#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. 

[hotcinnamonsunset]

a whale of a good time🐋

[castletemprwine]

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

hand knit and crocheted, words by me

[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

[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

[bakedbakermom]

fanfic is not content. fanfic is not a service.

fanfic is a HOBBY.

and like. i knit. i knit for other people. i share my knitting and give it as gifts and enjoy the process and the feedback and seeing someone love something i made and sometimes i will even take requests if i like you enough. but if i'm not having fun, or the person doesn't appreciate it, or they ask for something that will make me miserable or in a way that makes me feel obligated instead of excited... i will frog that shit so fast and you'll never get another sweater again.

people who make demands of fic writers, or scrape our content for sale or ai or whatever, or bitch and moan about our fic not meeting your expectations... you're the same people who will buy a $3 machine-made walmart sweater and then complain when you try to buy a handknit one and it's $350. babe that thing took 80 hours to make and i poured my heart and soul into it. i started with a ball of string and two sticks, and turned it into a hug you can wear. love it or go back to walmart.

[thesorcererandhisking]

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

[wispscribbles]

❄️ Remember to bring blankets for your recon mission ❄️

[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

[cecilyacat]

"Do you have any high intensity hobbies?" well you see i play a mean game of yarn chicken sometimes 😬

[inkskinned]

the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.

[jarjarblinks]

Where is the disability knitting representation? Since I injured my shoulder and can’t knit or even hold a book for the time being I feel even more hyperaware of the lack of accessible and safe knitting etiquette info.

All you see on YouTube or other social media are content creators turning out tons of products within a month’s - sometimes week’s - time, none of whom talk about their stretching or exercise regimen, break times, or safe knitting tips like switching up projects, needles, stitches or knitting styles.

Like I feel it’s safe to say disabled people knit. Physically disabled people knit. People with chronic pain knit. People with neurodivergent conditions knit. People who struggle with executive dysfunction knit.

Even if you’re abled, you should be taking care of yourself while engaging in this activity. But ableds are so much less likely to injure themselves or to struggle with recovery. What could be two-day shoulder soreness for an able person could be a weeks-long impingement for a hypermobile person, or even fucking surgery. I’m not saying these experiences don’t happen to ableds but as always disabled people have to be more careful, and the resources are sparse.

I did not have the luxury of being taught how to knit properly, effectively, carefully, by an elder. I am a Gen Z disabled person who went to YouTube and Instagram and only saw glamorous people sitting down, rarely varying their knitting style, and turning out projects at the speed of light. The lack of transparency about what goes into knitting and how it affects your anatomy is dangerous.

[jugglingjujube]

"Alternate your skeins so you don't end up with weird colour pooling"

Wrong. rectangle.

[iknowwhereyousnoozeatnight]

tennis

[oh-men-of-dark-and-dismal-fate]

Walking into a yarn shop like it's an art museum. Admiring all the colorways and textures of the various skeins. Nodding my head at the tasteful displays of handmade items by the local knitting/crochet group to demonstrate the different yarn brands. Talking to the owner to learn more about the local fiber art scene and learning about different dyers, and crafters in the area that I would have never found on the internet. Buying one too many skeins to continue my pursuit of creating beautiful things to bring joy into mine and others lives. My way of paying homage to this wonderland of fibrous beauty.

Fucking glorious.