#It's not for fucking knitting

[kinsey3furry300]

While this is very cool, the big problem with this is, sometimes the traditional crafters are dead wrong because they don't realise just how new most traditional crafts are over an archaeological timescale. This is why achedemics should reach out to other communities to see if they have insight, but also why those communities should listen to what the achedemics say in return.

I remember reading archaeological text books where it said pre Colombian Mexicans kept knives in the rafters of buildings, and we didn't know why so it must be religious. Turns out if you don't have shelves that where you put them to stop your kids playing with them, no one had ever asked a mother with toddlers where they would keep them if they lived in this space. But I also remember reading a 2000+ word essay by a modern potter on how a lot of Greek pottery must be ornamental or ritual because its unglazed and as a result porous and won't hold fluids. Yeah, you cook with it once and the fat clogs the pores, and it holds fluid after that. That's been known archaeologically basically forever, and confirmed once the scanning electron microscope was invented, but to someone who's never cooked with the pots they make, they would never see it. We thought some hairdoos on roman staues must be wigs as no one could figer out how to do it, until they asked a hairdresser, who was able to re-create it by sewing hair in place. We ignored indigenous Easter Islanders when they said they walked thier statues into place, we forgot roman concrete, Lost the recipefor greek fire... but sometimes the acedemics spot clear problems in simple solutions offered by laypeople, and it causes wild misinformation about the past to spread if not countered. Knowledge has to be a two-way street.

Its like that weird roman dodecahedron, the idea that some granny solved it and knitted glove fingers using it is really really cool...

... its just a pity that knitting as a technology wasn't known until the 11tc century AD. Its a medieval Egyptian Arab technology to make more breathable cotton, and wasn't known in Europe until after the crusades. Nålebinding, or knottless knitting, may have been known in Scandinavia as early as the 5th century, but doesn't seem to have spread south and was unknown entirely in classical antiquity. We have a lot of well preserved fabrics from Greece and the roman empire, and while corse loose-knit wool fabrics are known, they are either made on a loom or basket-woven together by hand (with one late roman helmet liner that may be Nålebinding from a danish bog and one from an alpine salt mine but that's controversial). Knitting, historically speaking, is a new technology we've not yet found the boundaries for. Crochet is white-hot bleeding edge tech, being 18th century. It will be millenia before we understand the limitations of Crochet, and that's awesome.

Sometimes the nerds in their ivory towers need to listen to some wisdom from outside their comfort zone, and Sometimes traditional craftspeople need to be gently sat down and told that there are living tortoises older than their "traditional" craft. The experts are often wrong, and arrogant about it. The same unfortunately, its also true of the non experts. If an old mystery has a clear, simple, obvious solution that appeared online in the past ten years, give it a good hard look to see if that solution actually fits the evidence. Just becaues its a logical solution to us today, doest means its the logical solution people in the past would have picked. The world isn't usually simple enough to provide us with the satisfying answer we want, and that's okay.

Edit: quite funnily since posting this I have received an article on Roman Nålebinding, and it appears that while knitting with needles was indeed unknown in classical Greece and Rome, Nålebinding was in fact known and used in both Greece and Rome, but remained a niche thing only used in certain local areas. Fiber crafts really are the academic fronteer that never rests. As Ursula Vernon said "In historical accuracy there are two groups who will always spot if you're wrong by a single year and call you out: the gun people and the textiles people, and I fear the textiles people more."

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

[swervesbar]

It's not transformers but I knit my giant eurypterid body pillow a sweater and its the best thing I've ever made PLEASE LOOK AT IT

[castletemprwine]

i'd devour you whole if you'd let me 🩸🫀

hand knit and crocheted, words by me

[devilishbird]

knitting is like cooking: at first you're too scared to deviate from the recipe because the recipe writer Knew things that you don't and then you do it for a while and you're like. recipe writer wrong we do this based on vibes only

[hotcinnamonsunset]

a whale of a good time🐋

[lazylittledragon]

i’m going to fucking scream, transphobes are so sad and obsessed that they’re misgendering A DRAWING OF MY BALDUR’S GATE 3 CHARACTER

[uselesstherapy]

[shadypeachrunaway]

[twoheartsoneclara]

ever since i was a little girl i always knew that i wanted to say to myself “im going to kill myself” whenever dealing with the slightest inconvenience

[thesorcererandhisking]

The thing they don’t tell you about yarn art is that you will learn that you don’t know how to count.

[unfinishedsweaters]

I know it’s not very smart to drop every other project I’ve got right now and knit a snake so I can write up the pattern, but—I could drop everything and knit a snake; how am I supposed to resist the temptation? just look. look at his little face

I want to knit him again and hide him in a wood pile

[sophsicle]

psa: if u send me transphobic asks I will not answer them cause I have no interest in platforming u whatsoever

But I will say this *pulls out megaphone*

All transphobes are sad pathetic losers with dirty asses

*puts megaphone down*

Thank u

[vamphours]

just finished my first mitten!!! absolutely horrendous to knit colorwork on 2.50mm needles but look how beautiful it is!!!!

[fibrespace]

I posted about this project back in June, when I was having tension troubles. I almost frogged it halfway through, but instead, I gave her a nice long four month time-out to think about her misdeeds before circling back.

Mistakes were made, but it all worked out in the end. I forgot to knit the dinosaurs' eyes and just decided to roll with it, and it took a steaming bath and some serious ironing to get the fibers to relax, but she's finished.

[chickensgod]

Literally learning new knitting techniques is like learning spells

[broadwaylewzur]

i made this at like 2 am last night