midnightsmenagerie

[midnightsmenagerie]

I’ve started a second try of making a lace border/mat pattern after my first go was accidentally ruined. I took the opportunity to swap the heart shape I originally had for spiders and diamond-ish things. Much better!

[midnightsmenagerie]

[midnightsmenagerie]

A correct bobbin lace set up

VS

The one i crafted from random stuff in my appartement

[midnightsmenagerie]

I finally finished this cross stitch of Scandinavian knitting patterns. I gotta decide how to frame it still but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out

[midnightsmenagerie]

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?

[midnightsmenagerie]

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.

[midnightsmenagerie]

there's actually a secret eighth deadly sin and it's exactly like gluttony except for textile projects

[midnightsmenagerie]

I finished the first wing! On the next butterfly I'm going to add more thread, I don't quite like the gaps that fall at the top curves of the wing. Won't be visible when it's on the dress, luckily

[midnightsmenagerie]

Starting a new bobbin lace project. Fans are fun!! But i definitely did not put enough thread on the fan bobbins and now I’m slightly panicking because I don’t understand the video I found for how to attach new thread 🥲

[midnightsmenagerie]

Bobbin lace practice

[midnightsmenagerie]

I made myself a genderqueer pride bobbin lace bookmark!

[midnightsmenagerie]

[midnightsmenagerie]

Currently trying to distract myself with bobbin lace

I bought more bobbins and new pins. The bobbins aren't here yet, but the pins are lovely. Longer and more colourful than the ones I had, and there are so many of them!

Plus I like having the gumball look as I'm working. I'm using the smaller white ones for the edges in case I need to pull any out I know what I'm grabbing.

[midnightsmenagerie]

Bobbin lace on my massive pillow!

It's just something small because I only have 12 bobbins right now (the rest have gone missing) but I'm OK with that!

[midnightsmenagerie]

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

[midnightsmenagerie]

[midnightsmenagerie]

Me, to myself: “I don’t think I’m really improving though”

Laid out at the top is my very first attempt. The second center one was a few weeks in, the bottom blue one is six months of practice.

It didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere, until I zoomed out to see where I’ve been. 💛

(Pattern is a cut down mini size of Galicia Bee’s rain spiders. On the last attempt I varied up spider style but otherwise it’s her work.)