#I did end up writing it

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[runraerun]

Steddie Amnesia Ficlet: 2/3

-> Part 1 | Part 3 | AO3

cw: more head trauma/concussed!Steve discussions.

Steve hears Eddie call after him, but he doesn’t stop—he can’t face it. Not right now, anyway. Not when his eyes are stinging and his heart is pounding in his ears, each pulse more painful than the last. His legs take him to the building he’s supposed to go into, fueled purely by muscle memory. Not brain memory, of course, because nothing up there works properly anymore, apparently.

The Brain Injury Recovery Center.

It’s where Eddie expects him to go. He’ll catch Steve if he goes in, or he’ll wait for Steve by the doors until he comes back out—both options involve facing Eddie after Steve had made a total idiot of himself. Both feel utterly mortifying.

So he ducks into the alleyway beside the familiar brick building instead, just to catch his breath. It takes Steve longer than the average bear to sort out his feelings now, after all. Jesus, who’s he kidding? Everything seems to take him longer.

Steve feels hot tears streak down his cheeks before he angrily scrubs a sleeve over them. Of course Eddie isn’t his boyfriend. Eddie’s funny and cool and he’s in a band and he lights up every damn room he walks into—and Steve… well, maybe Steve was something a few years ago when he was in high school, and maybe he was even something before his accident, but now…

There’s a sharp clapping noise that sounds like thunder. A door slamming, Steve’s brain sluggishly supplies. It’s followed by shouting.

“Steve? Steve!” Eddie calls from somewhere on the street.

Steve’s heart feels like it’s going to fall out of his ass. His face is probably still blotchy and wet, his breathing hasn’t evened out yet and his eyes are still leaking like a goddamn faucet. He’s pathetic.

Can’t let Eddie see him like this…

He ducks behind a metal garbage bin, careful not to let anything but the bottom of his sneakers touch the sticky looking surfaces around him. It stinks, like rot.

“Steve?” Eddie’s voice echoes off of the alleyway walls. Steve claps a hand around his mouth to muffle out any of the pathetic sounds that seem determined to escape from him. So much of his body just does whatever the hell it feels like now. Out of Steve’s control, like everything else.

For a few, tense seconds, there’s silence. Eddie’s listening for him, maybe. Steve shuts his eyes and waits him out.

It feels like an eternity before he hears Eddie’s hurried, retreating footsteps, continuing his shouting for Steve. He sounds almost as panicked as Steve feels. Almost.

Steve gives a noisy, wet sniff and does one final scrub of his face before getting to his feet. He starts walking.

As he goes deeper into the alleyway, he thinks back on all the things he’s been wrong about. The fact that Eddie had some of his band t-shirts mixed in with Steve’s clothes… well, that was because they were both guys who wore about the same size, and Eddie left his shit everywhere. It’s no wonder some of his stuff got mixed into their laundry. And the times Eddie’s driven him places? That’s just… what friends do, Steve supposes. And all those times Eddie made Steve laugh? Made him feel like the center of the universe? Well, that’s just… Eddie. He must make everyone feel that way. It’s like his super power. But it isn’t romantic… It doesn’t mean anything more than Eddie being a magnetic person.

Steve is just so stupid. Painfully so.

He blinks as the sun hits him. He must’ve reached the other side of the alleyway.

Steve cups a hand over his eyes and grimaces. His migraine wasn’t backing down. He sighs. Time to head back.

Steve turns back into the alleyway he’d emerged from, only he’s about halfway through when he realizes the color of the buildings on either side of him are wrong. They’re brown on one side, painted green on the other. That isn’t right…

His heart jackrabbits in his chest, but he keeps walking forward. Maybe he’ll recognize the street once he’s back on the other side.

But when he gets there, it’s as unfamiliar to him as the alleyway. Steve turns, looking up and down the road to see if he could spot Eddie, or his van, or the Center. But there’s nothing.

And when someone shoulder checks him, Steve supposes he was sort of asking for it, standing in the middle of the sidewalk like that. He apologizes, but it’s too late. The person’s already out of range to hear him.

It’s as if everyone else is on fast forward while Steve’s stuck on pause. The world keeps moving along while all he seems to be able to do is watch it go by.

Why would he ever think someone as dynamic and spirited as Eddie would hitch his horse onto Steve’s busted up, barely mobile cart?

Stupid, stupid, stupid…

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and wills himself not to start blubbering again like a goddamn baby. His life is already one big, painful lesson in humility as it is, he doesn’t need to wallow in it.

Steve keeps walking. Figures he’ll spot something, or someone familiar to him eventually. The pounding in his head’s eased off to a dull ache, at least. Maybe there was something to this exercise and fresh air thing the doctors were always going on about, after all…

The thing is though, Steve doesn’t spot anything familiar. Not even vaguely so, and it’s not until the streetlights turn on that he realizes he’d spent the majority of the day wandering around the streets like some lost dog that managed to slip his leash.

It’s cold too, and all he’s got on is jeans and a polo. It’s October, isn’t it? No wonder he’s got goosebumps all up and down his arms.

Then, he finally spots something familiar; a phone booth. Steve breathes a sigh of relief. He’d just call his parents. They’d come pick him up.

He gets the booth and lifts the receiver before he blanks. A quarter. He’d need that. Duh, Harrington. So he hangs up the phone and pats his pockets until he finds a wallet, but all that’s inside of it are a couple of crisp bills. He’d need to break one.

Steve turns, scans the street until he spots a well lit, invitingly warm looking diner. The joint looks so damn cozy that he forgets to make sure the street is clear before he steps out into the middle of it.

Tires screech, harmonizing with the horn that’s blasting at him—Steve flinches, reaching up to cover his head and braces for impact.

To his great relief, the hit never comes. Which, thank fuck. He can’t afford anymore accidents. As it is Robin’s threatened to make him wear a helmet full-time.

Steve doesn’t listen to whatever the person yells at him, he just hurries to get the hell out of his way of the other moving vehicles.

“Smooth, Harrington. Real smooth.” He mutters to himself as he catches his breath.

He pushes the door to the diner open with shaking hands, but it’s blissfully peaceful inside, and he can actually feel his insides unclench as he stands inside of it.

“Sit anywhere, hun, I’ll be right with you.” A woman’s voice tells him. Steve nods and slips into the nearest booth overlooking the street. Watches the cars go by. There’s even a couple of cop cars, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Steve wonders briefly what sort of emergency they’re rushing off to when the waitress comes to his table.

“What can I get you, handsome?” She asks, cheery and warm like the rest of the diner.

“Uh…” Steve frowns, taking a few seconds to process the question, “nothing. I’m just waiting for my parents to come pick me up.”

The waitress taps the side of the notepad. “Well you gotta order something, hun, or you can’t stay here.”

Steve wants to stay here. It’s warm and smells fucking amazing, like “pancakes?”

She waitress smirks. “Yeah, we got those. You want a stack?”

“Yeah, please.” Steve smiles back, laughing along with the waitress like he’s in whatever joke that’s currently so amusing to her. “I’m starving.”

“You want some coffee too, to help you sober up, maybe?”

“Oh, I’m not drunk.” He huffs out a little self deprecating laugh, “I wish. No, I—uh, my meds, they’re the kind that you can’t mix with alcohol. Coffee too. Bummer, right? Yeah… But, uh, it is what it is, I guess—so…”

He can feel it. The way his mind so often wanders. He’s lost his train. His track. He frowns, eyes drifting towards the street again, watching the headlights zip by.

“…so just the pancakes then?” The waitress asks, jolting his train back onto its rails. His attention snaps back onto her.

“Yeah, pancakes. Sure.” Steve flashes her what he hopes is a charming smile.

She returns his smile and leaves him be, and he lets himself relax. Props his head up on a fist and watches life go on for everyone else but him.

He gets his pancakes, and some juice too that he doesn’t remember ordering, but hey, that’s nothing new. And damn, the pancakes taste even better than they smell. He needs to remember the name of this place so he can come back with everyone. What did the doctors say? Repeat something in your head over and over until it sticks. Repetition. Repetition, repetition, repetition…

It’s around the time his fork hits an empty plate that one of the police cars stops in front of the diner window, lights on, but the sirens are off now.

Hopper steps out.

Huh. That’s weird. Steve wonders what sort of emergency he’s here for.

When Hopper enters through the glass doors, the bell hung over the entry way rings out pleasantly. An angel getting their wings.

His eyes land on Steve and the older man sighs, shoulders falling. Relief, Steve recognizes. Hopper pulls the radio from his belt and says something into it before stomping over.

Then it clicks.

Oh. Steve’s the emergency.

He feels his face heat up. The handful of other patrons scattered across the diner are all looking at him.

“There you are.” Hopper sighs, gruff and exasperated.

Steve sinks into his seat, just a little. “Shit. I fucked up, didn’t I?”

“Just a little.” Hopper chuckles dryly. He takes off his hat and slips into the booth across from Steve, apparently not in any sort of hurry now that he’s found the runaway dog.

Steve runs a hand through his hair, a nervous tic he’s developed. “Sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be sorry. Just strangle Munson for me when you see him next, will ya?” Hopper drops his hat onto the table and waves the waitress down. He orders a coke.

Munson. Eddie.

The memory of how he made a total and utter fool of himself comes rushing back, slamming down onto him like one of those cartoon anvils. Jesus, how did he forget that..?

Suddenly the pancakes aren’t sitting so good in his gut. Feels like he’s gonna ralph.

“Was he freaked out? Eddie, I mean.” Steve asks, cautiously approaching the question. Did Eddie say anything about why…?

“Yeah, him and Robin both. Then the kids found out too—don’t ask me how. I suspect the curly-haired one has an illegal transmitter.” Hopper leans back in the booth as the waitress drops off his coke. He takes the straw out and drinks it right from the glass. Steve waits for him to finish, doesn’t say a word.

When Hopper puts the glass down, Steve just sits and watches the way the drops of condensation run down the cup, distorting around the fingerprints Hopper’s left. “Anyway, they’re all out on their bikes looking for you too.”

Hopper smiles fondly, like it’s something charming and not… pathetic. “You got a lot of people that care about you, kid.

Steve swallows around the lump in his throat, and nods. Tries for a grin, but it’s weak. Probably wouldn’t fool anyone, much less a cop. “Yeah, I’m a real lucky guy.”

Hopper looks like he wants to say something else, but he just takes a breath and nods. Steve’s grateful he doesn’t argue. Doesn’t think he has the energy in him right now to fend off the ‘but look how far you’ve come!’ ‘Your speaking’s gotten so much better!’ ‘It could be a whole heck of a lot worse!’ comments.

“What do you say we get you home? Unless you want dessert? My treat.” Hopper offers with a grin.

“No, I just want to go to sleep,” he says, before remembering his manners, “thanks, though.”

“Alright then.” Hopper glances down at the cleared plate of pancakes and the half finished coke before sliding out of the booth, followed by Steve. He takes out wallet, but Steve beats him to it. He tosses down a few bills, hoping it’s enough. Hopper doesn’t comment, so it must be.

The drive back to his and Robin’s apartment is a solemn one, but it’s strangely peaceful. Hopper’s got the heat on full blast due to Steve’s lack of coat, and the motion of the vehicle along with the darkened sky leaves Steve feeling wrung out in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

In fact, when they finally arrive, Hopper’s gotta shake his shoulder to wake him up.

“We’re here.” He rumbles out in his gruff baritone.

Steve lifts his head from his folded arm and looks up at the modest building. He wonders how far they live from the pancake diner. If they could walk there, sometime, him and Robin and Eddie.

But then Steve realizes he never got the name of it. He feels his insides sink. Another thing lost to him.

“Thanks, Hop,” Steve gives Hopper a nod and what he’s sure is a tired smile. “I’ll, uh—I’ll try not to run off again.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it.” Hopper says, diplomatically. “Let me walk you in.”

Steve cringes at the idea. He’s grateful for Hop and all he’s done—especially the part about not making him feel like a complete dummy—but he just wants this all to be over and for things to revert back to how they were. And at this point he’s so close he can taste it.

Steve busies his hands by undoing his seat belt. “No, it’s okay, really—“

Hopper looks like he’s about to argue but Robin damn near crashes out through the building’s illuminated front doors. She makes a b-line for Steve, who’s just barely gotten out of the cruiser.

She wraps her arms around him and doesn’t let go. “Steve! Holy shit, you scared me so bad. I’ve been out of my mind!”

Steve’s arms are trapped at an awkward angle, but he reaches around her as best he can, arms like flippers. “I’m okay. Seriously. Look, not even a scratch.”

She doesn’t laugh. Just squeezes him harder. Truthfully, Steve doesn’t know if he’s okay, but it’s what everyone always seems to want to hear from him, so he says it often.

“I’ve already killed Eddie like three times.” Robin murmurs into Steve’s chest, before finally pulling away. Her eyes are bloodshot, her nose stuffy, like she’s been crying.

“It’s not his fault, Rob.” Steve’s brows pinch together as he frowns, “is he…”

But when Steve looks up towards their building, he can see Eddie standing in the doorframe, his dark silhouette illuminated by the entry way lights. He’s still as a statue, holding open the door for them, arm extended out into the cold autumn night. Steve’s insides squirm.

“You got him from here, Buckley?” Hopper calls from his cruiser and Robin ducks to meet his eye before giving him a thumbs up. She loops her arm around his waist and they start towards their place—towards Eddie.

Before they reach him, Steve keeps his voice down as he asks, “Can I just go to bed? I don’t—I can’t talk about it right now.”

“Okay.” She nods, “I get it.”

But she doesn’t, not really.

Steve avoids eye contact with Eddie when they finally reach the building, and before he can say anything, Robin interrupts. “He’s going straight to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” Eddie says in a small voice. He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t even follow them back up to their apartment. Maybe Eddie’s even relieved he doesn’t need to confront it tonight. Maybe they won’t ever confront it… maybe he’s hoping Steve’s brain will take care of everything and make him forget. Make it like it never happened. Part of Steve wishes—

No. He doesn’t wish that. His brain’s already functioning at half capacity, he doesn’t want to thank it for fucking up, even if it might make Steve’s life easier.

Whatever Eddie’s expression is, Steve doesn’t look back to find out. He keeps his eyes on his feet, focusing on putting one step ahead of the other.

When they finally arrive at Steve’s matchbox sized bedroom, he doesn’t even bother changing into pajamas, or even out of his jeans for that matter. He just falls into his bed, pulls a pillow over his head and wills himself to let go of the day and surrender to the sweet pull of blissful unconsciousness.

🫣 Oops, I made it worse. But I promise the Eddie and Steve confrontation is in the next part! 🙏 This is tagged angst with a happy ending for a reason.

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[katabay]

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A KNIGHT...

the visual inspiration for this was a combination of Frederic William Burton's Meeting on the Turret Stairs and also Bernardo Cavallino's The vision of St. Dominic receiving the Rosary from the Virgin

this was supposed to be just a one off illustration to get the thoughts out of my system, but then I started thinking about medieval politics and warfare and plagues and a castle and home as both a place of refuge, a prison, and a tomb, so perhaps they will end up as ex voto characters as well.

you may say, hey! that rosary looks like it has too many beads! it's a fifteen decade rosary, probably. dominicans are really into marian devotions. it works out.

also. spiral style stair cases. oh boy. it was that unexpectedly more difficult than I originally thought it would be to draw. the more I think about it, the less I understand them, even though I had a million photos of the stairs in front of me while I was drawing it.

⭐ I have a tip jar (ko-fi)!

⭐ and other places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[kenjakusbraincum]

Heey, I LOVE your writings on soft sukuna, you write so beautifully🩷 please can you do one where he is jealous (fluff)😭🩷

Thank you sm for the kind words!!! Here's my best attempt at doing your idea justice <3

Sukuna has no real reason to be jealous. He practically owns you, controls every aspect of your life, who or what could he possibly be jealous of? Every servant who dared approach you in an inappropriate way would be dealt with swiftly. And you're a good pet, who has eyes for no one other than your master. You really don't give him a reason.

But there's this one thing... Since you've been so good and obedient, Sukuna has allowed you many liberties. You're permitted to skip around the mansion, watch Uraume cook, even enjoy little hobbies. You've tried many before you found that crocheting particularly piqued your interest. Ever since you've learned the basics, you've been spending hours working on perfecting your skills. At first it was cute, watching you squint in concentration as you move the hook. But then the math became really simple - having this hobby to keep you busy meant you approached Sukuna out of boredom a lot less. And he noticed it. It irked him, but you're not technically doing anything wrong. You were still as happy to serve him as ever, he just had to ask. But why would he have to ask? You should be all over him on your own. He should have to push you away, not beg you to give him attention. He didn't like this disturbance in your master and pet balance that this little hobby of yours caused.

He stands at the door now. You're crocheting again. You and your favorite servant laugh at your failed creation so sweetly, you don't even notice he's waiting. He clicks his tongue to establish his presence, and your servant falls to her knees immediately. You however, are not held to that high of a standard anymore.

"Master!", you call him, and hop up to greet him with a deep bow. Before he can say anything, you've picked up the piece of fabric you've been working on and ran into his arms to show him.

He looks at the ugly form and scoffs. "This is what I'm sponsoring?", he says and pulls a loose piece of yarn, making your little creation fall apart. He always was a bully, but you note his bad mood.

"I'm only a beginner...", you sulk.

"That much is obvious.", he flicks the yarn away and it falls onto the floor. Before you can bend to pick it up, he seizes your wrist and pulls you back. "Aren't you a little young to waste time with hobbies for the elderly?", he asks. You look at him with your cutest, practiced doe eyes, but it doesn't work.

"Come, pet. I know an activity more suitable for your age.", he says when you don't respond, and steps out of the room. You hop after him, unaffected by his condescending comments. You know that they're just for show. If he really thought you were a hag, you would've been gone a long time ago.

"Sitting at your throne all day?", you tease innocently and join him at his side, sliding your arm underneath one of his. You hope your playfulness will distract him from whatever is bothering him. "Or in a bath?" His lower set of eyes peeks at you and smirks, noticing that you're feeling particularly daring today. He's not sure how he feels about that. "Or in your bed." He rolls his eyes gently and opens the door to his chambers.

"At least then you'd be serving your purpose and actually spending time with your master.", he comments and shuts the door. His comment catches you a bit off guard and you stop in front of his bed. He makes his way towards you, and you look up at him with an insulted expression.

"Master, are you jealous of a ball of yarn?", you ask playfully, and squeal when he suddenly pushes you down to sit on the bed. Now you're at eye level... with his crotch.

"You've got quite a big mouth today. Put it to good use for a change, will you?", he runs his hand from the crown of your head to the back of your neck. You seem to have struck a nerve, so it really is the ball of yarn. Is it possible that Sukuna is this clingy?

"Will you?", he repeats and tugs on your hair and narrows his eyes. You smile obediently and reach behind him to untie his obi.

"Yes Master."

-

You try your best to manage the time you spend crocheting from then on, working on productivity in the hours that you dedicate to developing this skill. And it helps that you have a specific goal in mind now: helping Sukuna realize that this hobby is a friend, not an enemy. He still catches you engaging in it sometimes, and gives you a dirty look, but you're as quick as ever to drop what you're doing and join him. That seems to satisfy him.

When you're finally happy with the result of your creation, you look for Sukuna around the mansion. It's not really that hard to find him, as he frequents three places most of all: the dining room, his bedroom and his throne room. This time, he's sitting on his throne, and a small line of people wait for their turn to be gifted his attention. You on the other hand, don't have to wait in line to get it. His lower set of eyes spots you the moment you enter the chamber. You're allowed to roam the mansion, but barging in unannounced is not standard even for you.

Still, Sukuna has learned that you usually only feel daring enough to cross boundaries when you're sure he'll like what you have in mind. So for now, he will let this slide. He's bored as hell anyways. The people are dismissed and you pass by them on your way to his throne, nestled on a pile of bones. You stop in front of it and greet him with a bow.

"Master, I come to you with a humble offering.", you say with your hands on your thighs and your eyes fixated on the ground.

"Show me.", he says simply, but you recognize entertainment in his voice. You climb up the bones and feel his stare scan you from head to toe, before you sit on his knee.

"May I ask you to close your eyes?", you ask and flutter your lashes. Oh the way you seduce him. Who else could ask Sukuna to do something as dangerous as close his eyes? Give his opponent valuable time to land an attack. Who else could dare? And who else would he ever listen to and really close his eyes? Really do as he's told? Oh how safe he feels with you.

You take one of his large hands into yours, and gently pry his long fingers away to open his palm. He has beautiful hands. The only ones you've ever known, but you're sure they're the most beautiful hands in the world. So dangerous, so elegant. You want to press a kiss to his palm, but you hope your gift will have the same, maybe even more profound effect.

Something soft touches his skin, and then you speak, as politely as before. "You may look.", in your softest voice. And when he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking at you first. You're an offering on your own.

Then he looks at his hand. Two crocheted plush figures resembling him and yourself lay flat on his palm, connected through their holding hands. At first glance, it looks like they're two separate creations. In a sense, they are, but... He tries to part them.

"We're sewn together.", you explain. He hums in amusement and inspects your gift more closely. His plush is bigger, recognizable by the pink hair and four buttons for eyes. It's even wearing his favorite kimono. Yours is smaller and less detailed. You look like any other human when placed next to him, insignificant. But in a sea of pets, entertainers and lovers he's had in the past, he would never fail to recognize it as you.

He's spent so long looking at it with that face of his that you just can't read. You're starting to grow restless in his lap, and he feels your eyes dwell into his soul. When he looks back at you with one pair of eyes, your brows are furrowed in worry and you're fiddling your hands in your lap. He pats you on the head and pulls you closer, so you have no choice but to lean on his frame.

"It's beautiful, darling.", his fingers run through your hair, scraping your scalp softly. "No loose threads either.", he looks at you with all four eyes now, and you feel so small in his arms. You're not used to receiving this many compliments from Sukuna at once. Not ones that weren't directed at your body or performance. Especially not when he's looking at you so tenderly, when every word sounds so loving and genuine. "You've improved so much.", his hand is on your face now, and you catch him glancing at your lips. You part them to start thanking him, but you already know how much he hates listening to that.

You stay quiet instead, and lean closer, letting him take you. And he kisses you so softly, fingertips light against your heated skin. You feel like you're floating, like a lily pad in a warm pond. The littlest gesture of his affection has you melting in his embrace. The power he has over you... and how wonderful it is to surrender yourself to it.

None of the liberties and privileges you've been awarded with compare to this. You know that many pets have walked these halls before you. Many warmed his bed and claimed the title of his favorite. But how many loved him like this? Enough to dedicate time of their day to making intricate gifts. How many could say Sukuna kissed them lovingly, for no other reason than to show gratitude and affection?

You're flushed completely red by the time his lips leave yours. You can't hold the intensity of his gaze, as he stares at you in adoration. "I'm happ.. I'm glad you l-like it...", you stumble through the words and win a giggle out of him. You are just so cute. Like a pet should be. He rubs your head again and pushes you away lightly.

"Go now, the people await me.", he says with a benevolent smile gracing his face. "I'll see you tonight."

You bow to him and leave.

And when you visit him that night, he is as gentle as he was when he kissed you earlier, still in a good mood after your gift. Caressing your hair, shoulders and back, as you lay comfortably with your head on his chest. Keeping you warm in his embrace. You're trying your best to follow the conversation, but sleep is slowly taking over you. Sukuna notices and plants a kiss to your forehead, wishing you goodnight. The last thing you see before your eyes close, is your handcrafted plushies sitting on his nightstand.

[solarmorrigan]

Silly idea I talked about ages ago with @azure7539arts, inspired by a similar event my workplace hosts every year. Would minors be allowed to participate in such an event? Probably not! But then again, it was the 80s, who can say for sure. Anyway, it's my birthday and I'll post nonsense if I want to <3

-

“I need you to buy me.”

Eddie looks up from his notebook, effectively jarred from his campaign-plotting fugue state by Steve’s declaration.

Steve is standing at the other end of the dining table, staring at him expectantly.

“Y’know, this is the part where someone usually follows up their completely bonkers demand with an explanation,” Eddie says slowly.

“At the charity auction,” Steve clarifies. “I need you to bid on me, and I need you to win.”

Ah, yes, that weird Rent-an-Athlete charity auction the school runs every year; anyone on any Hawkins High sports team could volunteer to be “auctioned” off in order to raise money for said sports team, to spend a day at the beck and call of the highest bidder (within reason, supposedly). It’s generally restricted to students, but occasionally, prominent alumni are invited to participate – and Steve certainly fits the bill, especially after the story the government spun about his heroism in the face of “serial killer” Henry Creel last spring.

“And what, deny all those pretty girls a chance to get at you?” Eddie asks drily (he’d never turned up at previous auctions himself, but you could hardly avoid gossip in a school their size; it had usually been some cheerleader bidding with daddy’s money who won a date– that is, a day with Steve Harrington).

“It wasn’t always a girl who won,” Steve says, crossing his arms over his chest. “One time it was Mrs. Dalton – you know, the lady on the school board who lives on my block? I just spent the day doing yard work for her. She gave me lemonade. That was pretty cool.”

“Right,” Eddie drawls. “And I’m sure she definitely didn’t sit outside and stare at your ass while you were working.”

“She did not– she– I mean she was on the porch, but, like– she wouldn’t have– she’s, like, seventy, Eddie,” Steve splutters, and it’s all Eddie can do not to laugh.

“Older gals have needs, too, Steve,” Eddie says, giving in to a smirk. “So she was checking you out from the porch, huh?”

Steve goes red. “Shut up, that isn’t the point. I’m trying to ask for your help.”

“Right, right, your absolutely reasonable request for me to buy you at market. Why, again?” Eddie asks.

“The kids are planning to bid on me,” Steve says gravely.

Eddie blinks at him. “Okay?” he says, when no further explanation is forthcoming. “You basically do most of what they ask, anyway, so…?”

“Okay, believe it or not, I actually say no to at least half of what they ask me to do. I would literally never get anything done if I gave in to all their demands.” Steve jabs a finger at Eddie, who holds up his hands in mock surrender. “Anyway, this is all Henderson’s fault.”

“It usually is,” Eddie agrees, nodding sagely.

“He decided that he was going to bid on me and then use that day to finally make me play your nerd game with you–” Eddie snorts, and Steve shoots him a look, “but Wheeler doesn’t want me to play, so he said he was going to bid against Dustin and make me do anything but sit in on a session with you guys.”

“So let Wheeler win.” Eddie shrugs.

“No! I can’t let fuckin’ Mike win, he’ll probably make me do something even more ridiculous!” Steve exclaims. "He’ll make me play chauffeur for him and El on a date, or something, and he’ll probably include the stupid hat.”

“Wait, I thought El broke up with him,” Eddie breaks in.

“No, they’re on again,” Steve says absently, shaking his head. “Which is why Max has been in a bad mood lately.”

Eddie bites back the reflexive need to ask “How can you tell?”, going instead with, “I thought she and Sinclair were on again.”

“No, they are. That’s why no one’s been actively murdered,” Steve says.

“How do you keep track of all of this?” Eddie asks, squinting at Steve.

“It’s a natural skill. And we’re getting off track,” Steve says quickly. “Normally, I wouldn’t be that worried, because Dustin regularly blows his savings on weird science gadgets or whatever, but then Lucas and Will started taking sides.”

“This is getting very involved,” Eddie says.

“So you see why I’m stressed!” Steve insists, smacking a hand to his forehead (personally, Eddie thinks Steve is stressed for many other reasons, but he figures pointing that out just now won’t be appreciated). “Lucas is on Dustin’s side, and that kid does odd jobs like nobody’s goddamn business; he actually has shit saved up. And usually I’d have faith in him being more, like, sensible than to spend it all on this, but the little shit is really fucking competitive.”

“Wonder who he got that from?” Eddie mutters.

“Okay, we do remember that I’m not actually biologically related to any of these idiots, right?” Steve snaps.

“Well now we’re just getting into nature versus nurture–”

“Eddie.”

“Right, sorry, continue.”

“Well, Will took Mike’s side–”

“Shocking.”

“Right? But anyway, I don’t know if the kid has much saved up, but between him and Wheeler, they might be able to win.” Steve sighs, looking far more world-weary than Eddie feels the situation really warrants.

“You know you don’t actually have to do what they ask you to, right?” Eddie points out.

Steve rolls his eyes. “If an auction winner complains to the school that the person they bid on didn’t fulfill their end of the bargain, they can get their money back. It’s a whole…” he waves his hand vaguely, “thing. Happened once when I was a sophomore; Deacon McNab. Lost a good chunk of change for the football team, and they vandalized the shit out of his car.”

“Ah, right. Forgot we went to school with literal psychopaths,” Eddie hums.

“So, I just need you to bid on me and win, so I’m not stuck wasting a Saturday on whatever the hell the kids are going to try to make me do. Or not do. Or– whatever,” Steve says.

“Okay, not that I don’t understand your predicament here, but I think you’re forgetting something kind of important, Steve,” Eddie drawls.

Steve’s brows draw together in question. “What?”

“I’m fucking poor.”

“Oh.” Steve shakes his head. “I didn’t mean– no, I will give you the money, you don’t have to spend a dime, man, I just need you to get me out of this.”

“Why not have Buckley do it?” Eddie asks.

“That was Plan A, but she actually has a date that night, and it’s kind of a big deal, so I don’t want her to cancel,” Steve says. “But I assumed you wouldn’t be busy.”

“Wow, rude,” Eddie scoffs, and Steve sighs.

“Fine, sorry, I just really hoped you wouldn’t be busy.” Steve gives him the most lethal set of puppy dog eyes Eddie has ever seen, as if there had been any chance from the beginning that he’d be able to say no. “Please?”

Just for show, Eddie lets out a long sigh, falling against his chair and letting his head flop over the backrest like he’s deflating.

“Fine.”

“Thank you,” Steve groans, sounding so genuinely relieved that Eddie almost feels bad about how quickly his thoughts dip into the realms of the inappropriate. “Oh my god, I owe you.”

Eddie glances back up at Steve, tongue darting out to wet his lips almost unconsciously. “You know I’m not as easy to appease as a couple of fifteen-year-olds, right?”

Steve’s eyes drop for just a second—maybe down to Eddie’s lips, maybe not; who can say?—before he looks back up, cocking an eyebrow at Eddie. “I think I can handle it.”

Slowly, Eddie grins. “We’ll see.”

[milkweedman]

learning to spin on a drop spindle: a beginner’s lengthy yet comprehensive guide

I put this monograph together for a friend, but many other people wanted to read it as well, so here it is !

Fig A: Parts of a Drop Spindle. (image source. notes are mine. Click for higher res !). Apologies in advance for the lack of image descriptions--for the most part I use images because I can’t figure out how to describe the thing in words, so describing the images is kinda the whole issue. If anyone wanted to write them for me I’d add them to the original post in a heartbeat !

How to Get Started Drafting and Spinning

So, you have your fiber and your spindle--now what ?

Friendly pre-tutorial reminder that radfems can fuck right off if they think I’m writing any of this for their benefit. I’m not. I hope they all choke on their spindles <3. This is a safe space for trans people first and foremost.

(Check out this post that goes into picking a spindle and your first fiber, if you don’t have one yet)

First, you might wish to practice drafting a little. Drafting is the process of drawing the fibers out from, for example, a strand of roving or a rolag, into a thinner, airy length. To draft, loosely hold your fiber in your dominant hand, and pinch the very tip of the fiber with your thumb and forefinger of your non dominant hand. Then gently pull. If you pull all the way, you should notice that your fiber detaches from the fiber source eventually. For yarn, we want very very long lengths, so we don’t want that to happen. To get a continuous length of drafted fiber, simply change where you’re pulling from as you go. For example, you can draft out 2 centimeters/1 inch of fiber, and then move your fingers 2 cm/1 in back toward your fiber supply, and draft again.

The thinner you draft (or pre-draft*), the thinner that fiber will spin up. Once we start spinning, you’ll see how adding twist immediately compacts the fiber quite a bit, so you need to draft much thicker than you actually want your yarn to be. When pre-drafting specifically, if in doubt--draft thicker. You can always draft it out a little more as you’re spinning.

Figuring out how to draft smoothly can be one of the harder parts of learning to spin, but even before knowing how to do it perfectly you can still create good yarn.

Check out The Joy of Handspinning website to see drafting in action, as well as several different types of drafting.

Also check out this video explaining pre-drafting roving. 1:00-2:30 is especially helpful. If it’s not clicking from this video, search youtube for “pre drafting fiber for spinning” and watch til you have a better understanding.

*pre-drafting just means drafting before spinning--so it’s the same type of thing as drafting while spinning, but without having to wrangle your spindle at the same time. I’d recommend pre-drafting at least a bit of your fiber until you feel comfortable doing it. Then you can spin with your pre-drafted fiber, and it’ll be easier than if you hadn’t pre-drafted.

Tips: If you have a bottom whorl spindle, you may also want to practice spinning the spindle before it has any fiber on it, just to get a feel for how it moves. You could do this with the bottom point in a bowl or on a flat surface like a book or table. Try rolling the top of the shaft between your thumb and index finger. Don’t worry about it toppling over frequently--your spindle will be suspended by the yarn that you’re spinning, so it won’t topple !

If you have a top whorl spindle, you might have a harder time getting it to spin without being suspended, because the center of gravity is so high. Instead, try tying a piece of thread or scrap yarn to the hook (if it has one) or below the whorl (look for figure B below) and secure it with a half hitch knot. Then try spinning it like that, and let it hang freely to unwind itself whenever it has too much twist before you try again.

You can also try spinning a bottom whorl suspended by scrap yarn or thread. The advantage of trying it while it’s suspended is it can allow you to watch twist being added and see what it does without messing with your handspun, as well as letting you get a feel for how it moves while suspended. If you have a bottom whorl, I’d give both a try !

---

Now that you can draft, you’re gonna want to attach your fiber to your spindle. Some people use a leader to do this--it’s a pre-spun loop of yarn that you tie to your spindle. Then you loop some pre-drafted fiber through the loop of the leader, add twist til it holds, and off you go.

Another way to do it is without a leader. I’m much more familiar with this method, and I find it way easier, so I’ll go into more depth on this one:

1. Take the end of your pre-drafted fiber (you will need enough pre-drafted fiber to go from the underside of the whorl to the very top of the spindle, and then back again. If you’ve pre-drafted way more, don’t worry. We’re just working with this short amount for now, but it can stay attached). Make a slip knot at the end. You can roll the fiber between your fingers to add some twist if you’re having trouble making a slip knot with it. (Tip: if you’re having trouble getting the fibers to roll, wet them slightly with water or spit and it will be much easier)

2. Put the slip knot on the bottom point of your spindle, and slide it up so that it’s at the whorl.

3. Gently wind the pre-drafted fiber up the spindle shaft, until you are at the hook or top. Wind it over the hook (or do a half-hitch knot at the top--if there’s a groove near the top your half hitch should sit in there, otherwise it should sit as close to the top as possible while still being secure. You may drop it a few times while learning where the perfect spot is--such is life). Be careful with pre-drafted fiber--depending on staple length and fiber type, it can pull apart quite easily. The trick to keeping that from happening is to keep it a little slack and loose until you have added twist to it.

4. Pinch your pre-drafted fiber between your thumb and forefinger on your dominant hand, about 1 hand’s width from the top of your spindle. Turn the spindle in the direction you intend to spin your yarn (usually this will be clockwise, or to the right). Spin the spindle until you have the desired amount of twist. You should notice that all the fiber above the hook/half-hitch has twist, while the fiber below it has none. You need all of it to have twist, so let’s even it out--pop the half-hitch off with your thumb/unwind the yarn from the hook, unwind the yarn from the shaft so that the entire length you’ve worked with so far is stretched out. This will allow the twist to equalize. Now wind it all back up and put the half-hitch back/wind around the hook again. You may need to repeat this a couple times to get your starting fiber fully twisted (don’t worry though--you only need to do this at the very start. From here on you shouldn’t need to equalize twist like that until the next time you start from an empty spindle).

You’re done attaching the fiber--now you can spin !

Fig B: How your yarn should sit on a spindle, both top and bottom whorl

If that doesn’t make sense, here’s a video showing how to attach it with and without a leader. If that doesn’t help either, search youtube for “how to attach leader to drop spindle” and keep looking until you have a better understanding.

---

So you know how to draft and your fiber is attached to your spindle--now it’s time to spin ! There are 3 different parts to spinning a singles on a drop spindle.

1. Adding twist. This can be done with just your hands, but the spindle makes it a whole lot faster. This is the purpose of a spindle--to add twist very quickly (and as a bonus, it’s a handy place to store the yarn as you spin it !). All you have to do is spin the spindle, and the only trick is to make sure you always spin in a consistent direction--don’t start a project spinning clockwise and end it spinning counterclockwise ! You’ll have an impossible time plying it then. There are a lot of different ways to spin a spindle--you’ll see a few watching the videos here, and more if you search out videos of drop spindling yourself. Whatever method is comfortable and practical for you is what you should do.

2. Drafting the fiber. You already know how to do this part !

3. Winding the yarn on. When your yarn is long enough that adding more length will make it hard to work with, you’ll want to wind it onto the spindle so that you can get back to spinning. To do this, pop the half hitch knot off the top/unwind from the hook, unwind along the shaft, and wind it near or at the base of the whorl, in the orientation seen in the very first picture. Always wind in the same direction that you’re spinning, to stop your yarn from flying off.

I would highly recommend starting with the method known as “park and draft” while you learn. In this method, you first add a ton of extra twist (usually as much as you can) and then put the spindle down and draft until that extra twist is used up. Then you wind on, and repeat. This isolates the actions of spinning so that you are only doing one at a time, which makes it a lot easier. Most people move on from this technique once they’ve figured it out, but you don’t have to--the drawback is that it’s typically slower, but hey, spinning is a slow craft anyway. There is no wrong way to spin, and everyone’s hands and bodies have different needs and work in different ways.

How to Park And Draft

First, use your dominant hand to pinch your pre-drafted fiber a few inches/6 cm above the top of the spindle.

Now just spin the spindle clockwise, until it won’t really spin any more. (Don’t try to get ~the most twist ever achieved~ or anything like that--your yarn can potentially snap from too much twist. Take your cue from the spindle--when it stops wanting to spin, you’ve got enough twist.) Don’t let the twist advance beyond where you’re pinching it off.

This is important--if the twist gets into your fiber, it becomes much harder to draft it. But don’t worry, you can undo this by pinching just above where the twist has entered your fiber, and with the other hand just below (pinching the actual yarn here). Now (with the hand that’s pinching the yarn) roll in the opposite direction that you’re spinning in. This will move the twist down into the rest of your yarn. Let go of where you’re pinching the fiber, slide your yarn-pinching hand to where it usually is as you’re spinning, and get back to it.

Your leader/yarn should be very kinked up and wiry. Now put the spindle between your thighs (or between your knees, under one knee, or under something heavy that won’t damage your spindle. Thighs are convenient, but if it’s uncomfortable, try putting the spindle somewhere else. It needs to be held firmly in place and not move around). This is the “park” part of “park and draft”.

Now, you want to be pinching the twist off at the same spot, but using your other hand instead. I usually pinch right above where I’m already pinching and let go with the lower hand.

First we’re going to just bring the twist up the pre-drafted fiber by sliding your pinching hand up the fiber, slowly and gently. You should see the twist follow behind your hand as it enters the fiber. If you have lots of pre-drafted fiber, you might wind on, add more twist, wind on again, etc. You could also draft out your pre-drafted fiber (this is what the majority of more experienced spinners who pre-draft do) while you go.

The “draft” part of “park and draft” is just like pre-drafting, but one end is attached to a spindle. This gives you something to lightly pull against, if you want. Draft slowly and with purpose.

At a certain point, you will run out of excess twist. At this point, wind on. If you’ve only done a short length, you can also add more twist, park it again, and go back to drafting.

If you’ve run out of armspan but still have lots of excess twist, unpark your spindle (let it hang free) and allow it to untwist a little, monitoring it closely. If this happens often, try to put less energy into twisting your spindle, or allow it to twist for less time.

The amount of twist that your yarn has matters a lot--it will impact your finished yarn hugely. A yarn without enough twist will be very limp and might even fall apart as you handle it. A yarn with too much twist will be wiry and inelastic. You want to find a middle ground where it’s got just the right amount for what you intend to use it for--a hard, inelastic wool yarn can make a good bag, but not a very good hat.

To see how much twist you’ve added to your singles as you spin, try a plyback test ! This is really quick to do on spindles--just relax the distance between your fiber supply and the top of the spindle. When the yarn is no longer taut, the live twist will cause it to twist back on itself. With too little twist, you may just get a few sad loops (or no loops, if it’s super undertwisted). With too much twist, you may get tons of tight little curls of yarn. With a good amount of twist, you should have a few good curls (just one if it’s a short length of yarn, or several if it’s your armspan) that aren’t too tight. Those curls are what your yarn will look like once 2 plied, so it’s a great litmus test for whether you’re adding the correct amount of twist or not.

Fig C: What different amounts of twist looks like in your singles.

To fix too little twist, just spin the spindle a little extra until it looks right. To fix too much twist, either draft more fiber or else let the spindle untwist a little.

You can and should do this before winding each new length on, at least while you’re still learning the motions.

Check out this video of how to spin with the park and draft method ! 0:00-4:45 is intro and attaching the leader. 4:46-9:00 is the method itself (note to friend: don’t watch past 9 mins). If this video doesn’t work for you, search “drop spindle park and draft” on youtube.

A few interim tips

1. It’s critical to hold your fiber supply loosely. If you find that you have put a lot of force into drafting, then you are either holding your fiber way too tight or your hands are too close together (or potentially both). Drafting should not require force. If it is requiring force, adjust your grip and your hand placement continually until it gets better, and refine from there.

2. Try to put some tension on the yarn as you wind it on. This will make it sit a little neater and flatter, so that you have a more stable cone of yarn and can fit more on it.

3. If you draft out your fiber so much that it runs thin and just sort of disintegrates, just pull off the most wispy parts from your yarn and the fiber supply, then hold the two together again, making sure to overlap by several inches/6-10cm. Gently draft out a little and add twist before putting that join under the weight of your spindle, or it will fail again. You can join from one fiber source to the next one (necessary with rolags, hand combed top, and strips off of batts) in a similar way; make sure to leave a little unspun fiber for a good join, and overlap the end of the first fiber source with the beginning of the second by about an inch/2.5 cm.

4. If your yarn snaps (rather than your fiber running thin as you draft), it’s because it was A) twisted way too much B) spun too fine for the drop spindle you’re using C) both A and B or D) your spindle has become heavy enough that it can no longer spin as fine as you were spinning.

For A, B, and C: remove as much twist as you can from either end of the snapped yarn, then put both ends in your upturned palm, overlapping them over the whole width of your palm. Add enough either water or spit to get them good and wet (not dripping, but they do need to be wet). Now place your other palm down on top, and rub vigorously for about 30 seconds until the ends have joined together. If necessary, you can also just tie the ends in a knot, although it’s not invisible and you can usually feel it in the finished yarn.

For D: is your whorl removable ? If so, remove the whorl and continue spinning. If not (and for the vast majority of beginner’s drop spindles it won’t be), your spindle is full ! Even if there’s still room, it’s too heavy to continue spinning on for that project. You could keep going spinning a thicker yarn, but that means your yarn will randomly get thicker somewhere near the end, which works for very few projects. If this happens to you when there’s still tons and tons of room on your spindle, that means in general you ought to spin thicker yarn on that particular spindle if you want to fill it up all the way.

Okay, I spun yarn, now what ?

So at the moment, you have what we call a singles (some people just say “single”). That can be used as is, or it can be plied--that is, held together with more strands of singles and twisted in the opposite direction. But either way, you need to get it off your spindle !

If you’re going to leave it as a singles, then you’ll be winding it into a skein (we’ll get into that later). If you want to ply it though, you’ve got a lot of options. (I’ll get to how to actually ply later, this is just discussing those options.)

Many Methods of Plying

Plying Straight Off The Spindles

First, if you’ve got multiple spindles capable of spinning the same weight of yarn, you could just set your full spindle aside and spin another one. You’d need at least 3 spindles (the third, ideally, a bigger plying spindle) to get a 2 ply yarn, and 4 spindles to get a 3 ply with this sort of setup. This is what I do with supported spindles, since I have many, and I can attest that it saves a lot of winding time and is terribly convenient.

But it’s also probably not doable for many people, and it’s ridiculous to buy 3 drop spindles when you’re just getting into it !

Wind And Store

Second, you can wind your singles onto something for storage, and then use your now-empty spindle to spin another singles. Two great things to store yarn on are small rocks and empty toilet paper (loo) rolls.

Winding it around a small rock is better than just winding it into a ball for plying, since the rock will weight it and stop it from flying up in the air once you start plying. A big pebble works great. With this setup, you’d want to put all your balls of singles in a bowl or container of some kind, hold the ends of each, attach it to your spindle, and let them roll around as you ply.

They can tangle (mine usually don’t, but it can happen), so the toilet paper rolls might be an upgrade--these can be put on a stick, and the stick can be put on something (or you can poke two holes in a cardboard box, put the stick through one hole, load the rolls onto it, then put it through the other hole as well) to keep it stationary so that the rolls... well, roll. This requires some storage space (usually if you do this often, you don’t wanna make a new one every time, so keeping it is preferable) and is honestly not a huge upgrade... unless you have a ball winder that can wind the yarn onto the TP rolls for you, in which case this is a big time saver. If you don’t have one and don’t have issues with tangling, the rocks will probably work just as well and take up a lot less space.

Fig D: Diagram of a Simple Ply Box

Ply Bracelet

Thirdly, if you want a 2 ply yarn specifically, you could wind it onto your hand and make something called an Andean Plying Bracelet. Here’s a link to a page that goes into it in detail. I highly, highly recommend learning how to do these. They look a little complex, and I couldn’t tell you the motions if my life depended on it, but I can do them with my eyes closed while not paying a whit of attention. They rely entirely on muscle memory, so once you learn them, they’re easy as pie.

The whole point of a plying bracelet is to get 2 strands of yarn out of 1 singles. You could of course wind a singles into a ball, then wind half of it onto another ball, and then ply from there. But a plying bracelet is a lot faster, and will always match up exactly.

One downside of a plying bracelet is that, as the name implies, it goes on your wrist. So if you keep needing to put your spindle down to take care of other things, you’ll need to pull off the plying bracelet as well (or carry the whole thing with you). They can be stored on a cylindrical object that’s smaller than your wrist, or sometimes also draped on hooks or put on the spindle shaft itself. I don’t usually encounter problems when pulling on or off my plying bracelets--it doesn’t seem to tangle them--but if you’re plying while cooking or watching a child or something else that might require you to stop immediately and hurry over to whatever needs tending, then you might want to save the ply bracelet for another day.

Chain Plying

Fourth, you could wind your singles into one ball, and then chain ply it. Chain plying is a way to turn one singles into a 3 plied yarn. It also preserves stripes in your singles (we’ll talk about this in more detail later), so it can be perfect for a very colorful singles.

Chain plying is simple. Do you know how to tie a slip knot ? Of course, because you needed one to start spinning ! (Although here’s the link to how to tie a slip knot again, if you need it.) So that means you basically know how to chain ply as well.

Step one: tie a slip knot at the end of your singles (you want a very short tail, since that’s basically waste). Make the resulting loop nice and big, and lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through the loop--now you have a new loop ! Make it nice and big as well. Lay it over your singles. Pull the singles through.  Repeat until you’re at the end of your singles (try to have your last loop be a very small one). To finish, place the end through the loop, and then just pull on it until it tightens the loop. Note that you typically are adding ply twist and winding on as you do this, but you can also just chain ply an entire single and wind it into a ball as you go, then add twist once you’re done. That can be a lot easier to wrangle, if you’re having difficulties.

You might notice that this is basically a really open crochet chain. Yep ! It needs to be open so that the twist can enter the yarn, but you can do very big or somewhat smaller loops--although no matter what, you need to keep the loops large enough to at least hook a couple fingers through them so that you can make the next loop. Note that sometimes, the bump at the start of each loop can be felt and/or seen. Also note that chain plying is best done with smooth singles that can slide against each other. It can be done with a bumpy, lumpy yarn that sticks to itself, but bumps and lumps will catch as you try to chain, and if the yarn sticks to itself then it won’t slide nicely, which can really slow you down.

You may find that you prefer holding the ball of singles as you chain, or you may want it in a container on your lap/on the floor. You could also make a little wrist pouch to hold it, although take friction into account--if you make it out of wool yarn, choose a smooth one.

Ply Ball

Fifth is a sort of hybrid of a few of the others I’ve already mentioned, called a ply ball. To make a ply ball, simply wind two or more singles together into a ball (I’d suggest winding them around a small rock for a ply ball, too). The number of singles you wind in your ply ball will be the number of plies your yarn will have. A chain plied single wound into a ball is also functionally a ply ball.

Ply balls are extremely portable--you only ever need to work with one at a time, so you can just keep it in your pocket without worry of tangling, and it’s not attached to you or a box or another spindle. The downside is that it generally requires you to either have multiple spindles (ex: fill up two spindles, wind both off into one ply ball) or do extra winding (ex: fill up your spindle, wind it off to a rock for storage, fill up your spindle again, now wind from the spindle and the rock to get your ply ball. Add more winding for more plies).

However, you can also wind a ply ball from plying bracelet (yes, that’s more winding--but now it’s portable, and you’ve just turned one singles into a 2 strand ply ball) or even chain a singles, but wind it into a ply ball instead of plying it then and there to get a 3 strand ply ball (this also might let you play around with really long or really short chains without having to think about ergonomics as much, since your spindle isn’t involved).

Ply balls can also be helpful if you’re having issues wrangling your singles while you try to ply, since they’re laid together already--so they’re worth an attempt if you are having trouble keeping your yarn in line while plying.

There’s a short (but full of tips) article on ply balls here.

There’s even more ways to ply--look into "plying from a center pull ball” (similar to a plying bracelet, but requires a ball winder or a nostepinne) and “ply on the fly” (chain plying at the same time as spinning the singles--highly portable instant gratification). There may also be others that I’ve forgotten or not heard of, hopefully mentioned by others in the notes !

So Many Ways to Ply--How to Choose ?

So, every plying method and every number of plies has its own effects on the finished yarn, and you can use those effects to get the yarn you’re after.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with yarn weights such as lace weight and worsted weight, you should read this first !

A singles is great for your soft, fluffy, luxury stuff--cowls, hats, mittens that won't get a lot of wear, or shawls. It also preserves the colors that you spun exactly--so if you spun a beautiful perfect rainbow singles and the most important thing to you is that it stays a rainbow, you could leave it as a singles ! You can knit, crochet, weave, and nalbind with them like normal (I actually really prefer them for nalbinding--they felt easier so the joining is quicker), although because they haven’t been plied, they’re a lot weaker to abrasion and snapping. So they’re not ideal for things that need to be durable, and if you’re spinning short and/or fine fibers, you may find that even with some care they still don’t last very long, so keep in mind that stuff made from singles probably won’t be passed down or anything like that. But still, I’ve knit several small pouches from singles that have held up just fine being tossed around my room. One advantage to note is that you have the most yardage and the least spinning time this way, so it’s a very ‘time cheap’ yarn--you spin 100 yards/90 meters of singles, and you get 100 yards/90 meters of yarn. No time spent plying. However, it is as thin or thick as you spun it, and however consistent or inconsistent your spinning is, that’s your end result ! A lot of spinners (me) balk at this.

2 ply is next. I use 2 ply for almost everything besides socks--it’s quick, it’s fairly durable, and it looks very pretty (and an error correction: is ideal for lace). A 2 ply halves the amount of yarn you end up with--if you spin 100 yards/90 meters and 2 ply it, you’ll end up with 50 yards/45 meters. It also has a distinct ‘handspun’ look--2 ply knits up to a messier fabric. I really love that effect, but if you want a neat, uniform fabric, don’t do a 2 ply ! I’m not sure how it affects crochet or weaving, unfortunately, but do I suspect it’s similar with crochet. It also bulks up your yarn--it’ll be a little bit less than double the thickness of your singles, usually. 2 ply holds up alright to gentle/moderate daily wear, and is great for hats, gloves that don’t need to be hard wearing, scarves, and bags that won’t need to bear a huge amount of weight. It’s a workhorse yarn--you can use it for almost anything, and it’ll probably be okay. The only thing I would never use it for is socks--that’s a 3 or 4 ply project.

Let’s talk 3 ply ! 3 ply can be achieved either through chain plying or else as a traditional 3 ply--meaning 3 separate singles all plied together. You’ll get very different effects from these two methods in terms of both color and even-ness. If your singles had any stripes of color, with chain ply they will remain as stripes (this could be an alternative to your rainbow singles !). With a traditional 3 ply, your stripes will all blur together, and you’ll get a varied and multicolored yarn. You will get 1/3 of the yardage/meterage of your original singles, so a 3 ply yarn takes longer to make than a singles or a 2 ply. But it is also about 3 times thicker than your singles, so if you’re struggling to spin thick singles but want a thick yarn, 3 ply is a great option.

If your singles are very even, you’ll see no real different between chain ply and traditional 3 ply (except for the bumps at the start of each loop--they are usually visible as well). However, if your singles are kind of all over the place, chain plying magnifies this. On the other hand, a traditional 3 ply really evens out any inconsistencies. Even though I’ve got a few years under my belt, I am not a very consistent spinner, simply because I can neither visualize nor remember the weight I ought to be spinning, so it’s always a total guess (damn aphantasia). Beginners are also often inconsistent spinners, just due to lack of muscle memory. Either way, a traditional 3 ply can be really helpful in creating a fairly smooth, even yarn from really wild, inconsistent singles.

Fig E: comparisons of chain ply and traditional 3 ply, in terms of consistency

Lastly, 4 ply. 4 ply will turn your heavy laceweight singles into a light worsted, if it puffs up in blocking enough. I love 4 ply for my supported spindles mostly, since those spin very fine yarn and I don’t have a use for anything finer than sock weight yarn. It’s also very durable, and a laid 4 ply (like a traditional 3 ply--just 4 strands held together) make good socks. A cabled 4 ply (take two 2 ply yarns and ply them again) makes terrible socks, but is still very durable and has an interesting rope like appearance and texture. 4 ply in general is great for socks, bags, blankets, and especially sweaters, as it doesn’t pill much and will stand up to heavy wear. However, you have to spin 4 times the singles to get your finished yarn--a 100 yard/90 meter 4 ply skein requires 400 yards/360 meters of singles, and then more time for plying. So these are rather slow. They’re an awesome option for a fiber that refuses to spin up to anything other than the finest lace, and they will make great objects and garments that will last for a good long while.

Past 4 ply, you kind of just get rope. I haven’t ventured past 4 ply much--give it a shot if you’re curious !

The Why of Ply is a great article on the different aspects of different plies, and touches on some stuff I don’t mention (like stitch definition and cables) if you want to know more ! Highly recommend it.

How to Ply

So... you know at least a few methods of plying now, know how many plies you want your finished yarn to have, and you may have even already wound a ply ball or filled all of your spindles. Which means it’s finally time to ply everything.

To start, you need to attach all your plies to your spindle. For the methods that I’ve discussed (with the exception of chain plying), you’re going to do the following: gather the ends of your plies together, and make one slipknot with all of them. Then put the slipknot on your spindle below the whorl, the same way you would when spinning singles (and when not using a leader).

For chain plying: chain your singles until you’ve got about a foot or a third of a meter. Now you want to attach it to your spindle. Take the very first slip knot loop and slip it onto the spindle, below the whorl.

Now, secure your yarn by wrapping it around the hook or else with a half hitch knot, and spin the spindle counterclockwise (anticlockwise). You should immediately see the plies twisting together to form plied yarn.

From here, you will proceed basically the same way as you did when spinning singles--you’ll add twist to your plies, then wind on. This can be a really great opportunity to practice doing things while the spindle is in motion; you won’t be drafting, but depending on the type of plying you’re doing, you may be chaining, pulling from a ply bracelet, or simply letting the plies slide through your fingers (you do want to tension them and keep the twist from getting past your hand). If that requires too much coordination, feel free to park and ply--that is, spin the spindle to add excess twist, park it and let it into your yarn, then wind on.

If you try to ply your yarn the same direction that you spun it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really turn into a cohesive yarn, and instead becomes wiry and the plies don’t slot neatly together. If you notice this happening, turn your spindle in the other direction. A yarn that is both spun and plied in the same direction won’t be stable or strong, and will tangle the second you try to work with it.

This is why it’s helpful to be consistent in which direction you choose to spin your singles, by the way--if you always spin wool clockwise, then you can know with certainty that it will be plied counterclockwise.

We refer to yarn as having either Z twist or S twist (this refers to whatever the finished twist is, so a singles that you’re never going to ply, or a 3 ply yarn, for example). This just makes it a little easier to talk about and recognize what we’re doing.

Fig F: S and Z Twist in plied and singles yarn

It’s essentially a mnemonic device that allows you to glance at your yarn and go “Oh! I spun these three singles counterclockwise, so I should ply them all together clockwise.” I often have to draw an S or Z in the air (just like I sometimes have to draw an L in the air to pretend I can reliably tell left from right), but it is pretty foolproof and will prevent you from, for example, trying to ply an S twist singles with a Z twist singles and then wondering what on earth went wrong.

By the way, this page has a really helpful chart on what direction you might want to spin in based on what you intend to do with the finished yarn. For example, crocheting (right handed style) with S twisted yarn will remove the twist as you work, but knitting in continental or English style (or crocheting left handed style) with that same yarn will add twist. Most spinners spin their singles to have Z twist and ply them with S twist--but if you’re a crocheter or knit Eastern style this will unply your yarn as you work, and you are encouraged to try reversing things to have better results with your handspun projects. The more you know !

Now, back to your plying. You may be wondering how you’re supposed to know how much ply twist to add, which is a great question, because plyback tests don’t work when you’re actually plying. Those are for when you’re spinning your singles. Instead, I do what I call a “hanging test”. Just hold out a length of plied yarn between your hands and let it hang (not pulling it taut--the yarn should have a nice downturned curve). A balanced yarn--that is, a yarn that has equal and correct amounts of spin and ply twist--will just hang nicely. An underplied (or underspun) yarn will usually also hang nicely, but you will see gaps inbetween the plies. This is no good at all. Gaps won’t just make your yarn look bad, they'll also make it split when you work with it, and will be less durable and more prone to pilling, felting, and eventual disintegration after much use.

On the other end of the spectrum, an overplied yarn (which may have both too much spin and ply twist, or may be underspun and then overplied in an attempt to fix ones mistake--which won’t work, by the way. You need to go back and add more spin twist to your singles) will twist in the middle instead of hanging. If it only twists a tiny bit, you’re fine. But if it twists a lot, there’s problems. Overtwisted 2 ply yarns tend to be aggressively smooth--this is only relevant for 2 ply, since those have a sort of pearled silhouette. If your 2 ply is smooth, then you’ve most certainly overplied it. 3 and 4 ply are always smooth, however, so a smooth profile for one of those is to be expected.

Fig G: Ply twist in 2 ply yarns. Do these yarns have S or Z twist ?

Don’t worry if your first yarns aren’t perfectly spun or plied (really--they won’t be). Every spinner is striving for something different with their yarn. Some are aiming for total technical perfection, some aim for exquisite fineness, some aim for beautiful colorways and for finding the softest and most lovely breed of sheep. Some just want to spin, some just want usable yarn, some just want a pair of socks that last on their feet and find commercial sock yarn to be about as durable as wet paper (that would be me). You certainly don’t have to know what you want to get out of spinning right away, but the point is that every single spinner has their own standards that they hold themself to, and you don’t need to (and shouldn’t !) try to meet others standards. Especially when still learning, but also just all the time and forever.

I’ve Plied My Yarn, Now What ? OR I Just Want Singles, Now What ?

Now your yarn needs to come off the spindle ! But not the way we’ve been taking singles to ply off the spindle--we need to make what’s called a hank. A hank is basically a loop of yarn that’s been tied so that it’s nice and secure. These loops can be pretty big (mine are all 2 yards/1.8 meters) or as small as the distance around your hand--it all comes down to what you wind your yarn onto.

I have already made a tutorial that goes into quite a bit of depth (and has pictures, even), so I’m gonna speed through this part a little bit.

1. Find something to wind your yarn around. A Niddy noddy is the preferred tool for the job here, and will make it much faster to wind and thoughtlessly simple to calculate the yardage/meterage of your yarn (I’ve seen people use yarn swifts as well, and they certainly look very speedy), but they are by no means required. Substitutes include: a large hardcover book, the back of one or two chairs, your hand (ideal for very small amounts of yarn), your forearm (for smallish amounts of yarn--wrap between the thumb and forefinger and go down to the elbow, then back up), or anything else that won’t deform with pressure and is holding relatively still.

2. Wind your yarn around that thing. You may need to start with a slipknot to attach it to whatever it is you’re winding on, or else a piece of tape. If you’re using your forearm or hand, you can simply pinch the end to hold it in place. Unlike when winding your yarn onto your spindle, when winding your yarn into a hank, you want to use as little tension as possible so that you can get a more accurate measurement of length later on. Also try to keep your winding tidy--in an ideal world, the yarn should be traveling almost the same path every time, not a few inches to the left one time, then wildly skewed to the right the next time.

3. Tie off your hank. Once you’ve finished winding, you need to secure your hank so that it doesn’t tangle. You can use either scrap yarn or else the ends of the yarn you just made (I prefer the latter, since the ends tend not to be very good anyway, so at least they don’t go to waste. In this case, snap off or cut both ends--the length you should cut depends on how thick your hank is). Find where both ends are--you will need to tie knots near the ends so that you can attach the ends to them. Tie an overhand knot a few inches/5cm below the first end, and then hold that end alongside one of your strands of knot-tying yarn, and tie another overhand knot. Repeat this with the other end. Make sure you haven’t overlooked any strands of yarn and left them out of the tie--that’s a very easy way to get tangles.

4. Remove your hank. Gently push your hank off of whatever you wound it on. Put it to the side--now we want to measure. Use soft measuring tape (or a piece of inelastic string or yarn, if you don’t have one--you will then need to measure that against a rigid measuring tape) to span the entire path that your yarn traveled. Write down that number, and now count the number of strands in your hank. Multiply the two numbers together. Now convert your inches or centimeters into yards or meters, and you have your yardage or meterage !

Ex: You wrapped your yarn around your palm, which measures 10 inches. There are 41 strands. 10x41=410. 410 inches is roughly 11 yards. Or: You wrapped your yarn around a small book, which measured 21 cm. There are 50 strands. 21x50=1050. 1050 cm is of course 10.5 meters.

Fig H: Winding a hank on a hardcover book.

It can be very helpful to label your handspun yarn. The yardage/meterage is critical information when it comes to using patterns, less so if you don’t use patterns. But there’s other info that you might still find handy to know later on, such as what the fiber is, where and when you got it, when you spun it, how you plied it, any info on the dye job, what the yarn weight is, what spindle you spun it on, whether it is part of a set, how much it weighs, etc.

Some of my really verbose labels might look like this: Avocado dye and copper mordant hand dyed in the fleece 2020 Cormo Bought 2019 Spun for 2020 TDF 2 plied on wheel 210 yards 3.4 oz light worsted weight

But most of my labels just have the yardage and breed, if I label them at all. I tend to document things online and also remember spinning my yarn better than I remember anything else going on in my life, so I’m a little lazy about labeling. Your labels should include the information that you think you’ll find helpful in the future, or that you know you won’t have another way to recover if you end up forgetting.

Blocking your yarn

Don’t attach that label just yet--we aren’t totally done with our yarn. It has one or two more steps before it’s ready to be used, and that first step is called blocking. There’s a few ways to block yarn--wet blocking, steam blocking, and resting.

Wet blocking: Get your hank of yarn wet, using anything other than very hot water (this could start felting your yarn). You could run it under the tap for a minute or else let it sit in a bowl of water with a little hair conditioner for about half an hour, if you wanted your yarn to be a little softer, then rinse the yarn. Squeeze as much water out as you can, then hang it to dry. You can (and should) also snap or thwack it--but I've gone into detail on that in a link below.

Steam blocking: Get a source of steam going--like a pot of water simmering or a very hot tap running. Using tongs or a long wooden spoon, hold your yarn over the steam and slowly rotate it until the whole skein has been steamed. Don’t let the yarn touch the water.

Resting: If neither option above is possible, you can also just let your yarn sit for at least a week. This lets the twist settle down, so it’ll be a lot easier to work with. However, it doesn’t do anything else that blocking does, so it won’t really show you your “finished” yarn, and may lead to problems down the road.

So--why did we just do that stuff ? Well, we blocked our yarn to reset the fibers, basically. During the spinning, we put the fibers under tension, and they more or less stay in that slightly stretched state. But it’s not really stable--the next time they get wet, they’ll spring back into the natural crimp that the wool wants to have (this changes drastically depending on breed and even individual sheep), and will often puff up. The hank might lose a little length and your yarn’s weight (not as in ounces or grams, but as in lace, dk, or bulky weight) often increases some. So if you’ve made your yarn into something before blocking it, with the perfect gauge and nice drape, the first time you wash it you’ll find that it’s thicker and a little smaller and has less drape. It might not fit anymore, or the seams might be messed up.

This is all entirely avoidable if you just block it before you do anything with it, so I highly recommend that you do.

The other thing that blocking does is set the twist, so your yarn won’t kink up as you work with it--even a perfect, balanced yarn can kink up as you work if the twist is live--which makes it a lot more pleasant. Resting sets the twist as well, as mentioned above.

I’ve gone into blocking in more detail in this post here, if you’d like to know more--I’d especially recommend reading the last section about snapping and thwacking your yarn.

Once it’s fully dry (and remember--wool can hold a lot of water and still feel dry, so give it a little extra drying time just to be sure) it only needs to be wound into a ball before you can use it ! Congratulations on your handspun yarn--that’s a real achievement.

Storing your yarn

If you don’t plan on using it right away, you may want to skein your hanks up to keep them compact and tidy. To do this, put your thumbs on the inside of your hank, and pull it taut. Then, one thumb at a time, twist in the opposite direction that you plied in. Your hank should start to kind of look like rope. Once it has a lot of twist (enough that you’re struggling to add more), find the center point of the hank, and fold it. With 2 yard hanks I tend to fold it over my knee, but a doorknob or something else would work just as well. It should immediately look like an oversized piece of yarn--that’s because we just twisted it one direction, and then folded it in two and let the excess twist twist it in the other direction, which is the same way you ply yarn ! There should be a loop at each end where your thumb was--take your thumbs out and put one loop through the other. Now you can attach your label and you’re good to go !

If it’s a very small hank (one that’s been wound around the palm, especially) you’ll probably just want to wind it into a ball instead. You could do this with any length of yarn--it’s not an ideal way to store wool yarn ultra long term, since staying wound into a ball can stretch out the fibers again, which means you’d need to wind it into a hank and re-block it if you wanted to make an accurate gauge swatch or something. Short term (a year or less) it’s just fine.

If you’re wondering how to wind up a big hank into a ball without tangling, just sit down with your knees up, and put your knees inside the hank, then move your knees apart until the hank is taut. Now you can wind in relative peace, free from tangles. You can also use a yarn swift, if you’ve got one.

I would recommend, by the way, using up some of your first skeins as soon as possible (you might want to keep your very first skein so that later you can see how far you’ve come--I really wish I kept mine). You won’t know how your spinning is until you’ve used it, so to prevent you from getting to skein #40 thinking you’ve been doing great, only to discover that your yarn is actually unusable... use your early yarn ! Evaluate it, make judgements, and learn from it. Does it need more twist ? Is it very lumpy ? Are there lots of spots where it went thin ? Do you like how the colors turned out with the plying method you chose ? These are all good questions to ask yourself as you use your yarn.

Moving On From Park and Draft

Once you’re comfortable with the park and draft method, you might want to try moving on to true suspended spinning. As I said earlier--it may not be for you, and that’s fine, but you won’t know if you don’t try. True suspended is quite a bit faster than park and draft, so if you want to speed up a little, you should give it a shot.

In park and draft, you first add twist, then park the spindle to draft your fibers into yarn. In true suspended spinning, you set the spindle going and draft while the twist is being added. This eliminates the whole ‘standing/sitting there with your arm outstretched, waiting for your yarn to accumulate twist’ section.

The easiest way to get into true suspended spinning is to work your way up to it--try drafting just a little bit while your spindle is building up twist during park and draft. To give yourself more time, set the spindle spinning slower. Then try drafting a bit more. The goal is to draft at the same rate that twist is added, meaning that you can wind on pretty much as soon as the yarn is too long to keep spinning.

The trick here is to adjust the speed at which your spindle spins rather than the speed at which you draft. You can only draft so fast before your technique gets sloppy, and past that you’ll be focused far more on keeping pace with the twist being added than on drafting evenly.

So if I find that I spun my spindle too aggressively, I still it immediately and try again, but slower this time.

I answered an ask about this a while ago where I went into a little bit more depth, if you’re interested.

And if you haven’t seen it, the pinned post on my blog is a lot of stuff like that all collected into one post for easier perusal. Some of them I’ve already linked to earlier in this post, but others I haven’t.

Small Projects, Scrap Projects, and Big Projects: Tips for All

You may be wondering, What the hell am I supposed to do with this yarn ? This isn’t even enough for a pair of fingerless gloves !

Which is a fair concern--endlessly accumulating small skeins of yarn can be frustrating if you don’t know how to use them up.

Drop spindles are limited in how much yarn you can make on them, and while you can make huge skeins by joining smaller skeins together, they may not all be the same weight ! Or they may not match. Or it may just be really boring.

You may also be doing a lot of experimenting, and ending up with 30 yard/meter skeins that you can’t even make something tiny with.

Small Skeins: For single skeins that are too small for gloves, hats, etc, you may still be able to make things like pouches (for yarn, crochet hooks, dice, coins, etc), baby socks or hats, coasters, or other small items. My spinning wheel oil holder is a little basket crocheted out of some handspun, and I have a mini tape measurer on my keys with a cover crocheted over it from handspun as well. You might have to invent things to do with your handspun, but using items that you made enriches your life--I promise.

Scrap Projects: What about tiny skeins ? Or maybe you’ve already made all the coasters and baby socks and spinning oil holders that you could possibly need, and now the small skeins are piling up again. I humbly submit the Scrap Yarn Project--my favorite type of project by far. I’ve been slowly working on a handspun scrap blanket for about 2.5 years, using tiny scraps, small skeins, and leftovers from projects alike. I knit 5x5 inch stockinette squares (some have colorwork, some have different stitch patterns, but mostly I let the yarn be the star) and for the most part just try make squares that are thick enough to stay warm but thin enough to have a little drape. It’s an incredibly satisfying project.

Fig I: An older image of the author’s handspun scrap blanket in progress. The yarns used range from fingering weight to super bulky, and are spun in all sorts of different ways. But it still feels very cohesive.

I like the square approach (and of course if you wanted to crochet granny squares, that would work perfectly too) because it’s modular, so you can decide halfway through that you don’t want a sweater, you want a bag--and then just sew the squares into a bag, instead. But it doesn’t need to be squares by any means--you could also make scrap yarn sweaters, hats, socks, scarves, etc., that are constructed normally.

The only thing to look out for is yarn weight--in some cases, you might want the weights to all be very similar. Socks, for instance, won’t do well if you have parts that are bulky weight and parts that are light fingering weight. You could hold yarns together to get similar weights if necessary, or just only add to the project when you’ve got another scrap skein of worsted weight or whatever. For squares you can use any weight of yarn if you want, but you should change your hook or needle size to get a fabric that’s a similar density, so your stitch count will change from square to square.

Big Projects: These can be difficult even for experienced spinners, because consistency is key to ending up with an even fabric. Not from armspan of yarn to armspan, but from skein to skein--if the weight changes, things can suddenly get much more complicated while you try to correct for the skeins that are too thick or too thin.

One way to try and mitigate that is to not ply anything until you’ve finished spinning all the singles--that is, if you need 10 skeins of 2 ply, spin 20 spindles worth, then go through and pair off your stored singles, thin with thick and average with average. It can definitely be more tedious to do it this way, but if you’re worried about consistency, it might be a good idea.

It also might not be necessary. Try to let your mind stretch back over the whole course of human history--as a species, we’ve been spinning yarns for pretty much all of it, and until very recently, what you spun was what clothed you. If the skeins you spun for your new cloak were all different weights, well... you probably either repurposed those skeins (IF you could, and that’s a pretty sketchy IF) or you shrugged, wore a lumpy cloak, and got on with life. Perfection isn’t everything, my friend. Either way, do what’s going to make you happy. For me, I’d be just fine with a lumpy cloak.

Out Of The Basics: A Few Further Pushes Into The World of Spinning

There’s many, many techniques out there, and an infinite variety of yarns to be spun. Some require tools, some don’t. Some are very advanced, and some quite simple. There are many other tools to spin on besides drop spindles. There’s also processes related to spinning--such as dyeing, fiber prepping, and wool washing--which can greatly enhance your spinning enjoyment and variety. I can’t teach them to you today, but I can certainly tell you about them so that you can look into them yourself !

Changing Up Your Fiber or Techniques to Get Different Effects

We touched on this earlier in the section about the number of plies--a 2 ply yarn will knit up into a bumpy, slightly irregular fabric, and a 3 or 4 ply will be very regular and neat. But that’s not the extent of what you can do to change your yarn up (without buying anything new). I’m going to throw some terms around now--you’ll need to google them, because this is already absurdly long.

For one thing, if you have roving, you can try splitting it lengthwise and fractal plying your yarn for a very beautiful self-striping but marled effect. You can also try spinning it from the fold on multicolored roving, which keeps the colors separate instead of muddied, which can happen otherwise.

With any fiber, you can always mix and match, or add pops of color ! If you’re spinning a bunch of gray rolags, for instance, you can occasionally detach the rolag, spin a tiny bit of blue roving, reattach the rolag, and go back to spinning. Depending on how you ply it, this could produce almost specks of blue or else slips and streaks.

Speaking of plying, the way you make a 2 ply can really change the colorway of the yarn if your fiber is a gradient or multicolored. Say you’ve got roving that’s a gradient from white to purple--if you do a plying bracelet, your yarn will be part barberpole, part gradient: a purple ply with a white ply at one end, and then gradually transition to the midpoint of lavender-pink in the middle, with both plies the same color. But if you plied it the other way, by wrapping your singles onto storage rocks and then plying from those, you’d get a yarn that’s got one pink ply and one white ply at one end, and one pink ply and purple ply at the other.

Chained 3 ply versus traditional 3 ply will make a huge difference as well. If your fiber has stripes, chain plying it will preserve them perfectly (as long as you’re careful to start a loop at the color change--or if you wanted it to fade in a little, you could start partway through a color change), whereas a traditional 3 ply will always marl them, no matter how careful you are about evenly splitting your fiber into 3 sections.

If you like really colorful and bright yarns, you might enjoy cabled 4 ply (where you ply two 2 plied yarns together). If your starting 2 plies are already colorful, you’ll get super colorful yarn with a cabled 4 ply--to me it always looks like dashed lines in different colors.

A laid 4 ply can also make some interesting color combinations, and is perhaps the ideal candidate for mixing random singles together, since it has 3 other plies each singles can hopefully be tempered by. And a yarn that has 3 plies of one color and 1 ply of another color can be interesting indeed !

It’s not just color that you makes an exciting new yarn, though--you can also try making boucle, or thread plying or autowrapping, or spinning beehives, spinning beads into your yarn, spinning thick and thin yarn... the possibilities are almost endless. I’d highly recommend giving “The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs” by Sarah Anderson a read if you can--she discusses all of these and many more, and shows how to do them. Other good books that’ll show you how to make lots of different kinds of yarn, or how to tailor your yarn to your needs, are: “Yarnitecture”, by Jillian Moreno, “Spin Art” by Jacey Boggs, and “Yarn Spinning With A Modern Twist”, by Vanessa Kroening. Your library may well have copies, and if not you could likely request they buy it.

You Don’t Have to Drop Your Spindles

...Because there’s other kinds of spindles ! And things that aren’t spindles, but on which you can also spin !

There are Turkish Spindles, which are functionally almost identical to drop spindles (and you can drop them, to be fair), but you wrap your yarn around two detachable interlocked arms that also function as the whorl. When you remove the arms and spindle shaft from the turtle (not cone) of singles, you can then 2 ply with it immediately using both ends. Turkish spindles are great if you love 2 ply and hate winding.

There are Supported Spindles, which come in many forms but are essentially fancy sticks with pointy tips that you spin in bowls. These have more winding than drop spindles because you spin in very short lengths at a time and wind onto a temporary cop that’s just below the tip (it’s much faster than if you wound all the way down to the cop near the bottom). However, you use them while sitting or even (with a bit of wrangling) laying down, and your arms stay in a comfortable, much more relaxed position while spinning. It also spins, as a default, finer yarn than your average drop spindle (I can achieve a very fine and consistent laceweight on any supported spindle, but have only managed that on my tiniest and lightest drop spindle). And they are very fast tools--with proficiency, they can be much faster than drop spindles. Supported spindles are great if you find drop spindles painful, if you have low energy, if you’re mobility impaired, or if you want to spin finer yarn.

There are Spinning Wheels, which come in many shapes and sizes but are the fastest way to make yarn by hand. There are a few objects which could fall under the umbrella of a spinning wheel (namely Walking Wheels, Charkah Wheels, and Electric Wheels) which do not have treadles, but the majority of spinning wheels are powered by foot treadles and can spin faster than you can spin a drop spindle. They also remove winding from your list of duties (for the most part), since the flyer will wrap your newly spun yarn onto the bobbin as you go. New spinning wheels can be prohibitively expensive, but you can also find used ones for ludicrously cheap on craigslist, at estate or garage sales, at antique shops, or other places where old items might be sold. (You can also often find them at affordable but not cheap prices at fiber festivals). Be sure to research the parts of a spinning wheel before you try to buy a used one from a non-spinner--there are many SWSO’s (Spinning Wheel Shaped Objects) out there that will fool you. Spinning wheels are great if you want to make larger amounts of yarn, or want to make yarn faster.

There are Electric Wheels, which are small machines that will add twist and wind the yarn onto the bobbin for you, so all you have to do is draft. New low end models are much cheaper than new spinning wheels, and they take up far less space. They also remove the element of treadling, so if you are intrigued by spinning wheels but have weak legs in any capacity, these can save you a lot of pain. I have a spinning wheel and can’t spin on it much anymore, because my knees and hips dislocate almost immediately. I switched to supported spinning primarily, but an electric wheel would be a good substitute as well. Electric wheels are great if you want to make more yarn faster, but can’t afford a spinning wheel or don’t have the space for them. They are also one of the more accessible tools for those with severe mobility impairments.

And there’s still more, although I can’t do a pitch for all of them xD. There’s Tahkli Spindles for spinning cotton, Navajo Spindles that are long thigh-spinning tools, Medieval Spindles that are easy to whittle replacements for if you break your spindle a lot, and even more beyond that. Many cultures have their own traditional spinning tool, each with their own techniques and strengths, and if drop spindles aren’t doing it for you but you still want to spin, I implore you to check out other kinds of spindles !

From Sheep To Sweater (Washing and Processing A Raw Fleece)

Most people learn to spin from roving (even if it might not be a very good beginner’s preparation), although there’s also rolags, batts, top (both commercial and hand combed), sliver, and cloud. But what if you could start with a raw fleece (unwashed, with vegetable matter and lanolin and who knows what else) and make things out of that ?

There’s some immediate advantages to starting with a raw fleece (even over a washed fleece). For one, raw fleeces tend to sell very cheap. This will depend on where you live, but the vast majority of fiber that I buy these days is raw fleece, and I’ve never spent less on fiber. At a fiber festival, I once paid $10 USD for 2 pounds (slightly under 1 kilo) of raw Shetland fleece. So--they’re cheap. As soon as someone starts putting work into a fleece, like washing it or dyeing it, the price immediately jumps.

Second, if you’re looking for the most bang for your buck, starting from a raw fleece is the way to go. You need to wash it, skirt it (take out the really terrible or gross bits), perhaps sort or grade it if it’s multicolored or there’s clear variation in fiber quality, dye it (if desired--I only dye my white fleeces, as I quite like brown and gray and black), process it into spinnable fiber, spin it, ply it, and then knit/crochet/nalbind/weave/do whatever else your heart desires with it. A single raw fleece can last me a month even if I work on it tirelessly, and I might have paid $20 USD--a little over an hour of wages for me.

It also brings you a lot closer to your work. I can’t say I felt very attached to my fiber when I worked exclusively with roving, but sorting through a pile of hand washed Southdown Babydoll locks while I comb them into top to spin into sock yarn on supported spindles that I whittled myself--I can tell you, I feel pretty damn connected to my work, to the ridiculous little sheep whose wool I have, to my socks, and to the wool itself. It adds a lot of depth, both to the experience, and to my understanding.

It’s also honestly pretty easy. To wash a fleece, you need a dedicated wool pot (as in, don’t cook in it again), a bit of dish soap, and some time. Put the fleece in--don’t crowd it, just work in batches if your pot can’t easily fit all of the fleece--add cold water and a squirt of dish soap, and let it cook on the stove for about 45 minutes, without a lid. Don’t let it boil--ideally it should be steaming but not quite simmering. You can use a dedicated wool spoon/tongs to gently and infrequently stir the wool. The water should get pretty gross. After 45 minutes, start the tap running (you need to rinse the wool in very hot water--if you let temperature shock happen, it could felt), drain the water, and rinse the fleece. Then repeat--filling up the pot with hot water now--until the water stops looking dirty at the end of the 45 minute cooking time. Rinse it one more time, and then let your wool dry, ideally on a clothesline but over a vent/spread out flat on a towel is fine too.

Yes, it really is that easy. If you’re worried about felting or otherwise ruining the entire fleece, you can always start by washing just a handful, so that way if you ruin it there’s not much waste. But I’ve washed at least a couple dozen fleeces that exact way, and I’ve never ruined one.

After washing and drying your fleece, you need to prepare it. I typically prepare enough to spin for a day at a time, but you could also do it all at once if that’s more your style. There’s many ways to prepare wool, and I’ll discuss most of them at least in brief, but we’ll start with teasing. This is where you take a lock in your hands, and tease it open. Let any VM (vegetable matter) fall out or pick it out yourself, and open the lock up to the point that you can no longer see any lock structure. It’s now spinnable, just like that ! This is a pretty slow method, but if you start out your raw fleece journey buying just a few ounces/50ish grams of fleece, it’s perfectly doable to tease it all open by hand.

If you have money to put into the endeavor, a humble pair of hand cards (70 TPI will card most wools), or you can kind of make do with two pet brushes like these (although at that point, spend $10 USD more and you have a pair of hand cards, so idk what the point of that is, unless you already have them) is a very good place to start. Load the fiber onto one card, card it until it’s uniform, roll it into a rolag, and it’s spinnable !

You also have hand combs, which are a lot more expensive than hand cards, but which can process very long fibers and can get out all the vm. Cards don’t remove a lot of vm, so combs is the way to go for super vm-y fleeces. They also produce hand combed top, which spins up into a very compact, strong, and abrasion resistant yarn--great for socks.

Past that are drum carders, which are machines in the way that spinning wheels are machines--manual, but they certainly automate the processing of fiber for you. These can be expensive indeed, but process fiber very quickly and are a great choice if you plan to sell the fiber, if you want to start with raw fleece but haven’t the dexterity to do it by hand (and there are electric drum carders as well--otherwise, you are turning a hand crank), or if you want to process high volumes of fiber because you just go through it that fast.

Honorable mentions include flick carding (both cheaper and slower than hand cards--you work with a couple locks at a time and open them up by flicking them with a tined brush), blending boards (these don’t process raw fiber, but they turn already processed fiber into batts--so you can blend many wools very easily for different textures or colors. These are like painting with wool--so fun !), and willowing (I haven’t tried this one yet, but you lay out your wool and repeatedly hit it with willow branches or other bendy sticks, which opens the fiber and also sends it flying all over the place. It looks very fun, and rather slow, and is also free as long as you can find a willow tree).

This website describes some of those methods (and one I didn’t get to) if you’d like to check it out.

Colors to Dye For

Wool takes dye very readily, and you probably come into contact with several natural dye materials every day--onion skins, avocado pit and peel, daffodils, coffee, black tea, thyme, even grass ! You don’t have to be working with fleece to dye it (although dyeing fleece gives you so much color variation and is very fun)--you can also dye roving very easily. Batts, rolags, and top less easily, although it’s possible with a lot of care.

For most natural dyes, you need to collect quite a lot of it, and then let it cook overnight on low heat. Boiling (sometimes even simmering) can kill the color, so you’ve got to be patient. Crock pots on low or medium are great for this. If you can cook it two days, all the better. Let it sit and cool for at least 12 hours, then strain it. (Tip: you can store natural dyes in jars in cool, dark places for at least a year without any ill effects--so you don’t need to use the dye immediately)

The majority of dyes need something called a mordant (I go into more detail about mordants in this post if you’re interested). There are many mordants, but some easy household ones are alum, baking soda (bicarb), copper (put a few bits of copper pipe in a jug of white wine vinegar, let sit for a few weeks at least before using), or iron (same as copper, but with rusty nails. Use a plastic jug !!! Metal will rust and glass can break). Most people mordant their wool by putting it in their dedicated wool pot with some water, adding the mordant, and letting it cook on low for an hour. Then drain the water and add the dye.

Natural dyes need to cook for a while to set--I usually let them cook overnight at least.

For batts, rolags, and top, you can do something called solar dyeing--carefully mordant your wool as usual, then place it in a jar with the dye, and put the dye outside in the sun. Over time (at least a week--often months, especially if you don’t live somewhere warm and sunny) the heat from the sun will warm the water and dye the wool. You could also try storing the jar somewhere you know will be warm, such as near the stove or fireplace.

You don’t have to use natural dyes either--there are also acid dyes, or food coloring, kool-aid (sugar-free), etc. I’m a lot less familiar with those, so I can’t go on at length. They can be a good choice if you don’t have the time for natural dyes, or if you want to get specific colors and not guess what your wool will turn out as. Look into them if you have any interest !

Dyeing your own wool is immensely satisfying, and can be a very cheap (or free, in the case of many natural dyes if you’ve collected or grown them yourself) way of obtaining more color, if you find that you keep ending up with a lot of white wool.

Endless Breeds of Sheep

There are many breeds of sheep on there (not endless, sorry--although there will always be new breeds being developed, so endless in a way !), and they all have different qualities, both in terms of the sheep themselves, and the wool they produce.

Do you want your wool to be very hard wearing ? Down breeds such as Southdown (one of my absolute favorites), Shropshire, or Dorset can be quite durable, and are resistant to felting. You could also go for stronger, coarser wools such as Jacob or Romney--coarser means stronger with wool, and softer tends to mean weaker.

Do you yearn for a softer wool ? Cormo is fantastically soft, as are Rambouillet, Debouillet, and Merino. Many lambswools (meaning the fleece from a lamb--the older a sheep gets, the coarser its wool tends to be) can be softer than their breed standard, so seeking out lambswools even from breeds like Jacob or Rya (both usually strong wools) can lead to soft fleeces.

Of course, there are more considerations than just soft and hard wearing, but there’s pretty much a breed for everything. If you’re interested, “The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook” by Carol Ekarius and Deborah Robson is an incredible resource, and covers just about every breed under the sun (with pictures, samples, notes, recommendations, and interesting bits of history), as well as most non-sheep fiber producing animals as well ! Speaking of...

There’s Not Just Wool

There’s also many non-sheep fibers, and plant fibers too !

Animals with easily usable fiber include: alpaca, llama, angora rabbits, goats, camels, musk ox, and more ! Their properties are usually different from wool--all of the fibers from the animals above have little to no crimp in their fiber, meaning that they aren’t elastic like wool is. They’re also varying degrees of warm (cashmere--the undercoat fibers that come from many different breeds of goats--are extremely warm, but still not as warm as musk ox down), and some are unbelievably soft. If you can, I highly recommend getting a little cashmere, a little camel down, or whatever other exotic fiber strikes your fancy. They’re very fun to experiment with, and small amounts can easily be worked into projects to add warmth, drape, or softness.

We can’t forget about silk, either--produced mainly by certain species of silkworms, although most insects undergoing complete metamorphosis produce silk of varying quality as well. Silk is a very interested fiber to spin--but it can also be reeled instead of spun, which is how you can get extremely thin silk pieces without even needing to spin thread-weight yarn.

But in early human history, before we domesticated sheep and bred them to have better wool than they started out with, we spun things like inner tree bark, flax, nettle, and cotton. These all require very different techniques than wool, but most of them can be spun on the same tools (and all but cotton can be hand twisted into cordage instead, if that’s more up your alley). They are also inherently cooling--fabrics made from linen will keep you very cool indeed--so if you live somewhere hot where having wool objects is mostly pointless, don’t despair ! There’s still stuff for you to spin.

Connect With Others !

I’m about done with this monograph, but there’s a few last things I want to share.

First is the existence of Fiber Festivals--you may or may not have some in your area. They’re extremely fun, and you can meet many spinners there. They’re also usually a very cheap source of fiber, as prices are often a lot lower at festivals.

Second is the existence of Spinning Guilds--again, you may or may not have one locally, but if you do, you might want to join ! There are also spinning clubs and groups, which might be a little lower-key and more welcoming to beginners.

Then there’s TDF, or Tour De Fleece. You may have heard of the biking tournament called Tour de France which happens in July--well, every year a lot of us spinners do a tournament ourselves, but it’s generally not competitive (except on Ravelry--there are teams and points and everything). For the most part, participating in TDF just means setting a spinning goal for yourself from July 1st to July 23rd (the end of the race) and then trying to achieve it. For a lot of people, this means spinning every day. Some set goals like “get through this whole fleece I bought 10 years ago” or “spin a sweater’s worth of yarn” or “learn how to spin flax, finally” (that’s what I did last year). Or maybe it is just spinning every day--even if just for 20 minutes. On tumblr you can see other’s work and post your own under the tag #TourDeFleece2023, or #TDF2023 (there’s many variants as well)--we’d love to have you !

Lastly, there’s International Spin In Public Day ! To be honest, nobody can really agree on what day that is--allegedly, it’s the 3rd Saturday of September. (For me, it’s literally every day that I leave my house, but I digress). But I’ve also seen posters for October, for September 10th or earlier, and just generally lots of different dates. I’d say play it safe--if you see someone say it’s International Spin in Public Day, go spin in public just in case :D. The purpose of a day like this is to bring spinning back into public knowledge--let’s face it, most people in the western world have zero clue how yarn is made, and couldn’t differentiate a spindle from a spatula. This sucks ! Spinning is such a great activity--it can be meditative, calming, fun, exciting, or a background motion to other activities that allows you to actually pay attention (if you have ADHD). And I think a lot more people would spin, and would enjoy it, if only they were exposed to the idea. You certainly don’t have to act as Spinning’s public outreach officer, or anything like that... but when people ask what you’re doing, explaining it patiently and encouraging them to look into it does everyone a favor.

In Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful and not too confusing ! It’s really important to note that I’m just one guy--I don’t know everything, and I might not always have the best techniques. Looking for information on spinning from multiple sources is a good way to get a well-rounded understanding, and to correct common misconceptions that you might have already learned. Perhaps more importantly, there’s pretty much an infinite number of ways to do almost every single step I’ve described here, and if the way I showed you--or the video I linked to showed you--isn’t working, don’t despair ! There’s nothing wrong with you, you probably just need to do it a different way. I must have watched 3 dozen videos of people drop spindling before it finally clicked with me.

I hope I’ve opened up the world of spinning to you at least somewhat ! There are many things I didn’t touch on, and lots of stuff I wish I could talk more about, but at the end of the day I mostly wanted to 1) show you how to make yarn and 2) pique your curiosity about the whole rest of it. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them (Purple, I will of course answer all your questions and also attempt to mind read your questions before you’ve even asked them so that I have a 10 million slide power point done by the time the question is out of your mouth), but check the comments and replies first ! Someone else might have answered it already.

Thanks for reading, and happy spinning !

Fig J: The author holding his old drop spindle, spinning at a doctor’s appointment. The spindle now belongs to the friend for which this monstrosity of a tutorial was written ! :D

[frownyalfred]

wow, past me was so funny. this ended up being just under 30k 😂😭

fic here.

“Bruce is a nesting and traumatized omega who’s missing his dead pup and that’s why he’s such a territorial bitch to Clark in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice” is such a stellar take, actually

[corviiids]

i actually did try to come up with a no kira lawlight are normal people who meet and date normally au once but although that was markedly less tragic it did not end, like, better

[silverwhittlingknife]

So you're a go to source for all things Dick&Tim bros and you tend to write primarily from Dick's POV. So, odd question, but if you were to summarize their relationship from his POV in FIVE panels which panels would you pick? Keeping in mind that one specific aspect of their relationship that you love needs to be clearly represented by each panel (loyalty, trust etc). I hope this is a fun challenge and not an annoying question so if you don't want to answer that's cool! Have a wonderful day!

No more talk. The same thoughts run through two minds... (SotB 29) / You're my equal. My closest ally. (RR 1) / I can't stop thinking how much I rely on him. (GoG 3)

25 Feelings Dick Has About Tim

This was such a kind ask & a cool challenge which I totally failed; here are TWENTY-five panels of Dick's POV on Tim sdfdsfds Look, I got carried away! Marcia and Cindy! The boys!!

OKAY SO BEFORE I GET TO THE PANELS A FEW NOTES:

WARNING THAT THERE ARE SOME NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN HERE because I love conflict but but but you gotta remember those are not the final word!! They are complicated people and sometimes they get mad at each other BUT ultimately their relationship is so hugely important in both their lives & they love each other and rely on each other so much -!!! <3

Also I have CONCLUDING THOUGHTS at the end about what Dick's POV leaves out (mostly: a lot of Dick defending & protecting & supporting Tim, which Dick does instinctively but isn't very self-aware about most of the time)

I have loosely organized my list into 5^5 format (5 categories with 5 examples each!), so if you want to skip to a relevant one, here are the categories!!

Below the cut:

I hate him and find him infuriating (#1-5)

On second thought, he's endearing & fun (#6-10)

Grief is complicated & he's all tangled up in mine (#11-15)

I love him & think highly of him (#16-20)

I rely on him & though it's hard for me, I trust him (#21-25)

I hate him and find him infuriating (#1 - 5)

1) He thinks he’s so smart and can psychoanalyze me and Bruce, but he doesn’t know me at all, he should get lost (New Titans 61)

2) He thinks he’s so smart and can psychoanalyze Bruce but he doesn’t know Bruce at all, he should get lost (Gotham Knights 26)

3) He is so nosy about stuff that is MY business (Robin 0)

4) He sounds like an insincere suck-up half the time... but okay, fine, if you push him he's got a sense of humor about it (New Titans 65)

5) I'm sure he's a better vigilante than me. It's my fault for being a failure, but I resent him anyway. (Nightwing 9 - Dick's having a nightmare)

On second thought, he's kinda endearing (#6-10)

6) He worries too much and gets anxious so easily, but it makes him fun to tease (Robin 67)

7) I'm not that competitive - okay, so maybe I'm a little competitive, I gotta make sure he doesn't get a swelled head (Prodigal)

8) I'm supposed to be his favorite! It is not cool for him to be fanboying over my not-girlfriend's not-boyfriend!! (Birds of Prey 19)

9) We have fun together. I can kick back and relax when it's just the two of us. Plus I get to boss him around a bit. (Prodigal)

10) He’s always trying to reassure me, and I guess it's a little comforting, but also he doesn’t really get it. Or me. He makes excuses that he shouldn't, because he doesn't understand that I suck. (Nightwing 64)

Grief is complicated and he's all tangled up in mine (#11 - 15)

11) He reminds me of everything I try not to think about. Sometimes the memories are so strong it hurts to look at him. (Batman 441)

12) WHY IS HE BEING IMPOSSIBLE ALL OF A SUDDEN??? THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING (Nightwing 139)

13) We're the same. He says all the things I don't let myself think about. It's like arguing with myself. (Nightwing 139)

14) He thinks he gets to tell me what to do but he doesn’t, fuck him (Battle for the Cowl)

15) Life sucks, so what. I sucked it up so he should too (RR 1)

I love him and think highly of him (#16 - 20)

16) He’s the closest thing to a brother I’ll ever have.  If someone hurts him I will hurt them harder. (Nightwing 6)

17) I can't handle the idea of losing him. (Nightwing 97)

17) He’s so good and I’m not. I'm afraid I’m bad for him. (Nightwing 110)

18) He’s better than me, and it’s kind of a relief because I know no matter what he’ll be okay. (Gates of Gotham 3)

19) In my head he’s the responsible one.  (Gotham Knights 10)

I rely on him, and though it's hard for me, I trust him (#20-25)

20) I know I have to trust him but I'm afraid he'll make the wrong choices and get hurt (Nightwing 139)

21) I'm sure I know what he should do because I see myself in him - not that I can take my own advice, but he should (Blackest Night 3)

22) I trust him.  When I’m losing my grip on things, he pulls me back. (Gotham Knights 10)

23) I want him to trust me (Red Robin 12)

24) He can tell when I'm lying. Sometimes he sees my weaknesses better than I wish he did. (Detective Comics 874)

25) He’s always there when I need him. (Teen Titans / Outsiders Secret Files)

Final rambling thoughts:

TIM: Uhh, okay, so I'm just skimming this list - do you really trust me? you're not just saying that? - but anyway, I'm confused because you left some stuff out? Like some stuff that's kinda important? DICK: No? I think I got everything? TIM (starts counting on his fingers): The time I was having a bad day but then I called you. The time I got captured by Two-Face but then you saved me. The time I fell off a train but then you saved me. The time I fell off a building but then you saved me. The time I fell off a different building - DICK: I feel like you're trying to make some kind of point but I'm not sure what it could be.

SO THE THING IS, I put 25 panels in here and not a single one has Dick catching Tim when he’s falling!!! But I think that's a central motif of their relationship from Tim’s POV, not Dick’s. I love Dick, but in some ways I think he is spectacularly un-self-aware.

And I think he especially has a lot of blind spots about Tim. He kinda intermittently gets that Tim admires him, and he enjoys it in a playful I-get-to-boss-you-around way. But Dick tends to consistently underestimate all of his own good qualities & skills, and he meets Tim at a point in his life when he's especially down on himself & his abilities. And so he's unable to see his own influence on Tim, & therefore unable to fully understand a lot of Tim's priorities and loyalties and motivations, because you can't actually understand Tim without understanding Dick's impact on him. There's a fascinating moment in Bruce Wayne: Murderer when Dick's completely blindsided & upset to discover that Tim doesn't entirely trust Bruce, even though this has been a definitive fact of Tim's whole thing ever since he showed up with his Batman needs Robin theory, and Barbara has to actively remind Dick of the obvious-to-everyone-except-Dick fact that a lot of Tim's loyalty is to Dick, and Tim loves Bruce but feels free to be more wary of him. (And to give Bruce credit: this is not something he ever begrudges.) But anyway Babs points this out, and Dick manages to sorta process it for about five seconds, but he cannot actually accept it into his worldview so instead he discards it at the speed of light and goes off and has an argument with Tim instead sdfsfdsf

All of Dick's virtues - Dick's kindness at the circus and Dick's determination to fight through grief and Dick's rigid sense of morals and Dick's vigilante skills and every time Dick has ever backed Tim up or listened to him or protected him or saved him from something or just been casually kind to a stranger in Tim's presence etc etc etc - all these things loom really large in Tim's mental story of Who Dick Is, and What Dick And Tim's Relationship Is. Tim meets Dick before he meets Bruce, trusts Dick more than Bruce, aspires to be Robin instead of Batman. And so in Tim's default version of the story, Dick is the super-special and admirable hero and Tim is... nobody in particular, a tagalong outsider who's barely managing to be a hero, not part of Dick and Bruce's family and not part of their story, who, if he's VERY LUCKY and tries REALLY HARD, might be able to fight his way to proving himself and offering something to Dick that Dick will value, if Dick doesn't get fed up with him first.

But that's not Dick's version of the story!!!

Dick's version of the story is almost the exact opposite, a story where Dick's an outcast failure black sheep who's screwing up everything he tries, and meanwhile Tim is The Sudden New Perfect Robin Who's Better Than Me And Probably Bruce Loves Him More And Probably They Gossip About What A Loser I Am, mixed with a complicated edge of Tim Thinks He's So Smart But He Doesn't Know Me/Us At All. Dick gets much more attached to Tim over time, and Tim gets unnervingly better at the know-it-all psychoanalysis so then Dick gets to have complicated feelings about him being right instead of just annoyance at him for being wrong, plus Dick's relationship with Bruce improves a lot, so Tim stops feeling so threatening. But Dick never fundamentally changes his basic theory of their relationship in which Tim is highly impressive and capable, and Dick is not so much.

And so asking Dick about Tim is kinda like if you asked George Bailey to tell you about Harry Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life; like, you'll be there for five hours while he tells you how great Harry is, and how accomplished Harry is, and how he doesn't really get how or why Harry does the things he does, and maybe George does feel a little resentful or jealous sometimes, but that pales in comparison to all his admiration and trust for Harry who he loves so much, who's better than him in so many ways, and he's not gonna openly gripe but secretly he can't help but feel sometimes like he's such a failure in comparison to Harry, a perfect person who emerged fully formed from Zeus's head with all the virtues and also all the accomplishments, etc. etc. etc. --

-- and he will not actually remember the part where he changed and saved Harry's whole entire life unless you literally send him to an alternate timeline in order to force him to remember it. <3

[lighteyed]

can it be easy this once? / steve harrington

summary: steve accidentally gives a stupid answer to your honest question. (best friends with benefits pining idiots to lovers, fem!reader)

unedited we die like men & title from the alcott by the national ft taylor swift hehehe enjoy

It started as a means of comfort after Starcourt, when he was bloody and bruised up but you took him home and got closer, closer, closer, until it turned into a mess of blurred lines and panting breaths, lips swollen for reasons other than being hurt, for better reasons, reasons that brought forth safety and relief for the two of you. You both tend to hunger for such things. It’d been good, easy, for a bit there. Lately it’d felt like the intimacy was threatening to choke you. Like you’d never met a form of  closeness you didn’t cling to. And God, did it feel like you were clinging. Craving an unwarranted change. Was it so unwarranted? You weren’t sure, you could never tell.

    The air in his room is hot and sticky with summer, the ceiling fan providing the barest relief, your bare skin providing the slightest bit more. You stare all around his room, taking in all the stark traces of him, though in truth it doesn’t betray much, just as he attempts to. It’s a plain room, plaid walls, matching curtains, his desk messy and cluttered, all the dresser’s drawers slightly ajar like he spent a touch too long shuffling through all his clothes to determine which outfit would be best, which, knowing him in the way you do, he probably did. You knew he wasn’t as secure as he liked everyone to believe. Steve Harrington tried his best, but sometimes you saw right through him.

     Other times he was harder to read. It was probably purposeful, layers of protection built around himself. Don’t love anyone, don’t let anyone love you, and you won’t get hurt. People can only hurt you if you let them. Steve wasn’t letting anyone anymore. Definitely not his parents, definitely not Nancy Wheeler, definitely not random girls who would inevitably end up disappointed with him. He swore it all off. He was a hopeless romantic who never wanted to be in love again. You understood it for the most part. Or you attempted to. It was hard when you were halfway (maybe more than halfway) in love with the guy, in his bed most nights, in his company most days, acting like a couple without being an established couple because he was too hesitant and you were too gentle to be pushy.

    He nudges you lightly, naked chest peeking up from his covers, naked everything else kept firmly underneath. “You okay? You’re quiet.” He sits up so he’s level with you, and you avoid eye contact by leaning down toward the floor to grasp for the shirt he let you borrow, a faded Spider-Man one he insisted was from middle school. You didn’t entirely believe him, but maybe it was just funny, and kind of sweet, to picture Steve sleeping in a Spider-Man shirt and keeping it a secret just for himself. You pull the shirt on over your head, and before you can do it for yourself, he reaches for your hair and takes it out from where it’s caught under the shirt. The familiarity of it makes you flinch. You can have sex with him all you want but God forbid he’s the slightest bit loving outside of that. It confuses you, the softness in the touches that aren’t in bed with him. If he holds your hand in any context other than bringing you as into him as possible while he slips himself in and out, you lose all sense of normalcy between the two of you. You can’t be normal when he’s holding your hand and stroking your cheeks and being kind, soft, adoring Steve, without being your Steve.

     “I’m fine, I’m just…” You reach for your shorts at the end of the bed. Steve watches you get dressed with his eyebrows scrunched together, confused. You’re not usually in a rush to leave after you have sex. Not that he wants you to. He likes that you stay until day sinks into night and he drives you home and waits to repeat it all again. Waits to see you, generally. And it’s not sex every single time. You drag him to see whatever’s playing at the Hawk and he makes you sit with him at Family Video on slow days when it’s just him on the clock and a single tumbleweed blows through the store instead of any customers. He drives you just about anywhere you ask and he lets you put on any cassettes you want in his car even if he hates what’s playing. It’s nice, the friendship part of all of it. If you had to give everything else up and just keep the friendship you’d be willing. He’d be willing. You consider it. “Nothing, just tired, probably gonna head home,” you smile at him over your shoulder before pulling on your socks and it’s half-hearted and he knows it.

    “What? You can sleep here, you know that,” he waves a hand around the room, trying to catch your gaze, but you avoid his eyes again. Descending light slants in through the curtains and envelopes him in gold. He glows, he’s so pretty. His hair is messy from where you heatedly ran your hands through it, but it still looks nearly perfect. The fact that he always looks so good infuriates you.

    “No yeah, I know, I wanna like shower and stuff too, and I left my new book at home and I wanted to do some reading,” you bluff calmly, standing up from tangled bedsheets and roaming the room in search of your sneakers.

   “That Stephen King scary clown book? I’ll take you home and you can come back and read it here, so you don’t get scared,” and he knows you won’t get scared and that you love horror far more than he ever could but he just really, really doesn’t want to be alone. Why would you go when everything’s right here? His parents aren’t home and something about you leaving makes him antsy and desperate. When you still refuse to look at him he feels himself, his confidence, growing smaller and smaller. “Did I- did I do something?” He doesn’t mean for it to sound as pathetic as it does.

   You whip around to face him, finally, finally, and touch a hand to his face. Relief floods through him at the heat of your fingers. “No, of course not, it’s all me, okay? I’m all sweaty and awful.”

    “You look beautiful, I swear,” he squeezes your hand and you feel like you’re drowning. It’s hard to breathe, your chest tight. “Are you sure you’re okay? You can talk to me, it’s me.” He scoots closer, if that’s possible. “You’re one of my best friends, we tell each other everything.” You look up toward the ceiling, inwardly groaning. Best friend.

   “You do this with all your best friends?”  

    “Well, no, Robin wouldn’t touch me even if she didn’t like girls-“ He feels himself starting to grin, teasing smile lilting at his lips.

     “Steve!” You’re laughing a little and so is he as you push his arm back. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

    “What’d you mean, then?” He’s still smiling, that entrancing, deliberately pouty, lazy smile. Vaguely smirky. You don’t know if it’s deliberate, a ploy to distract you, con you into staying, make you less prone to saying what you want to say, but you press anyway, even though he’s making you want to lean forward and endlessly kiss the smirk off his mouth.

   “I just think, I don’t know… you’re not seeing anyone else, right?”

   “’Course not, why, you got other plans after this?” He grins again. You roll your eyes. He makes it so hard sometimes.

    “Steve,” you whine, “I’m so serious right now.”

    “Okay, okay. No, you’re the only one for me.” He means it. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard. “Are you seeing anyone else?” He asks you like it’s the easiest question in the world for him to ask but honestly he’s shitting his pants a little. He’s not sure what’d he say if you said yes, I am, and I think we should end this, which is where he’s assuming the conversation is going. You’ve got we shouldn’t do this anymore written all over you in his eyes and he’s steeling himself for the heartbreak.

     “Does it look like I am?”

     “Does it look like I am?” He repeats back, and he reaches for your hand in that too intimate way of his, takes it all careful and slow. “What’s this about?”

     “I just, I just think, that, you know, I’m not seeing anyone, and you’re not seeing anyone, but we’re sorta… seeing each other, yeah?” You gesture between the two of you. He nods. He’s staring at you very intensely, waiting for you to get your words out. He’s still waiting for you to say you think this whole thing has been a very bad mistake, a miscalculated judgement on your part, you should go back to the way things were, so he’s not expecting what comes out of you next. “Shouldn’t we be, like, official, then?”

     And instead of throwing up all the ways he so badly would love for that to happen, he chokes out, because he’s stupid and speechless, “Official?” And the way he says it, like it’s a curse when it’s only his disbelief that you’d want that with him after all this time, makes you immediately go into panic mode.

    He quite literally sees the way you lose any sense of confidence in your question and he immediately tries to take it back as you stand from his side and start trying to force your words back in your mouth, too. “Fuck, forget I said anything,” you mumble, spying your shoes shoved under his desk where you’d comfortably kicked them off. You hasten to put them on as Steve scrambles up from the bed and starts dressing, matching your frantic speed.

    “Hey, wait, that’s not what I- I didn’t mean it like that-“

     “It’s fine, Steve, I get it, I totally do, this isn’t that for you, it’s fine-“

      “It is, it is-“ but you’re not hearing him, your mind is already elsewhere. It’s in your own bed in the quiet, alone with your thoughts and not with him, mercifully not with him. You need this one mercy, “I’ll drive you home, babe, c’mon, I’ll explain everything, please-“

    “I got it, it’s fine, I’m fine, you don’t have to explain, okay? I got it,” and you don’t just walk out of his house and down the block to yours, you absolutely flee. You take Steve’s heart with you.

      He’s pacing the floor behind the register at Family Video three days and three shifts later, practically clawing at the walls of the place, and Robin is pulling her hair out at the sight of him in distress this way.

     “What did you do?” She finally breaks, flipping her magazine shut.

      “What? How do you know it was me?” He stops pacing. He hadn’t even noticed he was doing it.

       “You’ve had three shifts and she hasn’t visited one single time. She always visits. And I know I didn’t do anything wrong, because I never do anything wrong, so, what’d you do?” Robin places her hand under his chin and stares at him expectantly.

      He huffs, his hands on hips. “Maybe she did something, Robin, did you ever think of that?”

     “Definitely not,” Robin retorts, waiting for Steve to be serious.

      He deflates. “Okay, it was me.”

      “I know that, now continue.”

      “We were, you know,” he tilts his head down and raises his eyebrows and widens his eyes.

     “Having sex, sure,” Robin bobs her head. A customer in the nearest aisle frowns and shuffles toward a different section further away from the two of them.

     Steve shushes her. “I wasn’t trying to say it so loud.”

    “Having sex,” Robin repeats, louder this time, not bothering to fight back a laugh at Steve’s exasperated expression, “continue.”

      “Well, after that, she started asking if, if I was seeing anyone, which of course I’m not, because, you know, I’m into her, obviously, so I told her I wasn’t, and she said she wasn’t, so she said maybe we should be official.” Steve hesitates to say the rest of what happened. He still can’t believe all he could do when you said the words was repeat them back to you with that stupid look on his face instead of giving you the biggest, loudest declaration of love in a big, messy, pathetic, devoted way, the way he pictures himself when it comes to you, messy and pathetic and devoted, and he replays that moment back to himself all day long, thinking of everything else he could’ve said to make you understand.

    “That’s what you want, isn’t it? She’s all you talk about all day long, you want to be with her, don’t you?”

    “Of course I do!” He snaps, dragging a hand across his face. “But when she said it I just couldn’t get the words out and she got, she got so sad and she left without me being able to explain anything and she hasn’t answered the phone which, yes, I’ve been calling, and I don’t know how to do this.” He’d never been good at school but he knew he’d get a Grade A in Pitiful.

    “Do what? Tell a girl you love her? You’ve been in relationships before, Steve.”

    “I know, but…” he sighs. “I’m different now, like, it’s not as easy anymore, for me, and I- I don’t want her to get hurt, and I don’t want to get hurt, it’s like, everything used to be my fault, and I wasn’t as good as I could have been, and I don’t want to break anything, I don’t want it to get fucked up, because it’ll be my fault, and I can’t do that again. Not to her.” He swallows, the words harder to come by than he would care to admit. “I’m a little… I’m a little in love with her, I think.” This is said quietly. It frightens him to say it out loud. He’s gone over it in his head, those words, so few of them, but they say so much, and it’s scary. He hasn’t said them to someone in years. The last time he did he got so brutally hurt he thought he’d never recover. But he had. So why was it still so scary?

    “A little bit?” Robin teases, but it’s all love for him, truly.

    “Alright, a lot in love,” he concedes. He wants to get used to saying it. He wants to say it to you. For real. Loudly. “I still don’t know how to do this, though. Not anymore.”

   “Come on!” Robin gets up from her stool and places her hands on his shoulders. “You’re supposed to be Steve Harrington. You were using those…” she pauses for a beat and then, “charms,” the word is said with the smallest hint of sarcasm but she persists nonetheless, “on tons of girls in high school and at Scoops! Now whip them out again for our very nice friend that you sometimes go to town with!”

   “When did any of those charms,” he says it with a matching sarcastic tone, “work aside from when I was sixteen and an idiot?”

   “You might not be sixteen anymore but you’re still an idiot, if that helps.”

    “It doesn’t but thank you for the encouragement.”

    “I’m just saying!” She exclaims, throwing her hands up and returning back to her seat. “Putting yourself out there is always gonna be scary, but you can’t let that stop you. You’d actually be an idiot if you let that stop you. Are you just never gonna see her again? No, because you’d go insane. It’s not like what you did was all that bad anyway.”

    “You really think so?” He perks up a bit, needing that confirmation that he isn’t a totally awful and irredeemable person. It’s easy for him to fall headfirst into that spiral of thinking. It was a trap set with the most accessible, perfect bait and he somehow always found himself walking straight into it without stopping to think if he was being fair to himself.

    “You’ve both been in bad spots, you reacted the way you did and she reacted the way she did out of what was most likely panic and embarrassment. She’s definitely not even mad at you. Probably just, again, embarrassed. If you explain I think it’ll all be okay, Steve, I swear.” Robin can’t take much more of this conversation circling around, as much as she loves Steve and wants to be there for him, she would love him even more if he acted on his feelings and allowed himself some happiness for once.  “So do you think you can you, like, maybe go tell her so she can keep visiting us at work? I need more company than just you and Keith and these customers with no taste,” she complains, glaring at the closed door that hides Keith, in all his absolute glory. The customer from before hears her comment and storms out. Robin rolls her eyes.

    “Right, yeah, tell her I love her, tell my best friend I love her,” he frowns, nerves creeping up the back of his neck. “Maybe you could just call her first and ask-“

     “Steve! I am not meddling in your love life like that when you already know everything there is to know!” She throws her magazine at him. “She said she wants to be with you, go be with her!”

    “Alright, alright!” He waves his hands dismissively. He begins to pace again, this time his eyes held to the clock. Robin groans. There’s still three hours left of their shift.

     You’re in your room wallowing, or doing what’d you call attempting not to wallow but failing at it miserably. You haven’t touched a single page of your book, mostly content to just listen to sad records and more or less stare at the wall. It was stupid, you knew, to behave in such a way over some guy. But it didn’t feel like some guy. It was Steve, after all. It all felt deeper than just some guy. You two had been through a lot together, more than most people have been, and if you’d just ruined your friendship with someone you always felt safe, felt at home with, over feelings you couldn’t control and probably would be better off not having, you were going to need some serious therapy.

     It probably was silly of the two of you to start this thing up anyway, you reason, fighting back your urge to do any further crying into a pillow. You try to focus on painting your nails a nice shade of dark blue but it reminds you of Steve’s old Scoops uniform and of that night (and all that nights that followed) so you stop in the middle of your second thumb and grab nail polish remover and start scrubbing away at your finished right hand.

“Fuckin’ ridiculous,” you mutter, the cotton ball in your hand soaked through with blue and your nails discolored and muddy. “I am ridiculous,” you say to yourself, shaking off your wet hand. Your room is filled with the smell of acetone and disappointment. You think about lighting a candle when your doorbell rings. You debate answering it before it rings again. And then again. And again, more frenzied this time.

    You open the door to a distressed Steve. His cheeks are red and he’s breathing like he can’t anymore. He’s not the multi-star athlete he was in high school, he realizes in this moment. “Did you- did you just run here from work?” You ask him, but he’s already too close to you, not answering your question, gazing at you because simply looking isn’t enough and has never been enough. He is gazing. He is flush with adoration. It’s hard not to bloom under that radiance. He makes you want to forget everything and go back to plush lips on hot skin and the quiet contentment that came alongside being with him in those first few months. You back up a little into your doorway but he steps up to you, following your steps. “Where’s your car-“

    “Forget that for a sec,” he says, and you stop talking out of surprise. “Just, just tell me if we do this it’ll be okay, and we won’t be terrible for each other, and we’ll be good,” because he needs to hear it, even if it’s ridiculous and he’s jinxing it before it’s begun he needs to know you’re right there with him. “Like, just tell me it can be easy this once. If you broke my heart I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it. ‘Cause I love you. I do. And I want this.” And you get it. He’s letting you get it. He’s letting you all the way in. You realize, flustered and basking in it, that he’s the first one to say those words. That you hadn’t even said them when you posed your first question. But he’s saying them out loud and it’s brilliant and beautiful. He is beautiful.

    It makes you want to weep, the love that swells here, out in the open. “Fuck, Steve, what type of girl do you think I am, breaking the heart of the guy I’ve been in love with since he started sneaking into my bedroom?” He smiles. He glows. It’s so beautifully Steve. Maybe it can be easy.

    When he kisses you, he proves it: the ease, the tranquility. He is fervent and burning. Everything is urgent with Steve. Especially kissing. He captures every bit of you immediately. His touch is light when he urges you out of your doorway and into your living room so he can shut your front door and quit giving the neighbors what he’s sure is the show of a lifetime. It is for him, at least.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Get Souped!

[tangents-within-tangents]

Hot take:

Crosshair does not have the Imperial disillusionment and redemption arc of The Bad Batch

Emerie does.

Crosshair has an arc for sure yes but it's not that.

I was thinking about this scene:

and how it got right what this scene kinda didn't:

(It was so close but then bad writing decided to undercut the moment with a joke rip)

And I think it's really interesting that these characters who were more or less raised into the Empire/First Order and chose to leave it are all directly asked why.

But take a look at Crosshair's answers in comparison:

Different context for the asking, yes, but still, compare that to clones like Howzer, Cody, Slip and Cade who left or turned against the Empire because they knew what the Empire is doing is wrong and they weren't just going to blindly follow orders:

Crosshair - Loyalty, Purpose, and Survival

Crosshair didn't choose to join the Empire (though the show isn't very clear or consistent about how much control the inhibitor chips have) but he did, for whatever reason, choose to stay. By the end of S1 we know his chip has been removed and as he definitively says "This is who I am." There were likely still other influences on his decision, but listen to how he talks about the Empire in the S1 finale:

Hunter: Crosshair, I've seen what the Empire is doing. Occupying planets and silencing anyone who stands against them. You know it's not right. Crosshair: You still don’t see the bigger picture, but you will. Hunter: Can't you see they're using you?

Crosshair: We’re not like the regs, we never have been. We’re superior. The Empire can’t protect the galaxy without strength, this is what we were made for. Think of all we could do, together!

Crosshair: You all are meant for more than drifting through the galaxy. It’s time to stop running. Join the Empire, and you will have purpose again.

Hunter: They destroyed an entire city! Crosshair: They did what needed to be done. Kamino, regs, the Republic, that time is over. The Empire will control the entire galaxy, and I am going to be a part of it. Hunter: Don't fool yourself. All you'll ever be to them is a number.

He undeniably knows what the Empire is doing, but he does not care. In fact it sure sounds like he actually supports it and finds self-meaning in it. Hunter spends those episodes trying to convince him it's wrong, he doesn't change his mind. In the end they offer him an out and he doesn't take it.

Wrecker: You coming with us? Crosshair: None of this changes anything. Hunter: You offered us a chance, Crosshair. This is yours. Crosshair: I made my decision.

The next we see Crosshair in "The Solitary Clone" (S2:E3) he follows orders and shoots the Desix governor, right after Cody heartbreakingly tries to do what's right and find a peaceful solution.

Cody: Tell me something, Crosshair. This new Empire, are we making the galaxy better? Crosshair: We’re soldiers, we do what needs to be done. Cody: You know what makes us different from battle droids? We make our own decisions, our own choices. And we have to live with them too.

After this (glorious!) conversation, Crosshair stays. Maybe this began to seed some doubts, but he actually smiles a few scenes later when Rampart assigns him another mission. It seems like for him it truly is as he said in S1:E1 (chip not enhanced yet but still influencing him enough for his brothers to notice he's acting strange):

Crosshair: Republic, Empire... what's the difference.

Crosshair: Orders are orders.

This unethical mission that finally pushed Cody over the edge does not change Crosshair's mind about the Empire, at least not enough for him to take action.

But what does?

Mayday: And here we are, the survivors. Combat troopers stuck babysitting cargo shipments. Crosshair: Mission’s a mission. Mayday: Yeah, I used to say the same thing.

Mayday: After all the clones have done, all we’ve sacrificed. We’re good soldiers, we followed orders. And for what?

This mission has nothing to do with how the fascist Empire treats the galaxy, it's about how they treat their soldiers. It's about how Mayday loyally fought and served his whole life and Lieutenant Nolan let him die

Lt Nolan: He served his purpose as a soldier of the Empire. Crosshair: You could have saved him! Lt Nolan: Perhaps you didn’t hear me, he is expendable, as are you.

Crosshair thought he could find purpose within the Empire, and Nolan shows him exactly what that will be.

His turning point is accompanied with this powerful visual of the ice vulture, a symbol (and threat) of death, and also set up within the episode a symbol of survival:

Mayday: Vicious creatures, but you have to admire ‘em. They find a way to survive.

This critical moment (that gives me chills, oof this episode is a masterpiece!) comes right after Nolan calls him expendable and directly threatens him:

Lt Nolan: And if you speak to me again with such disrespect I'll see to it you meet a similar fate, clone.

then Crosshair sees the vulture's shadow and turns to Mayday's dead body (ahh visual storytelling my beloved) then makes his decision:

Crosshair turns against the Empire not because he believes Hunter was right about this:

Hunter: I've seen what the Empire is doing ... You know it's not right.

but because he was right about this:

Hunter: All you'll ever be to them is a number.

Redemption (both in fiction and irl in my humble opinion) comes with making amends and reparations (which is why death 'redemptions' bother me so much but that's a rant for another time). Unlike Emerie, Crosshair never explicitly denounces the Empire or his own actions within it. He never says anything to specifically show if and how his views have changed from what he said on Kamino. He makes amends with his family (sending the warning message, helping Omega escape, making up with Hunter) but that's about it. The most we get in terms of acknowledgement is this:

Crosshair: I thought I knew what I was getting into with the Empire. I thought I was being a good soldier. Hunter: Nobody really understood what was happening back then. Crosshair: I’ve... done things. I’ve made mistakes. Hunter: I have regrets too, Crosshair. All we can do is keep trying to be better, and who knows there just might be hope for us yet.

Which is nice and all but it's more about them making up as brothers so it's way too excusing tbh ("no one knew what was happening back then" ummm? "The Empire will control the entire galaxy, and I am going to be a part of it" remember? And even if at first Crosshair was being controlled by the chip, the fact that he chose to stay after it was removed* means he condones and is therefore still accountable for those actions).

There's also a bit of self-destructive guilt:

Crosshair: Omega, don't risk anything for me. I belong in here.

Crosshair: Omega needs you both. So I’m doing this alone, it’s what I deserve. Hunter: Don’t even think about plan 99, Crosshair. Omega needs all of us.

(which thank you Hunter for pushing back on the death redemption bs and oh look is that a wrap up for the purpose thing?)

But there's no action taken on his part to make up for what he's done or to stand against the Empire (aside from the bare minimum of help with Tantiss, only after it became personally relevant, which like yeah he had trauma to deal with but still).

While I do think the implications/follow-up of Crosshair's turn should have been handled better in S3 (like rip Howzer! he deserved an apology, but that's a rant for another time), I don't necessarily** think this arc is a bad writing choice. It's just saying different things than we expect:

Maybe Crosshair's story is not about standing up against an unjust system, like we see with many other characters (who deserved more screen time but that's a rant for another timeeee). Maybe his story is about how even those who are loyal to the Empire, who actually believe in it, still suffer under and within it's rule. Not to garner sympathy, but to show that there is no winning.

Crosshair has another 'so what changed' convo in S3:E14 with Rampart, in which they draw parallels to each other:

Rampart: You used to believe good soldiers followed orders. Crosshair: Depends on who's giving them. The Empire betrayed us both. Rampart: And you think you can fight them? That's not you. You're like me, loyal to no one but yourself. Crosshair: I've changed.

(note how he says who's giving the orders, not what the orders are)

"Loyal to no one but yourself" describes Rampart much more than Crosshair, since we often saw Crosshair pride himself as a loyal soldier of the Empire whereas we saw Rampart abuse power to be self-serving within the Empire (like when he killed Wilco to save face). But they were both betrayed either way. Vice Admiral Rampart, snively Imperial opportunist through-and-through, shouts "I was following orders!" as he is arrested for the Empire's purposes. (Edit: and where Crosshair rejected the Empire and found new purpose fighting for his family, Rampart was still self-serving in the finale. He still tries to gain power for himself and he gets his comeuppance).

Even Hemlock, the final boss immoral Imperial scientist, who has to be benefiting the most from this system, echoes the expendability idea:

Hemlock: What I am working on is beyond your understanding. Something so vital to the Empire it makes me indispensable.

Then there's CX-2, also set up as a parallel/foil to Crosshair (fight me), who in the end is discarded as no more than a weapon, a tool that served it's purpose, showing us what would have become of Crosshair if he had stayed.

There is no winning in the Empire. Loyalty is not rewarded, it "doesn't go both ways." Everyone has to fight for their value. Even high ranking individuals** who for a time benefit from the injustice, in the end are just pawns to be used up and cast aside at a whim for the Emperor's gain. Even people who are motivated by self-interest alone cannot survive within this system, the only viable option in this galaxy is to fight the Empire and dismantle that system. (unless you conveniently find a magically safe island to hide away on but that's a rAnT fOr AnOtHeR tImE)

Which brings us back to...

Emerie - Cooperation, Compassion, and Choice

(Okay this post has already gotten away from me but I still want to talk about her to show the contrasts.)

Emerie may not have been given a lot of screen time to really flesh out her development, but there is a lot that is pretty clearly implied with her:

Crosshair: They’ll never turn her [Omega] over. Hemlock: They don’t have a choice. She is a clone, and therefore Imperial property. *Camera cuts to an angle more centered on Emerie’s face*

Crosshair: Give me your access card! Emerie: It won’t get you outside!

Emerie: I tried to warn him what would happen if he did not cooperate with the Doctor.

Emerie: Prisoner? Omega, you are no such thing. It will take time to adjust, but you will acclimate. It is far safer in here than out there.

Emerie: You should go back to your room. Crosshair: You mean her cell?

Emerie: Why children? Hemlock: Children are easier to attain and more agreeable to the subjugations. They are unaware of why they are here and what they possess.

Emerie: They're children. Like I was... Was your plan to discard them too? Nala Se: The Empire will keep them in order to control them.

We don't know a lot about Emerie's background, but it's clear that she had a lot less choice than Crosshair and less opportunity or ability to leave. Unlike Crosshair, we never directly hear Emerie's views of the Empire (and she was most likely 'taken under Hemlock's wing' before the Empire even came to power), but lets look at how she talks about the Tantiss:

"Remain calm. Cooperate and you might survive."

"Don't make this worse, Crosshair! There is no escape!"

"All of us serve a purpose here."

"The Doctor will inform me, if it's necessary."

"It's best not to ask questions."

"Escape is not possible, Omega. This is for your own good."

She honestly does the best she can within the system she is also trapped in. She tries to help Crosshair, Omega, and the vault kids in the only way she knows how (warns Crosshair about the hounds and security, tries to protect Omega from Hemlock, tells Scorch his "actions were extreme" with Jax, insists on overseeing Bayrn's retrieval, double checks his m-count (to give him an out), and tries to find out where he came from). When she gives Omega, and later Eva, the doll, I think it shows just how little she really is able to do here (and it's kinda heartbreaking imo).

The framing of this shot especially (after Jax's escape attempt) visually shows how Emerie herself is trapped/imprisoned:

Despite the fact that very little of this is Emerie's fault, she has very little power and she is doing all she can, the narrative does not excuse her role in the Empire:

Nala Se: What will you do, Emerie? Emerie: There is nothing I can do. I don't have that kind of power. Nala Se: Don't you?

Emerie: I- I was doing my job. Echo: Yeah, I’ve heard that before. You’re a clone. How can you be part of this?

These fighting-the-Bystander-Effect conversations parallel these exchanges:

Hunter: We made a choice, and so did you. Crosshair: Soldiers follow orders. Hunter: Blind allegiance makes you a pawn.

Crosshair: We’re soldiers, we do what needs to be done. Cody: You know what makes us different from battle droids? We make our own decisions, our own choices. And we have to live with them too.

which did not change Crosshair's mind. And honestly, all respect to Echo's disappointed mom glare™ but I think it's clear Emerie had already made her decision, she just needed help to actually be able to do anything about it. When she stopped Echo, with her voice wavering on the verge of tears (ahhh v good voice acting), she clearly had no intention of turning him in. She's on her own in the Empire's most secure facility with very little resources, if she had tried anything on her own she most likely would have failed and been killed

Omega: Emerie, you don't have to do this. Emerie: (sigh) I’m sorry, but I do.

but as soon as she is enabled by an ally, she immediately turns around to help: giving information and getting Echo through security, helping the kids escape, and giving Omega the tablet that allows them to free the other clone prisoners.

Where Crosshair's turn is accompanied by the symbolic imagery of the ice vulture, Emerie's is the removal of her (literally rose-tinted!) glasses:

Symbolizing how she has shed her previous views/indoctrination that altered her perception of the Empire and blinded her to it's wrongs. It's disillusionment.

Emerie's story shows us that even those who are raised and indoctrinated into this system can, should, and will escape (with needed help). Even those who did not choose to be apart of the Empire and are not making the decisions still have the responsibility and ability to act on what they know is right.

Emerie, whose name means 'Home strength' 'Brave' and 'Powerful', and "reflects the importance of leadership and authority in the workplace".***

While Emerie is only in one more scene after her turn, so the wrap up is a bit rushed, she still very simply does what Crosshair does not:

Emerie: Because I was wrong about this place. And I'm trying to do the right thing.

Echo: I’m sure Senator Chuchi would find what you have to say very helpful for our cause. Emerie: I have a lot to make up for. I’d like to help out however I can.

She admits wrong, takes accountability, commits to making amends, and leaves with Echo to go take on the Empire (which hopefully we will get to actually see more of some day).

So, in short, she's showing us how redemption is done right!

---

Notes:

*Whether this writing choice was good/logical/in-character or not is another discussion entirely, but I'm going off of what we were given, what the show is presenting in the canon text and (reasonably inferred/intentional) subtext. Crosshair is pretty multifaceted and I could only touch on so much here. There's a lot of ways to interpret his character/choices, but I tried to avoid the realm of speculation or fanon explanations (even if they sometimes make more sense lol).

**History and political theory are not my area of expertise at all, so I have NO idea how well this aligns with real-world fascism stuff and therefore what implications this storytelling choice could have. I think the message of like 'if you think you could survive or gain power by doing what the Empire/fascist system wants you are wrong' could be good (like how everyone is actually harmed by the patriarchy type of a thing), but I hesitate bc maybe there are those who would benefit, since it's a hierarchal system, right? If anyone more knowledgeable than me has incite to share, by all means

Either way, I do think it works in-story and in-universe though. It's just in the execution. The main problem (even from a strictly theme/character arc stand point) is the lacking follow-up/consequences for Crosshair in S3. Like you gave your character accountability by removing the chip and I think that's great setup for an arc but you gotta follow through with that and actually hold him accountable!

***I'm always curious when clones have 'normal' names, like why did they chose the name Emerie of all things? So I looked it up. Idk how reliable sources are for name meanings so take it with a grain of salt but it's still fun. Fits pretty well, and clones names have definitely had significant meanings in the past (like how Rex and Jesse both mean 'king') so I'm pretty sure it was intentional.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[thresholdbb]

I'm a Kai Winn apologist but not because I think she's a good person. She's a compelling tragic character

[eerna]

imma be so real with you I did NOT care for all the cutesy ways they presented Vi and Cait's disbalanced social status in arc 3

[aonik]

The recent movie was so cool I had to draw something!