latin rosa) were so beloved while kudzu (< japanese 葛 くず < くづ) so reviled, when both are equally damaging introduced species.

I didn't quite realise how much the metaphor of foreign invasion can tilt not just the general public perception but actual conservation efforts. one example that Clare gives in the interview is that the government has dismissed the Stop Cop City movement by claiming the forest they're sitting is "all invasive species, I would barely call it a forest at all". it's very convenient to be able to call nature disposable when you're in the business of killing.

the other example, the one that motivated the author herself, was watching a guy being sad about having to kill barred owls to save the spotted owl. it's clear this was against this guy's every instinct, but he was like what can we do, they're invasive, the spotted owl is dying. well it turns out the spotted owl was dying due to habitat destruction by human commercial developments, not due to invasion of barred owls, who were just like, able to occupy the damaged niches left. mass killings are underway with no benefit so far seen to spotted owls—but plenty of benefit to the timber industry, who gets to log deeper while blaming some other species.

I think there's a sort of "argument by hard decision" appeal to destructive interventions. it's the opposite of the fallacy of the just world; call it the fallacy of the fucked up world. it's a fucked up world, so it stands to reason that killing a bunch of stuff in the name of preservation must be what we're supposed to do. we're hard men, and we have to make the hard decisions. shed a manly tear and tragically shoot the bird behind the barn. but uh, do we actually have to do that. have we clearly demonstrated that this intervention will in fact help in any substantial way. the evidence is too often very unconvincing—and the remedy worse than the ailment.

like no one is denying that human-spread species have often highly damaged imported environment—I personally grew up watching the North America pinus monoculture escaping their papermaking factory-woods and eating away my native Atlantic jungle, like a wave of acidic pine needles washing over everything—or even that sometimes it's good to intervene destructively. but framing this as if the species are the hated migrant invaders out-breeding the poor sacred natives who must be protected at all costs sets things up so that the actual causes of invasives spreading in the first place—pesticides, monocultures, paper industry, logging etc.—remain off-camera. thus, "scapegoat".