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urspiritualnurse · 3 months ago

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Pick a card. (Left to right)

What do I see when I orbit around your soul?

Pile 1.

Predominantly shapeless souls, sometimes harvest itself into a form that it's beholder deeply lacks, wants, yearns, desires or the opposite, fears.

I see that yours has mimicked a root.

Why has it shaped itself to that, what desires or what subconscious motive caused it is something you will naturally realize at your own pace and timing.

I see the repeated number 9s in the cards, and in this case I perceive that number as a blockage, a mid stop, a constantly frequenting incompletion, just when you believe you are about to reach the complete numeral 10, it restarts back to 1, and so begins the continuous sishyphean cycle.

If you picture a root digging in the soil and entangling itself to every fibre and grain of it, that imagery is usually delicate, gentle, soothingly heartwarming .

But in your cards, the picture I visualize is rather hostile , as if every string of that root has claws, shredding each grains, piercing through any and every vitality of the land to dig itself down, so fiercely and so passionately, as if it's life depends on it.

With no end goal, destination in mind, that it is aware of, it just absentmindedly keeps on digging.

I see you going from people to people, community to community, anywhere and everywhere, with your roots clawing on every connections you have had, with a pure intentions to find solace but your desperate and devoid roots knows no other way to plead firmness, and stability except digging furiously onto everyone and everything.

Do you find yourself to be an uncomfortable being to be and be around?

Has your soul crossed you out from being its land where it can simply ground itself?

Has it found other candidates instead to have them fulfill your role?

Do you have someone that you feel is the epitome of comfort?

Ask yourself, when I'm nearing their existence, my soul's form which I have no awareness about, how is it approaching and interacting with them?

Your soul is wandering sad and desperate to feel a sense of connection to a land that it can call its own, why are you uncomfortable to your ownself? That is for you to unpack and unravel.

What can you do to call your beloved vital essence back to yourself?

Start by asking, "why do you make your soul uncomfortable ?"

( your vital roots will inadvertently be claws to the lands, that isn't yours to dig.)

Pile 2.

Anger is an advocate of those too timid to speak.

But if anger is unsupervised, unguided, unguarded, it denotes to the onlookers, that it is only a mere tantrum with loud speakers on, consisting the blend of generous vulgarity and crude language.

I see, in this pile humiliation has been the main force behind reasonable outbursts of anger.

Was there a crowd who laughed when you would scrunch your expression in fury? Was there a community that mocked your anger's sensibility and intelligence?

From this reading, an image of a canine species comes to my mind, whose fangs represents your justified anger, yet I see those fangs growing so tall and untamably beyond the line of normalcy, that it pierces through the specie's snout, making it unable to voice out the core reasons in sensible, coherent language and speech.

Your anger, (and I keep wanting to reassure you) is justifiable, valid.

Yet it has reached to a point of such humiliation, and provokery from the flocks of lunatics around you who are too insensible and too uncompassionate themselves to ever see past your fury.

That your anger has surpassed its own ability to communicate.

It has lost the language it is meant to use for efficient self expression that causes no harm to you and others and also the reality around.

Have you heard the term "blacking out", your anger goes through that quite a lot.

Don't be too hard on yourself, or your burning anger, for that is the only warmth that is loud for you to notice , that is emanating from within you, not others.

A warmth that says, "I care."

Do what you must, after reading this pile.

But my utmost suggestion would be, communicating with your anger.

Ask it, who is it angry at? What did they do? What did they caused?

Nomatter who the culprit behind it is, whether your ownself or others.

Just notice how the anger responds to your question.

Does it howl incoherent language?

Does it throw things around and punishes inanimate objects, walls with your

knuckles?

Or does it speak.....

In a language that only those who are truly listening can understand.

(Insensibility towards a disheartened child, is what leads to a tantrum.)

Pile 3.

Do you know in this whole play of existence, we all expect certain things from the earth that we reside in.

And if we were to put all those collective desires in a single piece of paper, one would notice a common thing from each anonymous man's written desires.

Luminosity.

Every living being with a thrifty sense of individuality, somehow always seem to find anything luminous, desirable.

Or maybe, it's just that, what you want always seems to shine.

Whether it's love, promotion, prosperity, good health, vacation, etc.

I see in this pile, the luminosity you desire is of riches and the freedom that it comes with.

And when I speak of freedom, you must know how grand and multi dimensional it is.

The freedom riches gives, the freedom love gives, the freedom good health gives, etc, are all different yet they all are indeed a valid face of the multifaceted term, freedom.

I see you, having almost a professional outlook and interactions with the world, the earth.

I can almost hear you speak to it, " You are letting me live here, I will pay you back for your service by not throwing litters around, donating to charity that cleans your vast back, agreeing on plastic bans, etc"

In all of those chat you hold with the earth, in your subconscious mind room.

You represent formality and such alienating disconnection, that your inner sense of disbelief towards anything that promotes unity is reasonable.

What you want from this world is a luminosity build by luxury.

No shame, no bringing forth discussions about compassion here because the synonym of riches doesn't mean cruelty, for me to ever dictate you of how you should be and must pursue.

Do you ever feel like escaping your office and the very building you work on?

Somedays the formality eats you up and chews your mental agility and spiritual resilience, so much so you just wish to be at home, playing with your autistic and unspeaking cat.

You can do that.

You can call off the work.

You can reach out to the elevator and press the ground floor that takes you to the parking lot, there will be your car waiting for you, you can get in it and drive away from the office, the work air.

But what will you do when the crushing formality surrounds not just that place, but the entire earth?

Can your car drive you up to mars? To the moon? To the stars?

For you to escape even for a second, out of such professionalism burdens that you inhale every living seconds of your life.

In this reading, I see no visions that I must introduce you to.

You are already a visually active person, you think with visions not just numbers.

By no means this reading insinuates you of being unkind or lacking in any humane qualities.

Neither is it a complain from the mother earth to you.

Take it as a gesture unfolding infront of your awareness.

A gesture that suggests sensibility in your life.

Even the faintest mimickery of sensibility has acquired you a tip of what you yearned for.

Ponder, what the real thing could pull.

(Has the professional interiors followed you, even to your bed?)

Pile 4.

I must introduce you to an objective of mine that suggests what this outside world consists of, happens discreetly within our interior too.

Adversity, competition, push and pull, dog eat dog world pace, etc.

And how you may ask?

Every external worldly tension stems from various reasons, one that stands to this day, the most valid is, lack.

The uprising heat and debates, the battles of winners and losers are here, not just because of human sadism to win but to also get hands on a place, position, thing,etc before someone else does.

Which comes from an arguably devastating narration that we all collectively feed on, lack.

Your internal world seems to be a world copied and pasted from our very reality.

You seem to tell your internal conscious residing within you, that you lack space so severely that to be accepted for residence, one must go for the other to find the leash.

Competion arises the moment lack wanders around introducing itself.

Your masculinity and your feminity will compete for a position because you told them, only one must stay.

Your anger and the contradicting poise of a breeze will compete the moment you say to yourself, i need only one to navigate.

Your mind and heart will start to clash, get into heated arguments that spiral you into madness, depression, anxiety and mental , physical, emotional, spiritual agony.

Because you told yourself, only one is reasonable, the other is not.

That only one is reliable to execute life with, the other is not.

So, when your whole internal cells that makes up your entirety feels like a war zone,

a telenovela about a sibling rivalry, the marching tension between you and your competent colleague, or the ticking time bomb that ticks rules such as the one who gets there first gets to have it, etc.

You must know, it is because a narration is being given with or without your awareness.

That says,

I lack.

I lack so, what I consist entirely of, must decide with each other, who is to get deducted and who is to stay.

In this reading I don't think I need to guide you into answers because you already are aware.

But as a gentle nudge, here goes my everything.

" Lack only exists in places where prosperity unsettles us."

(Stop playing "the floor is lava" with the entirety of yourself.)

#pick a card #tarot pick a card #spirituality #divination #tarot reading

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slutforpringles · 18 days ago

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The FEA collection seems to have prompted a bit a discourse on Daniel's lack of response (so far) on the Red Bull situation and fallout from SIngapore - and honestly @cecoeur and @billscciardo have articulated lot of how I feel about it all far better than I could have 🫶🏻.

While there is a part of me that would love to see Daniel go full scorched earth on Red Bull and publicly eviscerate both their treatment of him and especially the lies they have told about how it all played out, I also can't help but wonder if part of the reason that we haven't seen/heard anything from Daniel is because he still feels conflicted about what he wants to do.

Daniel's spent the last two years emphasising how Red Bull feels like home and a second family, highlighting how many current team members have been there throughout his entire career and that their belief in him and the way they welcomed him back into the team was so important and special to him, and was a big factor in helping him fall back in love with the sport. Even if he feels totally hurt/blindsided/betrayed by everything that has happened (very understandably), those other feelings don't just suddenly cease to exist, and I do not fault him in any way for wanting to grapple with his own probably difficult and conflicting emotions before unpacking them for the wider public, especially given the way the press have so often been so viciously cruel with how they have reported on Daniel.

And I think as much as I'd love to think that Daniel could publicly eviscerate Christian/Red Bull's upper management/board members, shareholders and decision makers without that affecting his ongoing relationship with those people, is kind of naive and just not realistic. Even if he currently hates Red Bull with every fibre of his being, I think hitting destruct on all of that without at least giving himself time to think it through is just not advisable or sensible.

Anyway these are just my thoughts about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also contractual/legal stipulations at play until the season (and Daniel's contract) is over, too.

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sm0lprism · 7 months ago

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Bite-Sized (10) - A G/t BG3 fanfic

This contains g/t (giant/tiny content) so if that isn't your thing, then I suggest you stop reading. Thank you!

Read on ao3

Chapter 1 | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Series master list

Summary: Ria awaits her impending fate inside Astarion's mouth. Will this be the end for her or will Astarion surprise her?

Pairing: Astarion x f!borrower!oc (Tav/oc) (slow-burn)

Warnings: MOUTHPLAY WARNING!!! If you are uncomfortable with mouthplay or vore-ish themes, then DO NOT read this chapter! No actual vore occurs but mouthplay is VERY prominent and makes up the majority of this chapter. Swearing/course language.

Word count: 2.5k

EDIT: shoutout to my good friend @smolgloves for coming up with one of the ideas for this chapter!! (you know which one hehe)

It took every fibre in her being not to scream as Astarion’s lips passed over her body, pulling her inside his open maw. Before her eyes could adjust to the change in lighting, she was suddenly pressed to the roof of his mouth as he took a loud gulp and swallowed the remaining beer from his cup. She remained motionless as the giant fleshy muscle held her in place, all she could do was watch in terror as the liquid disappeared down his cavernous throat in a matter of seconds. All it would take was one swallow, and she would disappear down his gullet too.

His tongue suddenly relaxed, the beer now gone down his throat, and she found herself lying on the expanse of his wet, warm tongue. The scent of beer was heavy in the air, but it chilled her to the bone when she could also smell the metallic scent of blood hanging evidently in his mouth too. Tears burned her eyes and she stifled a sob. Her breathing came out in raspy gasps as dread hooked its claws into her once more as she attempted to process what was happening.

Gods, is he going to eat me?! Will I die like this?

Her mind immediately flickered back to when she had first met Astarion, how he had been so intent on eating her, how he had tasted her blood, running his tongue over her arms, and held her squirming in his cold fist like she was nothing but a mere piece of meat ready to be eaten. Fear clung fiercely to her heart and it quickly spread to the rest of her body like wildfire, smothering any other rational thought that was left in her brain. How could she sit idly, inside a vampire’s mouth, and not do anything? If she didn’t do something right now, she could be taking a trip down his throat very soon. She refused to wait around to see what would happen if she chose to remain idle.

My dagger.

As soon as the thought struck her brain, she hastily reached for her tiny dagger that Dammon had so carefully crafted and gripped it firmly in her trembling fist. Without a second thought, Ria drove her dagger into the flesh of his tongue and began stabbing the muscle multiple times as pure adrenaline clutched onto her hungrily with a vice-like grip. No sensible thoughts crossed her mind as she stabbed relentlessly, all she could think about was how much she didn’t want to go down Astarion’s throat and into his waiting stomach.

“Let me out!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs, blood from his tongue now splattering over her clothes as she continued to stab the wet surface, tears streaming down her face. “I haven’t come this far to be eaten by the likes of you!”

The fleshy surface beneath her suddenly tensed before pinning her to his palate once more, an audible grunt resonating loudly from the back of his throat. In the confusion of the moment, the dagger slipped out of her grasp and clanged against his large molars before falling and wedging itself between some of his pristine teeth that were dangerously close to the back of his throat. All she could do was watch in stunned silence, aside from the gurgling noises coming from the back of his throat, as her only means of defense was completely out of her reach.

Shit. Shit. SHIT!

Now she was quite literally at his mercy.

Perhaps stabbing his tongue so persistently wasn’t a good idea after all.

Sealing her eyes shut, she waited for the dreaded moment where he would swallow. Surely after her outburst of frequent stabbing, he would be done with her and gulp her down with no hesitation. Her body trembled as more sobs racked through her core violently as she waited for the end. But moments passed, and she was still pinned to the roof of his mouth as his tongue firmly held her in place.

What is happening?

Opening her eyes, her gaze scanned her surroundings and she was soon greeted with a formidable wall of teeth. She shuddered as her eyes fell on his fangs, so large that they could impale her entire body if he so pleased. Those same fangs had almost ended her life only a few weeks ago, and now she was face to face with them once more inside the vampire’s mouth. Chills snaked down her spine, suppressing another shiver, as she recalled those memories yet again of that fateful night. However, this time was different to when she had first met him – she was alive and inside the vampire’s mouth now, and surprisingly not halfway down to his stomach.

Why hasn’t he eaten me yet?

She wriggled around against his soft tongue, wondering if he was simply tasting her before the inevitable happened. Surely if he was going to eat her, he would’ve done so by now – right? His tongue barely moved, cradling her delicately against his palate, and it showed no signs in flicking her body down his throat. All she could do was wait painfully to see what he would do. Her heart pounded relentlessly against her ribcage, threatening to burst right out of her chest, her stomach dropping like a stone. If Astarion didn’t end her soon, the sheer suspense of the moment would.

After what felt like days, his tongue slowly relaxed and lowered her down until she was resting on the bottom of his mouth again. She didn’t dare move a muscle as she quivered on top of his tongue. Seconds turned to minutes, but still nothing happened. His tongue was surprisingly still as well, holding her as if she was as fragile as glass. While she sat in the vampire’s mouth, her overwhelming fear started to slowly dwindle. Her body was still frozen in place, refusing to move, worried that if she attempted to move again, he would squash her to the roof of his mouth, or even worse, swallow her whole. While she laid on his tongue, the only noises she could hear was the bubbling noise at the back of his throat. It certainly unnerved her listening to his bodily functions, a constant reminder of where she could easily end up if Astarion willed it.

Saliva coated her entire body, drenching all her clothes until they were a sodden mess. She sniffled as she realised that if she survived this, her clothes were completely and utterly ruined. There was no way she could walk out of this with any dignity left to her name, if she managed to get out of this at all. At least it was…pleasantly warm inside his mouth. It shocked her that while Astarion himself was icy cold to the touch, his mouth was surprisingly cosy. It pained her that the thought even crossed her mind, but the warmth that radiated from his mouth could only be described as such. Perhaps there was hope for her yet. She recalled Astarion winking at her moments before he slipped her inside his mouth, and how he had looked almost apologetic. Maybe she would be fine after all. And maybe stabbing his tongue had been incredibly stupid of her, but in her defense, after everything that she had been through, stabbing him was a perfectly reasonable reaction to the situation. Or at least that’s what she would keep on telling herself.

Pools of saliva had now started to gather around his tongue, steadily increasing by each passing second. A small yelp escaped past her lips as the fleshy muscle suddenly pinned her against his teeth, his throat releasing a very loud swallowing sound as the gathering pools of saliva vanished down his throat in a matter of seconds. Panic fluttered in her chest like a swarm of butterflies as she watched the liquid disappear so quickly down his gullet, and she shivered, thinking how easily that could’ve been her.

He…he still isn’t swallowing me.

His tongue soon relaxed, no longer pressing her against the wall of giant teeth. She inhaled a shaky breath, attempting to calm her frantic beating heart as she slowly accepted that perhaps she was safe after all. Why would he deliberately avoid swallowing her multiple times if he wasn’t going to do it? Especially after she had stabbed his tongue so harshly, she had expected him to swallow her almost immediately after doing something like that. But despite everything, he was holding her on top of his tongue like she was some kind of prized jewel. She was surprised that the vampire could be so gentle, especially in his mouth of all places where his dangerously sharp fangs could easily tear her in half.

Does he…care about me?

As soon as the thought entered her brain, heat blossomed across her face and her heart almost skipped a beat. Maybe he did care about her somewhat, after all, she had persuaded the group to allow him to feed on bandits and other thinking creatures. He had expressed gratitude towards her, and he had even thanked her for it the previous night. But she still couldn’t believe it.

No, that can’t be right. There’s no way that he could, especially after everything that’s happened…

The burning blush on her face only deepened and she knew for a fact that he could feel her tiny heartbeat pounding fiercely against her chest. She needed to get out of there quickly. She wasn’t sure just how much more of this she could take without turning into a complete mess.

Gods, why me? Why did I have to suggest the alcohol idea in the first place?

As if her prayers were answered, light suddenly showered down on her small frame as his lips parted open. A startled squeak jumped out of her throat as pale, cold fingers gripped her waist and pulled her out of his mouth and into the cold air from outside. She shivered as the freezing air caressed over her saliva-coated skin, and for a brief second, she almost wished that she was back inside the warmth of the vampire’s mouth.

Before she could even process the thought, silky fabric smothered her entire body and gently massaged small circles into her drenched skin and clothes. She was completely numb to it all, her brain still attempting to comprehend what was even happening, but through all her mixed and flustered emotions she gathered that Astarion was attempting to dry her with what seemed to be a handkerchief of some kind. He continued to softly dry her soaked body, including her little head, his saliva and drying movements causing her hair to stick up in utterly ridiculous angles. Her face burned with embarrassment as he continued to dry her body and she was a little grateful that he couldn’t see her face during that moment.

The fabric soon pulled away, revealing Astarion’s piercing red gaze that settled on her small frame as she quivered in the palm of his hand.

“Well.” Astarion’s tongue swiped over his lips, a faint smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “That certainly got a lot more intimate than what we planned for, didn’t it, darling?”

She opened and closed her mouth, but no audible sound registered on her lips. How was she supposed to talk after going through all of that, and then have him say that to her? Not to mention the way he ran his tongue over his lips – although she couldn’t tell if that was deliberate or not, it sent her heart spasming in her chest. Her mind failed to string together a coherent sentence as her lip trembled.

Astarion faltered, clearly seeing the look of distraught across her puffy face made him rethink what he was going to say next. His usual cheeky demeanour soon faded and was quickly replaced with a look of worry that once again surprised her.

“I do apologise for…uh…that.” He cleared his throat, his sanguine eyes staring at her with a soft warmth that was much unlike his usual piercing glare. “Holding you in my mouth was not my intended plan at all.”

He paused for a moment, his eyebrows knitting together as he cradled her in his hand.

“Are you alright?”

Her throat felt as if it were being crushed by some unseen force, tears pricked at her eyelids as her gaze darted away from his face to look at the floor below her as she sat in his cold palm. She didn’t know how to respond, after being faced with death once again and having those memories resurface, all she wanted to do was to run away and hide.

Of course I’m not alright. After all that, how can I possibly be?

“Ria?” Astarion’s voice rumbled all around her, startling her from her thoughts.

“Put me down,” she rasped, her voice barely above a whisper.

Both of his eyebrows shot up upon hearing her request. “Ria, we can ta-”

“I said put me down!” she exclaimed, tears burning her cheeks, her face swollen and puffy from crying. “Please. Now.”

He didn’t question her further as he dropped to one knee and lowered his hand to the ground. Immediately she hopped off his palm, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as she blinked back more tears.

She angled her neck upwards to look at him, his towering frame casting a long shadow over her tiny body as she swallowed back her rising fear. Now that she was on the ground, she was reminded once again just how small she was compared to him and everything else.

She needed to get away from him.

Before he could say anything, she sprinted away from him in the opposite direction. The ground trembled as his footsteps shuffled around on the dusty ground, and that only made her run faster.

Maybe it was utterly foolish for her to run away from her only means of protection, but she couldn’t bear to be around him in her current state. For her own sanity, she needed to get far away from him. They were still outside the Goblin Camp, the noises of the cheering from the goblins celebrating their latest kill rung heavily through the air, but she ignored it and continued to sprint towards the main building.

“Ria!” Astarion’s voice boomed from above, rattling through her very core and sending adrenaline spiking through her bloodstream. His large footfalls sent trembling earthquakes through the ground and she forced her legs to continue to run with all she had, not daring to look back.

In front of her she saw a small hole encrusted in the wall of the main building, just the right size for her to crawl into. She dashed inside, briefly feeling Astarion’s fingers brush past her hair as he made a failed attempt at grabbing her.

“Wait, just hold on!” Astarion shouted from outside, his voice piercing her tiny eardrums and she flinched from the intensity.

She ignored his words and instead ventured into the depths of the Goblin Camp.

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kiscon · 6 months ago

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May- K/S Newsletter!

(You can find the complete post in our newsletter. There is quite a lot of info so I only put the highlights!)

Dear K/S Friends, Summer is upon us, and we have mail for you! This time our newsletter is dedicated to only two topics, but they are so important that they warrant their own issue. 1. KiScon 2024 – Hotel Reservations:

We are happy to announce that room registration for KiScon is officially OPEN!

Our venue, the Seattle Airport and Conference Center, is now accepting room reservations for KiScon 2024!

Basic Information About The Rooms:

There are two types of rooms available to book. Rooms with one single king bed have a maximum occupancy of two people. Rooms with two double beds have a maximum occupancy of four people. Our group discounted room rate is $164 per night, plus hotel taxes and fees. Con group rates are good until the room block runs out! (See newsletter for specifics)

2. The KiScon 2024 Art Show & Auction

As KiScon 2024 is a hybrid con with an in-person AND online art show and auction, these traditional and much beloved parts of the convention are more complicated than they were at a purely online or purely in-person event. In the following, we are trying to explain everything as clearly and concisely as we can. Should you still have questions that have not been answered here, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

First things first, the art show and the auction usually have a certain overlap, but you can sell artworks at the auction that are not featured in the art show, and you can submit art to the art show that is not for sale. You do not need to be a registered attendee to submit art to the art show or to the auction!A. The Art Show

The art show aims to showcase a great variety of K/S fanart, trying to convey how rich in talent and creativity our fandom is.

To ensure that both in-person and online attendees can enjoy the show, it will be presented via a slideshow vid that will be accessible online throughout the convention weekend (and afterwards on our website). We will also show it on the big screen during the opening ceremony on Friday night.

In addition there will be space in the Rec Room at the hotel to host a small exhibition and show physical artworks that attendees bring to the convention in person. If you plan to bring physical artworks to the con, please do not forget to submit a photo or scan of it to the art show vid, so that our online members can also marvel at it.

For all submissions to the art show, please use our online form. Deadline: 15 September 2024.

B. The Auction

You do not need to be a registered attendee to offer items in the auction, but only attendees (in-person or online) are able to bid on items.

What is accepted for the auction?

Traditional, physical artworks:paintings, drawings, prints, but also three-dimensional artworks like sculptures, amigurumi, fibre craft, jewellery etc.

Digital artworks or hybrid artworks (e.g. a drawing on paper that you digitally altered afterwards); AI-art is not permitted, without exception. Digital items will be delivered to the buyer as high-resolution files; it is sensible to include clear information what rights the buyer acquires along with the artwork, i.e. what the buyer is allowed to do with the file (e.g. use it as illustration for their fic on the AO3? use it to prettify their website?)

Trek merchandise or collectibles (mugs, T-shirts, plates etc.)

Trek zines (especially rare editions), pro novels (especially hard-to-find ones)

The item must be K/S or K&S or Star Trek in general.

You must be the rightful owner of the item that you offer for sale or have express permission from the owner if you sell it for someone else.

In the case of artworks this means: you do not need to be the artist, but you need to be the current owner of the artwork; the artist’s permission is not needed.

(sorry folks, that's the limit for this post!)

#kiscon #KiScon2024 #KiScon 2024 #k/s #kirk/spock #spacehusbands #spirk #james t kirk #spock #thyla #my thyla my captain #t'hy'la #star trek tos #star trek aos #star trek snw

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melancholicheart · 1 year ago

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All This Time- Chapter 4

cw: trans male pregnancy (past, mentioned), angst, miscommunication, fluff with a happy ending

Johnny catches up with his daughter, joining her and Simon in the sand and Lizzie situates herself between the chains. She holds on tightly and Simon stands behind her and pushes her back gently.

She yells a little, excitedly, as Simon makes her soar through the air.

Johnny stands in front of her, lunging out for her little feet every time she swings towards him. She holds on tighter and wriggles in the seat a little to escape Johnny’s outstretched hands.

They spend a while playing, taking it in turns to push Elizabeth and putting her at the top of the slide to let her go down. Johnny even goes down with her one of the times.

She’s on the climbing frame when she complains to Johnny about being thirsty. Simon offers to get her a drink but Johnny says he’ll go, as long as Simon stays with Elizabeth.

He walks slowly, taking a minute to himself. He has no idea how to approach any of this with Simon or Elizabeth. He doesn’t know what to say, what to do. He doesn’t want to ignore the past but it’s so easy to fall into a familial role when they’re all together.

Johnny takes a moment, when gathering the juice and water from a nearby shop, to wonder what he’s doing. He trusts Simon, he once loved him with every fibre of his being, and that side of him wants to allow Simon to do this. To bond with his daughter and have fun with her.

His sensible side, as he calls it, or his parenting side disagrees. Simon is still military, after all, and there’s no doubt in Johnny’s mind that Simon will leave again. Go back to fighting to the death where one day, he just might not come home. He doesn’t want Simon to hurt his daughter that way, doesn’t want her to suffer because of them, and he worries away at his lip as he strolls back to them both.

Each step raises a new question in his mind to ask Simon. Is he ready to retire The Ghost yet? Is he willing to drop everything for his child? Is he prepared to be a full time Dad? A metal taste coats his tongue as he licks his burst lip, stepping back onto the park and spotting Simon in a corner with Elizabeth sat opposite him. They look to be building sandcastles.

“Papa,” Elizabeth says upon spotting Johnny, “Daddy said he’s gonna make me s’getti for tea!”

“Did he now?” Johnny muses, taking a seat between the two of them and handing out the drinks. Elizabeth goes back to perfecting her sandcastles whilst Simon nervously scratches his neck.

“If that’s alright with you, that is.” He mumbles, cracking open his water bottle and helping Elizabeth with her juice too.

Johnny nods, “Of course it is. We’ll need to nip to the shops first, though. Daddy makes a very special spaghetti sauce, Beth, even better than mine!”

Elizabeth puts a leaf in the top of her sandcastle and looks up at Simon, “Nae way!”

“Yeah way!” Johnny says, scooping sand into the bucket and making his own sandcastle, “Your Dad always used to make it for us, every Friday!”

“I’ll show you how to make it, kiddo,” Simon says, “It’s a secret recipe though, you can’t tell anyone else.”

Elizabeth nods, “I won’t! I’m good with secrets.”

“Oh yeah?” Simon asks, “What’s your biggest secret?”

“Cannae say, won’t be secret then.” Elizabeth replies without a beat and Simon chuckles.

“Good one.”

A little time passes, Elizabeth still playing and Johnny making small talk with Simon. It’s unnaturally awkward for them but Johnny only hopes the nerves ease.

Simon excuses himself for a short while, claiming to need the bathroom, and Johnny watches him leave. His head is hanging low and his hands are stuffed in his pockets as he shuffles in the direction of the bathrooms that Johnny pointed out to him.

“Papa, is ma Daddy gonna stay forever now?” Elizabeth asks. Her childlike curiosity sparks a pain in Johnny’s chest as he searches his mind for an answer.

“I don’t know my love,” Johnny answers honestly, “But I hope so.”

“Me too.” Elizabeth says with a happy smile. She toddles around the park in the meantime, bouncing from each piece of equipment to the next before Simon comes back.

Johnny, ever the attentive one, notes how Simon looks small. Shrinking into himself, he has a reddened face and irritation on the skin near his eyes, like he’s been rubbing it.

When Simon sits back down, his eyes track Elizabeth around the park and he doesn’t say a word.

“Simon, is everything alright?” Johnny asks, shuffling closer to him a little.

There’s a pause, one that has Johnny wondering if Simon even heard him, before a slight nod of his head is noticed.

“Are you sure? You can tell me anythin’, Si, it’s just me.” Johnny says. He nervously toys with the sand in front of him, “I know it’s been years but we’re still us. I’ve still got your six and I know you have mine.”

Simon scoffs but cuts himself off before he can elaborate. He nods and mutters a quiet ‘yeah’.

Annoying as usual, Johnny goes to press again when Elizabeth comes bounding back over. She trips in front of Johnny and falls into his arms with a giggle as he wraps his arms around her, checking she’s okay as she jumps back up and plays with Johnny’s hair.

“Papa can we go to the shops? We go the big Tesco for s’getti stuffs? And we see Nanny then!” She blabbers out, tugging a little on Johnny’s hair as she shakes sand out of his mohawk.

Johnny turns to Simon, “Are you ready to make a move to the shops?”

Simon nods.

Johnny presses, “You sure?”

“Contrary to what you may believe, Johnny, but swings and slides don’t exactly fill me with excitement.” Simon stands and holds a hand out for Johnny to take.

Which he does, of course. He stands with a spring in his step and grabs Simons shoulder, reminiscent of the day he very first met his Lieutenant. He smiles, “There he is, ol’ Ghostie back with us.”

“Shut up MacTavish.” Simon mutters with an incriminating blush spreading across his face, despite his formidable nature.

Johnny holds a hand out for Elizabeth and they walk slowly to keep up with her little legs as they leave the park. It’s only halfway down the road when he realises his other hand has found it’s way back into Simon’s grasp.

He says nothing, and neither does Simon.

#call of duty #mw2 #ghostsoap #mw2 2022 #soapghost #john soap mactavish #family #ghost #simon ghost riley #soap #trans mpreg #trans man #fluff #angst

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suzieb-fit · 1 year ago

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My new diabetic consultant is trying to prevent low blood sugars by decreasing my insulin doses.

All very logical, sensible and understandable.

But it's causing a lot of highs.

The yoga was planned. The cardio not very long after wasn't, lol.

So looks like today will be another high activity one.

Not a problem. I feel much better on days like this.

So after those two very different workouts, it was lunchtime.

Gotta love all that healthy fat, veggie fibre and natural protein!

#fitspo #fitspiration #fitblr #fitness #healthy living #health and fitness #fit #workout #fiton #suzieb-fit #health and nutrition #diet and nutrition #healthy nutrition #high fat diet #type one diabetic #type 1 diabetic #type 1 diabetes

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joyburble · 2 years ago

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The mourning suit. This is the costume that instantly made me go "WHAT? oh, no" Because look at it. It looks like it's made of wool. This is the moment it appears, half way through episode 33. What.

There's no embellishment, no shine of any kind, no transparency unless it's backlit. I can't tell what the material really is, but it looks like a fine dark grey wool with a subtle richness of shade in the weave, and a sort of crepe edging (which the sleeves also have).

That seam along the top of the shoulder is surprising: visible seams hardly happen in his other costumes, except when they're revealed by patterns, and specifically not there.

None of these high-necked, imperious undershirts. No glitter. No train. No storm-clouds of gauze, no explosions of gold, no river of velvet in five shades of honey, no roots of the forest, no flames, not even the black satin or the silver moonscapes he wore in the human realm. Just a leather belt on top and skin underneath. Not even a buckle.

The total effect of he way the sleeves hang, the textures, and the composition of the shot above, is to make him look tiny in relation to Shangque. Our eyes are invited to abandon the delusion that he is tall or imposing, and recognise the body of a dancer.

The headpiece points down more than up, and hardly even shines. It could be jet, and you can hardly see it from the front, it just makes absurd little antennae above the ears.

It's ankle-length, and there's no train at all; the shape is relatively practical, like the hunting dress, or like Shangque's outfit.

Of all the costumes, I think this has two other outstanding, and contradictory, properties:

it's the one that can only be created instantaneously out of the fabric of fantasy spacetime by the character's state of mind. In the previous scene, in the same location, he was still wearing the Fire Gown. What purpose or occasion could possibly explain this having ever been made for him? It's intentionally unclear how either clothes or bodies are supposed to work in-universe, but can you imagine this sitting in a sandalwood chest in Moon Palace waiting to be magically summoned? It's a nope from me.

It's the one that's most explicit about someone having made it. There's a visible shoulder seam, and another that joins the sleeve.

This outfit is an extreme contrast of visual texture with every other thing the character has worn, up to this moment.

And, to my Western eye, the colour and unadorned texture, not to mention the lapels, bring an association of ideas which I will call on the art historian Anne Hollander to explain. She's writing about the genesis of the modern Western suit, about 1810:

"Formerly the play of light on rich and glinting textures had seemed to endow the gentleman with the play of aristocratic sensibility, and made him an appropriate vessel for exquisite courtesy, schooled wit, and refined arrogance without having to reveal the true fibre and calibre of his individual soul any more than that of his body. ... ... Brocade and embroidery had once indicated the generic superiority even of quite inferior individuals, and had displayed the beauty of the costume, not the man. Careful fit witout adornment, on the other hand, emphasizes the unique grace of the individual body - indeed creates it, in the highest tailoring tradition. The man's rank, or even his deeds, are irrelevant to the fine cut of his plain coat; only his personal qualities are shown to matter. ... ... The perfect man, as conceived by English tailors, was part English country gentleman, part innocent natural Adam, and part naked Apollo the creator and destroyer ... expressed not in bronze or marble but in natural wool, linen, and leather, wearing an easy skin as perfect as the silky pelt of the ideal hound or horse, lion or panther."

Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, pp 90-91

As a visual comparison, here are three actual suits being worn in masterly fashion by (l to r) Tony Leung, Wang Yibo, and Eric Wang in the trailer for Hidden Blade (2023), which happens to be on my dash:

You see Hollander's point about the panther, right?

I also think it's a great illustration of another point she makes: the similarity of these three different suits focuses your attention on how different these three men really look. But that's another story.

I should spell out here that it's possible, and likely, that my association of ideas here was mostly a coincidence based on the very first glimpse, and the mood they were really going for with this costume is nothing more than humility and grief. The concept of a suit is not just texture and colour and visual simplicity: the complicated, multi-layered inner construction that uses the unique structural properties of wool cloth to create that illusion of panther-like simplicity is important, and tailoring is not being used in that way for this costume, at least not visibly. Other costumes have more fit-and-cut going on than this one.

But, either way. The drastic visual contrast is telling us that we are down to business now, the setup is over, it's all unwind from here.

So, I called this the mourning suit, since that's what he's mostly doing in this series of scenes, and I can't resist the opportunity for a pun that goes with the colour scheme.

And I felt like I was being told: now we find out who he really is and what he does when the chips are down. I for one was delighted to see that "who he really is" still includes "hilarious bitch", among other things. Pour one out for Lady Chiedi. Changheng is right there. The grey underlayer has a subtle pattern.

He continues to wear this right through episodes 34 (this beautiful scene where he tries to be a dick and then silently concedes Shangque's point). The dark top layer is split at the sides, which creates this cute fanned-out tail, like a bird.

Shangque is such a good friend.

The breakdown in Ep 35. This was the nearest I could find to a full-length view of this outfit that's close enough to see anything.

It's still with us when a revelation triggers "RTFM: The Comeback" (see this):

In another visually shocking departure from everything we've seen before: there's no long under-sleeve covering the wrists. The big sleeves just fall back as the 'rescue' theme rises in the music.

The goodbye snog. This grey underlayer actually seems to be two layers, which brings this to the usual number of visible layers, it's just that the inner layer hasn't got the high neck we were seeing before, and the top layer goes under the belt rather than over.

The dramatic exit - and I was delighted to see that as well as "the bitchy part" and "the part that Reads The Fucking Manual and compares it with the data", we also still have "the dramatic flouncy part" of his personality.

Minus glitter, dramatic eyeliner, rivers of velvet or clouds of gauze, he's still backing himself to seize the situation by the throat, and I love that for him.

After this, it isn't worn again.

Anyway: the point of this costume is to pack an emotional punch by its contrast to everything else, and it does that very well.

The DFQC costumes master post is here.

#love between fairy and devil #costumes #lbfad #cang lan jue #dongfang qingcang #dongfang qingcang's fashion sense

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maedhrus · 7 months ago

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Oohhh this was a while ago but. Pls talk more about Edward doting on Thomas during his pregnancy. He would be living his absolute best life getting to spoil his husband 🥹

don't worry, i quite literally never stop thinking about domestic!joplittle!!! they are my whole words and i'm chomping at the bit waiting for even the slightest excuse to talk about them!! 💖💖

ned little has ALL the makings of a victorian wife guy. that thomas (who is, objectively, the best man he's ever known) agreed to spend the rest of his life with edward is a gift he'll never be able to repay. but he adores thomas with every fibre of his being so the very least he can do is dote on a man who is so unused to being cherished

thomas tells him about the pregnancy around two months in. thomas knows earlier but is very terrified that he'll lose it etc. and doesn't want to get his or edward's hopes up. but he has very bad morning sickness and edward worries that it's some lingering Arctic Illness and so thomas tells him to get him to Worry Less (unsuccessful)

edward weeps upon hearing the news. just buries his head into thomas' stomach and weeps for a long time

he then becomes absolutely riddled with fear because holy shit so much can go wrong?? what if something happens to the baby??? what if something happens to thomas?????? edward considers himself a steady man but he knows that that's a loss he couldn't possibly survive

thomas is also worried that something will happen but to the baby, not him. it just seems like too many things have gone right in his life and surely he won't be so lucky as to have this child successfully? but he also knows that edward's prone to worry, and thomas is prone to sensibilities and so reminds them both that thomas' mother had four children, edward's had twelve. genetics are on their side if nothing else

still, edward will not be deterred from doing everything he can to minimise thomas' discomfort. he helps him dress in the mornings, fetches him tea, warms water so thomas can sit in a hot bath, allowing edward to gently wash him, kiss at his bump

this agitates thomas initially ("i'm not an invalid, edward. thomas blanky had one leg and got less attention.") again, he's a man for whom work is literally his lifeline, but as the pregnancy progresses and he gets more and more exhausted, he enjoys slipping into the luxury of care

more than once did thomas fall asleep in their living room, reading a book or sewing, and woke when he realised that edward was carrying him upstairs to their bedroom, setting him on the bed with a kiss

thomas had always had a sweet tooth but it worsens during pregnancy and it has edward making weekly trips to town to supply thomas with boiled sweets, chocolate, all manner of deserts

and edward enjoys this! it distracts him from thinking about how the pregnancy can go wrong and he gets to dote on the man he loves! who is giving him a gift beyond measure!!!

they both fall into absolute bits when the twins start kicking for the first time (it was early in the morning, edward practically woke up to thomas crying and pulling at his hand) and they often fall asleep with their hands pressed into thomas' stomach

(the twins eventually arrive in the dead of night and thomas cries and kisses at the soft hair on their heads and edward sobs and runs his hand over tiny fingers because now there are two more impossibly small humans who he will spend his life adoring)

#this was a ramble and a half anon thank you for allowing me to do so!#THESE two freaks MUST breed for MY personal enjoyment #they would be the best parents of the 19th century!!!!! mark my words!#i simply must write for this au #asks #the terror #joplittle kids

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cameronfrye666 · 3 months ago

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How I Unf*cked Myself (a digestive health story)

TLDR (yes a very long TLDR, but this post is proportionally long)

Chronically fatigued and sick as a kid

Repeated courses of antibiotics (probably 20+) and 2x Epstein-barr infection between age 8 and 17

Around age 18 started noticing really weird food intolerances

Couldn’t drink alcohol without insane hangovers lasting 2 weeks+

Couldn’t consume foods high in refined sugar without going into days-to-weeks long episodes of hyperactivity, insomnia & extreme stress

Felt relatively shit eating most carbs

Tried fixing with diet change and vitamin / mineral supplements. Helped some symptoms but didn’t fix the issue.

Tried fixing with various probiotics. Incredibly mixed results - eventually found a regimen that worked for a period of time but, again, didn’t fix the issue.

After a hellish reaction to prebiotic fibre supplements, consulted a gastroenterologist and was diagnosed with Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth, Gut Dysbiosis and an active H. Pylori Infection. Significant Improvement of symptoms following:

10x 14 days Rifaximin (550 mg 3x daily)

H. Pylori Eradication Regimen (one week amoxicillin, clarythromycin, metrodinazole and omeprazole)

2 years of:

Keto / SCD Diet

Either Candibactin AR&BR, FC-Cidal, Dysbiocide & ADP supplements, or Allimed Neem & Cinnamon, alternating every 2 months between them (two caps of each product 3x daily).

Occasional use of natural motility agents depending on symptoms (ginger / artichoke formulations and iberogast).

This whole process sucked beyond description, if you have gut / digestive issues it is probably affecting your general health & wellbeing more than you realize.

Intro

I don’t really have anything left to say other than that it was a more painful experience than I think I could ever accurately describe. Gut health seems to be one of the last remaining big frontiers of human health, and I hope they figure it out so no one has to experience this again. I am still moderately lost in the issue but it has at least gotten a lot better recently.

Story

The Descent

February 4th 2012 is a day that I will likely never forget for the rest of my life. I woke up from a relatively short and disrupted sleep around 10am. A close friend of mine who had slept over the night before was sitting on the living room couch watching The Social Network with my dad. It seemed a sensible, logical thing to join them. So I sat down on the couch, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t. It's hard to explain exactly why I couldn't, but I just felt this immense inability to relax and settle down. Every bone in my body was vibrating, like this immense persistent energy rush.

I had also had a fair amount of red bull and other sugary soft drinks as mixer the night before, so I chalked this feeling up to a sugar / caffeine spike and decided to try and get on with the day. I had some breakfast, got showered etc., attempted to do some school work and participated in a family Sunday dinner. By about 10pm it began to become clear that this feeling of immense overpowering stress was not dissipating; if anything, it had gotten worse.

The next two weeks were an incredibly disorienting, painful and confusing experience. Rather than alleviate, the symptoms more or less persisted, although they would ebb and flow throughout the day. I started to notice that I felt the best first thing in the morning (important to note that "best" is a very relative term here) and worst from the late afternoon into evening, with a notable spike directly after dinner hour. I was living in a complete fog. I lost all emotional contact with the world around me. All I felt all day was this persistent restlessness and stress and a complete inability to get rid of it no matter what I did (showering, watching movies, lying down in bed etc.). I just felt like someone had mainlined adrenaline into one of my veins and wouldn’t turn off the tap. It is the most excruciatingly painful thing I have ever experienced, or think I am ever likely to experience. In some way, it is almost impossible to explain in normal words.

It was at the end of these two weeks that I finally decided to consult a doctor. Everyone here will likely be unsurprised to hear that he suggested I was suffering from a temporary bout of anxiety. Although I have certainly been anxious about my fair share of things in the past (studies, personal relationships etc.), I could feel that this was something quite different. On top of that, there was just nothing in my life bothering me at that time. I had great friends, had already been accepted to the University of my choice and was staring down the barrel of four months of school where my academic results didn’t matter anymore and then a three month summer break. I was offered some tranquilizers or anti-anxiety meds for my symptoms, but I wasn’t really interested in trying them as I wanted to get to the root of whatever the issue was.

The only other suggestion he had for me was to maybe take a look at my diet. He noticed I was twitching a lot and I offered that I had recently suffered some bad muscle cramps as well, so he suggested that after a bout of mononucleosis earlier in the year and a long winter with little sun, I may be deficient in a few things. He prescribed me a short course of magnesium and vitamin b-12 supplements and sent me on my way.

Over the next month, with the supplements only sort of helping and with me still watching my life essentially completely fall apart around me (barely able to attend school, permanently unwell, chronically stressed, insomniac etc., almost complete loss of social life) I consulted a few more doctors. They more or less all had the same response: you can try antidepressants and/or tranquilizers, but otherwise, sorry, we can't help you. A few also questioned the nutritional supplement prescription.

It was at this point that I started to feel I was more or less on my own in whatever this was.

Part II: Ascent #1

The three months following the initial onset of my symptoms were probably some of the worst of my life, which, considering everything I’ve experienced over the last decade+, is really saying something. I was in a completely emotionally disconnected state, basically felt only stress on a daily basis, and had no idea what was going on.

The only real nuggets of information I had that I trusted were that (i) it might be nutrition-related and (ii) caffeine and/or alcohol were clearly bad for me. I started doing a load of research into what causes nutritional deficiencies and imbalances, how to correct them, and what a healthy diet looks like. Prior to this I had been more or less unconcerned about what I ate or drank in a day, although my diet was reasonably healthy mostly just due to my mother's cooking.

My readings on diet led me to make a few changes. First, I changed from a magnesium oxide supplement to magnesium bisglycinate, for better absorption. Then, I switched to an entirely refined-sugar free, whole grain diet high in unprocessed meats and vegetables. Lastly, I started taking almost nightly electrolyte salt baths (either epsom salt or dead-sea salt).

Although none of these changes cured me by any means, very slowly, I started to feel somewhat better. I could feel moderate improvements on a daily basis. Some days were better than others, but overall things were on an upwards trend. From this point onwards I became almost completely convinced that my symptoms were the result of a nutritional imbalance and that I would cure them through diet and supplementation.

Then, something very strange happened, which, in retrospect, should have pointed me in the direction of my ultimate diagnosis. I went into hospital to have my tonsils removed (as mentioned I had been very sick as a kid), and when I came out later the next day I had a very strange level of emotional clarity. Somehow everything was less painful, and although the crazy stress symptoms weren't totally gone, the improvement in just 36 hours felt drastic. At the time I thought maybe it was painkillers I had been given, perhaps the IV drip they put me on post-op? In retrospect, it was most definitely the high-dose amoxicillin I had been taking since the operation for reasons I can explain later on.

Part III: Stasis #1

That summer things more or less stabilized. Nothing was ever quite as good as the days and week following the tonsillectomy, but the insane debilitating stress didn't come back either, so overall I couldn't complain. From a mental point-of-view I was sort of able to return to normal life other than having to watch my diet and avoid substance. I started university in the fall and was successful despite the obvious social constraints that came along with my new health regimen.

The years following this were pretty up and down. I was able to get through my university courses, have some semblance of a social life, and never returned to the manic stress state of my initial descent. That being said, I never felt "quite right" again. It is hard to place, but my health just still felt very poor. I had low energy, slept a lot, often felt quite irritable, and had very poor performance in sporting activities despite previously being a strong athlete.

The main salient point that came out of this period was that I started to notice that high-sugar foods could bring on shorter-term episodes that mimicked the time period of the original onset of my symptoms. In one instance, I almost failed a university exam after consuming a jelly-filled donut the day before and becoming almost literally incapable of processing information for a few days afterwards. Suffice to say, I completely cut sugar from my diet from this point onwards.

I also tried a few Myers' cocktail IV drips (basically a mix of magnesium, calcium and b-vitamins) during this time period as part of my thinking on the issue being caused by nutritional deficiency. I would feel pretty great for a few days following them (improved sleep, able to focus while studying, good energy for exercise) but then go back to my same poor-health state afterwards. This only compounded my belief that the issue was purely nutritional in nature. Alongside this I consulted some nutritionists and diet specialists, and they recommended me some further supplements and dietary changes, but none of it made that overwhelming of a difference compared to the changes I’d already made.

Part IV: Descent #2

For four years life went on in the position described above, at least from a health point-of-view. I had found a regimen that kept me functional and stable, and for the most part stuck to it and tried to forget about it all and get on with life. It was great to find some stability, but at the same time as an early twenty-something in University, having to stick to a pretty strict diet and lifestyle just wasn’t all that much fun.

So somehow I got the idea in my head that having found this stability, I must actually be cured of whatever it was and could go back to eating & drinking whatever I wanted. I got an 8-month research placement in France in 2016 and decided that I would just let loose and enjoy myself during that time. Upon arriving I quite quickly returned to being totally free with what I consumed, although perhaps still went light on very sugary foods. For the first few weeks, I felt great. I mean maybe not totally physical well, but it was just so mentally liberating to not think about this stuff anymore. I had a lot of fun going out with my new roommate, going on dates and just living life in a more free way.

Around the second month of being there I started to notice some chronic unwelness creeping back in. My sleep was starting to become quite poor, I had terrible focus at work and wasn’t accomplishing much, and would feel really unwell after most meals. I ignored it for a while.

By the third month, it was almost panic stations again. I don’t know why I didn’t react to this sooner, probably I was just trying to deny how bad it was getting again, but by mid-March (I had started worked in January), I was bordering on being physically non-functional again. I couldn’t do much other than spend most days in bed when I wasn’t at work, felt constantly agitated, was achieving essentially nothing on a daily basis (thankfully I was working in a French R&D centre where very little was happening at the best of times), and just felt constantly ill. It was not quite the return to the extreme stress of the first episode but I was still really unwell and uncomfortable most of the time.

I wasn’t really sure what to do, but I knew I really didn’t want to do another 6-months of diet control just to get back to a sort-of sufferable health state, so I started coming up with ideas for a quick fix. The only thing I really had was that those IV cocktails had made me feel pretty great, and since I was still in this mode of thinking it was all due to nutritional deficiency, I hoped that might be an easy solution (the logic being that alcohol and poor diet had lowered my micronutrient levels and I could just reverse it). It seemed this wasn’t available privately in Paris, so I went to London for the weekend just to get one.

What happened after that infusion is one part of this story that I still do not understand whatsoever. Within hours of getting the Myers drip, rather than feeling great, I felt catastrophically unwell. I did not sleep that whole night and for most of the rest of the weekend, and returned to Paris in a complete fog. The feeling persisted for some weeks. I have a few ideas of what it could have been - too much B-complex which can give you energy rushes, some kind of micronutrient overdose / toxicity since I was still taking lots of supplements on top of the IV at that time, or some kind of immune reaction - but really I don’t know. Suffice to say I never took one again.

Part V: Ascent #2

The terrible reaction to that IV drip started to put the idea in my head that maybe this whole thing wasn’t just related to nutrition and / or a micronutrient deficiency. So I started doing a lot of searching online about what else can affect digestion, intolerance to certain foods, and associated unexplained chronic health symptoms. The thing that kept on coming up was the gut microbiome. I had heard of probiotics before, and knew that yoghurt was supposed to help your digestion, but outside of that I was pretty uneducated. All I could really tell was that it might be worth a shot trying a probiotic supplement to see if it would help.

So, being me, I went online and found the strongest, highest-dose probiotic supplement I could find, or at least on amazon.fr . It was the Renew Life Ultimate Care probiotic with a dose of 200 Billion live cultures (I didn’t know about vivomixx and other 400Bn+ clinical products at the time). The night it arrived, I popped a dose and went to bed, and then another first thing in the morning. By the time I had eaten breakfast and arrived at work around 9am, I felt violently ill. I was sweating, had a pounding headache and felt like I was going to vomit at any moment. I managed to hold it together for the morning, barely managed to stomach lunch and then went home as soon as people started to leave (around 4pm).

I immediately went to google and started searching for what could cause this, and the main thing that came up was something called the Jarrisch-Herxheimmer reaction. I’m not sure what the clinical validation for this is, but the general understanding is that when something starts killing off pathogens in your body (which probiotics will do when they enter a pathogenic environment), they release toxins and inflammatory cytokines (can do a search yourself) into the body / bloodstream and you feel really unwell. Basically you are starting a fight between good & bad bacteria in your body and you feel the effects of it.

In some sense I was kind of excited that this had happened. The fact that I felt so violently unwell from taking probiotics perhaps pointed to the fact that I did have some kind of gut issue, which was a potentially useful revelation, although in the meantime I still felt horrendously ill. Most advice indicated that the reaction was temporary until you got “over the hump” but by day 7 I was still sick and things were only getting worse, so I stopped taking the pills altogether.

After looking into how I could manage this better, it seemed like low-dose pills or small amounts of probiotic foods could be a way to manage the reaction while still improving, and as there was a health food store on my street, I decided to start experimenting with Kefir. The first night just to see I drank 2 cups of the stuff and of course felt violently ill again. I then embarked on a months-long journey of upping my dose from just tea-spoons to being able to tolerate about 1/2 to 1 cup per night.

Within about six months I was able to dose freely with Kefir, and was eating other probiotic foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, all to positive effect. I managed to return to school following the end of my research placement, and although I still didn’t feel great, I would say I had made it back to another “stasis period”.

My next hypothesis for improvement was to switch from probiotic foods to a supplement again, although just because it was simpler to take than cups of kefir and / or plates of sauerkraut every night. I experimented with quite a few that I found online. I tolerated most of them that had a dose of 100Bn bacteria or less, although somehow still felt better eating the fermented food. Eventually, I tried the Renew Life Mood & Stress probiotic (no longer in production) because it had some strains that were clinically proven to reduce stress levels, which had been one of my main symptoms in bad periods, and it seems to work quite well. I wouldn’t say it completely changed how I felt on a daily basis but it kept me stable to the point that I could stop having to drink Kefir all the time and things felt mostly alright. I felt as if I had found the answer at least for a little while.

Part VI: Stasis #2

This period was the longest in this whole mess. For six years from 2016 to 2022 I just took my daily probiotic supplement, kept a fairly clean diet, and once again got on with life. In this time I graduated from University, moved cities within Canada, and then moved to London to found a start-up which I am still a director of (it has nothing to do with gut health). Until 2018 I would occasionally drink when social engagements came up, but I still always felt somewhat sick after. After feeling ill for almost two weeks after drinking heavily at a company Christmas party, I gave up alcohol entirely. I also never really returned to high-sugar foods for how unwell they had made me feel in the past and also just lack of need (I always found not drinking much more socially inhibiting that not eating deserts and the like).

It was in the spring of 2022 that, after 5-6 years of stasis, I once again became fed up with the whole thing. I was a young professional in my late twenties at this point and just didn’t understand why I had to take a probiotic supplement (of which I could only tolerate doses on the lower end) and eat a strict diet just to feel somewhat normal. I had considered longer-term solutions like getting a Fecal Microbiota Transplant to try and solve the issue once and for all, but most things like that were only offered privately, were expensive and the providers that did exist seemed a bit suspect (most FMT-type treatments are only available in clinical trials or for C-dificile infections at the moment).

Somewhere in here a nurse I spoke to at an FMT clinic I had called told me to try going keto and see if it helped. I did it and felt pretty awesome for four months but lost a ton of weight (I was already very skinny) and found it very hard to maintain (especially socially). I eventually gave it up returned to a whole-grain high-protein diet.

Part VII: Descent #3

After considering various options of how I reasonably could take action to improve my health and general life condition, I came up with the solution of finding a Nutritionist experienced in gut health issues. I had spent a lot of time avoiding medical professionals after my initial bad experiences with doctors and nutritionists either not being able to help or actually being actively unhelpful by questioning all of the symptoms and whether my reactions to foods were just psychosomatic, but I decided it was time to try again. I found a registered dietician in London who also had a PhD in gut microbiome research, which seemed like a great fit.

I shared my whole story with all of my symptoms and current condition, and although she had some questions about my sugar reaction and some of the weirder extended stress symptoms, she mostly accepted the story and that I clearly had some kind of untreated gut health issue. Her recommendation was that my diet was already positive (although could try introducing a few more carbs) and that the probiotic I was taking was as good as could be recommended by current knowledge in the field (noted that it is generally quite personal which ones work for some people and others not, and they don’t really know why).

In terms of path forward, she recommended that I try introducing some more prebiotic foods and potentially a prebiotic supplement. Going down the list of my daily diet, it was already quite prebiotic / fibre-heavy, so we decided to try a supplement. The idea is that the prebiotic fibre helps feed and grow more of the probiotics you are taking in the supplement, and will improve your gut health.

I started taking a daily dose (12g) of inulin, the best-validated prebiotic supplement available. The first few days I didn’t feel great and had pretty upset digestion, but nothing crazy. After about 3-4 days, I started having a reaction similar to the first time I ever tried high-dose probiotics. I felt pretty spaced out, generally ill, and hadn’t much appetite or desire for food. I interpreted this as being another Herxheimer reaction, so decided to stick with the supplementation. After about 1 month I still felt really unwell. Most days were a struggle to get through, I was in a total fog, and felt a lot of the extreme stress sensitivity of my initial low-points creeping back in. I spoke to the nutritionist and we decided that I would reduce my inulin dose or stop taking it all together. I reduced my dose by 1/2 and then by 1/3 but still felt increasingly unwell, so two weeks later stopped taking it all together.

The next month was very uncomfortable. I felt quite ill most days, had general nausea / feelings of disorientation, wasn’t really tolerating most foods, and wasn’t sure what was going on again. In a last ditch, I decided to stop taking all supplements (at this point just my daily probiotic). For about two weeks after stopping the probiotics I didn’t feel all that different, but then somewhere around 12-14 days in, things started to go seriously south. Day by day, or even hour by hour at one point, I started to feel things degrading at first back to the all-day stress symptoms I had in the very beginning of this whole journey, and then to a version like 100x worse than that.

At one point I didn’t sleep for almost five days. My heart was permanently bounding out of my chest, and I was just in excruciating pain every single minute of the waking hours. I had to quit my job for a period of time, and my life was otherwise completely turned upside down. Without going into too many specifics, as I have tried to focus at first on the health aspect here, this is also the closest I came to thinking that perhaps life had just not really worked out for me and it was time to consider giving up on it. For whatever reason I still don’t completely understand, I stuck with it and suffered through the worst.

The greatest intensity of these symptoms lasted for about a month. I went back on the keto diet just because I had felt well on it in the past and didn’t really know what else to do, and after 5-6 weeks I was able to return to work, although only part-time, and somewhat get a handle on my life. I still felt pretty unwell most of the time, and had become quite isolated personally and socially because of it, but at least it felt like the adrenaline tap had lowered a bit and I could mostly suffer through each day.

From a health-hypothesis point of view, I was a bit at wits end. I had contacted the nutritionist again and although she agreed the prebiotics can cause an adverse health reaction in some individuals for reasons not well understood, she didn’t really accept most of what I was saying around the extreme stress symptoms returning, and seemed a bit doubtful of me and what I was presenting. I decided that was about as far as we could continue together. Although I don’t deny I was in a terrible mental state at that time (which would be the case for anyone given the circumstances), I was completely convinced, and am unwavering to this day about the fact that the principal source of my issue was a serious, unadressed physical condition.

Part VIII: Ascent #3

All I felt I really had left was to go to a hospital and just accept whatever treatment they proposed (whether tranquilizers, sedation, some other drug or therapy I wasn’t aware of) or lay it all out for an experienced gastroenterologist / digestive specialist and just see what happened. I had often thought of seeking a specialist doctor, but was wary as pretty much all GPs and other doctors had been quite dismissive of my symptoms and assumed condition in the past. Here, however, we were quite literally in the “nothing to lose” position. With how things had gone the last months and my current life situation, I felt that if I didn’t fix this once and for all there was quite little point in continuing to live.

Luckily, I am at least somewhat a person of means, and in the UK there is quite an availability of private medical specialists who will see you for a cash fee. I went to one I had found from a private doctor review website who seemed to have some experience in chronic digestive and gut health issues. I explained to him this entire story, perhaps not quite in such detail and with such emotional weight around specifics of how bad it felt, but largely my reaction to certain foods, how I had tried to manage it over the years, and my current situation.

Firstly, he broadly accepted most of what I was saying, which was quite relieving in the first instance. His answer, although inconcrete, was that digestive health is, even for him and other experts, a very poorly understood area. He couldn’t say exactly why this was happening to me, but if I had the time and money he was willing to start looking into it with me and see if there were any potential solutions. For the first time, I felt as if an established member of the medical community was accepting their own blind spots in whatever this issue was , and willing to try and help.

His first suggestion was to run some tests to rule out more common and well-understood digestive disorders like Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. These all came back negative. Upon these results, he suggested that given my reaction to the prebiotic fibre and previous reaction to carbs and high-sugar foods, the most likely explanation was a chronic case of Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth or SIBO. The way to diagnose would be a sugar or lactulose (another prebiotic) breath-test, and the treatment being a course of a choice of antibiotics to wipe out the overgrowth and try to correct the dysbiosis (gut microbiota imbalance).

I was quite open that I didn’t really feel comfortable trying a sugar or prebiotic-fuelled test at that time, given how precarious my health and life position was and my previous reaction to both of those substances. He suggested that since the point of the test is to see if either the sugar or lactulose cook up any bad bacteria and produce gas, and I had already shown a very negative anecdotal reaction to both with associated gas production, he was happy to just prescribe an empirical dose of the antibiotics.

This is now going back a bit, but as a child I was given a tremendous amount of antibiotics. I am fairly convinced that that is what caused all these issues for me, or was at least the main contributor. So naturally I was a bit wary of another doctor giving me more antibiotics, although I trusted this new one quite a lot. I eventually found online that there is some validation of natural antimicrobial and anti fungal substances being helpful in treating overgrowths and gut dysbiosis, so I decided to explore those options first. They are mostly all formulations of herbal oils and concentrates. It’s the sort of thing I would have been quite skeptical of before all of this started, but at this point I had had so many unexpected negative and positive reactions to different foods, supplements and treatments that I was more or less willing to try anything.

The best validated one is called Candibactin. It’s a combined treatment of mostly Oregano Oil and a Chinese Herb called berberine. I ordered some online and decided to give it a whirl. By my third dose, I was having an extremely intense version of what I experienced when I first took probiotics. Persistent headaches, sweating, lack of appetite, general unwellness and pain. It felt like an extremely intense flu and at some point I felt like I was spiking a fever. I chalked this up to the Herxheimmer reaction again and stuck with it. Once again, by about day 7, the symptoms were still extremely intense and I had to give up on the treatment. Interestingly, although I was in extreme discomfort, my digestion had normalized in this time (I will spare you the description). I didn’t really know what to make of this but it is interesting that the supplements had at least done something.

Following the experience on the herbal supplement which I had no desire to repeat for the moment, my symptoms somewhat stabilized although didn’t return to what they were prior to starting them. I wouldn’t say I felt notably better or worse but just “different”. I decided it was time to give the pharmaceuticals a go and see if I could tolerate them or if they were helpful in some other way, so I took a two week course of Rifaximin (the drug they give for SIBO). Being on Rifaximin was an extremely painful experience, but not quite as bad as the herbal supplements so I managed to push through it and by the end it had had quite a positive effect on me. I still didn’t feel great after the Rifaximin, and continued to work only part-time, but it had definitely done something.

Somewhere in here I also commissioned a microbiome stool test, which showed I had a quite significant dysbiosis (low levels of lactobacilli with almost undetectable levels of bifidobacterium, and a strong overgrowth of H2S-producing pathogens). It also showed I had an active H-Pylori infection and extremely poor absorption of fat and other macronutrients. Off the back of it the gastro prescribed me a triple-course of antibiotics to clear the H-Pylori and attributed the poor absorption to persistent SIBO. The triple-therapy for H. Pylori was a horrible experience and I actually ended up in hospital and was told to stop taking one of the drugs (Flagyl / Metronidazole) because it was giving me tinnitus, insomnia and general disorientation, which apparently can be a side effect, but the treatment otherwise worked.

After this latest course of antibiotics, I was, as before, not in a life-ending position, but my health was still quite bad. I was not accomplishing much at work, and I had essentially no social life. I decided something had to change, so I told my work I would take two months off after Christmas and do whatever I needed to do to solve this thing. The two remaining options I had before me were to try the herbal formulations again, or eat a completely liquid diet for 2-3 weeks to try and starve the pathogenic overgrowth (actually a clinically validated method of treating SIBO).

I first tried a fat-based version of the elemental diet first (most are sugar-based and I didn’t want to test that again), but it caused extremely painful stomach-burning feelings, which apparently can be caused by caprylic acid in the MCT oil it is primarily composed of, and I stopped after two days. After meditating on it for about five days I decided to just re-start the herbal formulations and endure whatever pain it caused me until this thing was hopefully cured.

So began two years of varied supplementation and antibiotics. I switched off the Candibactin formulation at one point to another called FC-cidal & Dysbiocide, as is recommended to avoid building resistance, although this is less common with the natural products, and also took multiple further courses of Rifaximin as things weren’t progressing as quickly as I’d hoped. The experience was painful but in different ways than it had been the first time around, and also took a lot longer than I expected, although I suppose after 10 years at it that shouldn’t have been surprising. I am not entirely sure why being on the herbals the second time around was less extreme than the first. I don’t know if they were less effective than at the first exposure, or that something about my situation had changed, but it was different in some way. It’s also worth noting that pretty much the whole time I was taking the herbal supplements & Rifaximin I stayed on a Keto or SCD diet (specific carbohydrate diet, basically no starches and reduced carb), although I’ve moved off this in recent months as I’ve started to feel better.

Part IX: Today

Something seems to have worked. I can’t point to it concretely or specifically, I am not a microbiologist or a gastroenterologist, but my life feels so much better now than it did when all this kicked off, and I feel very positive about the future. I am actually back on a 3-month course of Rifaximin that my gastro has prescribed me at the moment to see if we can totally kick the issue, and will probably follow-up with some kind of diet / supplement regimen for some time after that, but either way my symptoms are so much improved by what I've done in the last two years that that feels like a success. I can't say that the problem is gone forever or would never come back but I definitely understand it a lot better and have a lot of tools to make sure that my life doesn't fall apart again like it did those last three times.

I still don’t really know what this all means to me personally. The process of getting better (trying the prebiotic, having my health collapse, taking the various pharmaceutical & herbal antibiotics) almost destroyed me as a person. At some point I had distanced myself almost completely from my job, my girlfriend at the time, most friends and pretty much any semblance of a normal social life or any life at all. For the better part of a year life was really just an existence of suffering every day and hoping to make it to the next one. Despite that, and that of course things always can or could have gone differently, I unfortunately feel as if at a high level I had no other choice. I was completely unwilling to spend the rest of my life living below my full potential of enjoyment, and was always going to do whatever it took to get there. I am sometimes shocked that I managed to survive all of this, but I am here, still living and will try to deal with whatever the experience has done to me in the same way I dealt with the issue itself: by living it, experiencing it day by day, not turning away from it, and knowing that no matter how dark the world can become, so long as you are still here, it is not really over.

Although the physical symptoms were and have been excruciatingly painful, one of the most difficult things about this whole experience has been the level of misunderstanding and invalidation, both from the medical community and from some friends, family, other personal acquaintances and the general public, around what happened to me. I understand that it is a difficult story to follow, but unfortunately it was all very real and somehow I managed to find a route out of it for now. One day the medical community will figure this out and understand what happened to me and others like me (because they are also out there in very sad corners of the internet - links below), and share it with the world to build our collective understanding and compassion. Until then it is strange to be one of the few people to know all of this and what this experience feels like and has felt like, but I am trying day by day to come closer to people and understand why we aren’t yet equipped as a society to address these kinds issues on multiple fronts. I don’t blame anyone for not understanding what was happening to me, but the few who did and were willing to listen at the time are angels and I’m not sure I would have gotten through it without them.

Eventually I hope I will fully recover from all of this. Physically, mentally, emotionally, because it has touched every aspect of my life over the last twelve years. Until then I am just here living every day in this strange situation of being a survivor of such a horrible, confusing and largely misunderstood problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ibs/comments/jpkol3/how_probiotics_destroyed_my_health_long_storyrant/

youtube

#SIBO #guthealth #Youtube

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tapisduluxembourg · 11 days ago

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Lavage de tapis de soie : Un soin délicat pour une matière précieuse

Les tapis en soie sont des œuvres d'art à part entière. Leur éclat naturel, leur douceur incomparable et leurs motifs raffinés en font des pièces de luxe souvent exposées dans des endroits prestigieux. Toutefois, ces tapis, bien que résistants, requièrent un entretien particulier. Le lavage de tapis de soie n'est pas une tâche ordinaire : il demande des compétences spécifiques et des méthodes adaptées pour préserver la beauté et la longévité de cette matière noble. Chez Tapis du Luxembourg, nous avons développé une expertise artisanale qui garantit un soin optimal pour vos tapis de soie.

Qu'est-ce qui rend les tapis de soie si spéciaux ?

La soie est une fibre naturelle issue des cocons de vers à soie, réputée pour sa finesse, son éclat et sa souplesse. Utilisée depuis des siècles dans la fabrication de tapis de haute qualité, elle confère aux tapis une brillance et une texture incomparables. Les tapis de soie peuvent être fabriqués à partir de soie pure ou d’un mélange de soie et de laine, chacun ayant ses propres spécificités.

Un tapis en soie, en plus de son esthétique luxueuse, se caractérise par une densité de nouage élevée, souvent réalisée à la main. Ce travail minutieux permet d'obtenir des motifs riches en détails, avec une finition lisse et brillante. Cependant, cette délicatesse exige un entretien spécifique, notamment en ce qui concerne le lavage. Un nettoyage inapproprié peut rapidement endommager les fibres et altérer les couleurs, c’est pourquoi il est crucial de faire appel à des experts pour le lavage de ces pièces précieuses.

L'importance d'un lavage professionnel pour les tapis de soie

Le lavage de tapis de soie nécessite une approche douce et mesurée. Contrairement aux tapis en laine ou en fibres synthétiques, les tapis en soie ne tolèrent pas les produits chimiques agressifs, ni les méthodes de nettoyage courantes comme le lavage à la machine. De plus, l’humidité excessive peut affaiblir les fibres de soie, tandis que des frottements trop vigoureux risquent de créer des plis ou d’endommager les motifs.

Chez Tapis du Luxembourg, chaque tapis de soie fait l’objet d’un examen attentif avant toute intervention. Nous évaluons l’état général du tapis, la densité de son nouage, la fragilité des zones usées et la solidité des couleurs. Cette première étape est essentielle pour déterminer la méthode de lavage la plus appropriée, respectant les caractéristiques uniques de chaque pièce.

Méthodes de lavage traditionnelles pour préserver l’éclat des tapis

Parce que la soie est une matière sensible, nous privilégions des méthodes de lavage artisanales qui excluent les produits chimiques agressifs. Nos experts utilisent des nettoyants doux, souvent à base de produits naturels, qui respectent les fibres tout en éliminant la saleté et les impuretés. Le lavage est effectué à la main, avec des brosses spéciales conçues pour nettoyer en profondeur sans abîmer la délicatesse du tissu.

Une attention particulière est portée aux couleurs. Avant chaque lavage, nous testons les teintures du tapis pour nous assurer qu’elles ne se décolorent pas. Le processus de nettoyage est alors ajusté en fonction des résultats, garantissant que le tapis retrouve toute sa fraîcheur sans que ses couleurs vives soient altérées.

Vous souhaitez confier le lavage de votre tapis de soie à des professionnels ? N'hésitez pas à consulter notre service spécialisé en suivant ce lien : https://reparation-tapis.fr/lavage-de-tapis-de-soie/. Nos artisans vous accompagnent tout au long du processus, de l'évaluation à la remise de votre tapis impeccablement nettoyé.

Les erreurs à éviter lors de l'entretien d'un tapis en soie

L’entretien d’un tapis en soie requiert une vigilance particulière. Il est essentiel de connaître les erreurs courantes à éviter pour ne pas nuire à la qualité de ce matériau précieux. Voici quelques conseils pour prolonger la durée de vie de votre tapis de soie :

Évitez les nettoyants chimiques agressifs : Les produits de nettoyage classiques, souvent utilisés pour les tapis en laine ou en fibres synthétiques, contiennent des agents chimiques qui peuvent ternir l'éclat naturel de la soie ou même la détériorer.

Ne frottez pas vigoureusement : En cas de tache, il peut être tentant de frotter le tapis, mais cela peut endommager les fibres. Un nettoyage doux et localisé est toujours préférable.

Évitez l'humidité excessive : Les tapis de soie ne tolèrent pas l'humidité prolongée. Un excès d’eau peut provoquer la formation de moisissures ou affaiblir les fibres.

Protégez le tapis de la lumière directe du soleil : L’exposition prolongée aux rayons UV peut entraîner une décoloration des motifs. Il est recommandé de placer le tapis dans une zone où il est partiellement protégé de la lumière.

Pourquoi choisir tapis du Luxembourg pour le lavage de votre tapis de soie ?

Confier le lavage de votre tapis de soie à Tapis du Luxembourg garantit un traitement adapté et respectueux de cette matière noble. Nos artisans possèdent une expertise unique, acquise au fil des années, dans le nettoyage et la restauration des tapis les plus délicats. En optant pour des méthodes artisanales et naturelles, nous assurons un nettoyage en profondeur qui respecte l’intégrité de chaque fibre.

Notre service propose également une évaluation complète de l’état de votre tapis avant toute intervention. Un devis détaillé vous est fourni, et vous restez informé à chaque étape du processus. Nous savons combien ces pièces peuvent avoir de la valeur, qu’elle soit financière ou sentimentale, et c’est pourquoi nous mettons un point d’honneur à offrir un service personnalisé et de qualité.

#Lavage de tapis #Nettoyage tapis en soie #Entretien tapis en soie #Lavage tapis artisanal #Lavage tapis pas cher

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garaksapprentice · 11 months ago

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In search of compostable clothing closures

Making clothes that are 97% biodegradable is surprisingly easy. Pick a natural fibre fabric, buy some 100% cotton or linen thread, and you're there. (You can even get 100% cotton overlocker thread - though you have to go searching for it.)

Those last few percent, though? That can be tough. One of the biggest offenders is closures. While there are plenty of clothes that don't need something to hold them shut, I confess I like having the option. Below is a round-up of various closures, and their compostability.

Note: for the purpose of this article, I'm treating metal closures as "compostable", in the sense that they're 1) easy to remove before you compost the rest of the object, and 2) infinitely reusable on other things, unless they break - at which point they're usually recyclable using our current commercial systems. And remember, re-using things that already exist is always preferable to buying new, "better" items.

Buckles/Rings

While less common than other closure methods, I find buckles, D-rings and O-rings are great when used in the right context. They're usually metal or plastic, neither of which are compostable - but metal will last practically forever, if it's good quality. Plastic tends to degrade over time, especially if exposed to the sun.

I find rings especially quick and easy to use, and a set of D-rings can give a very fine-tuned amount of tightening. My favourite belt uses two square D-rings instead of a buckle closure.

Buttons

The humble button, while ubiquitous now, took a while to catch on. Buttons as a common method of closure didn't become popular in Europe* until about the early 1300s, around the same time that the tailoring revolution[^] happened.

Nowadays, plastic is by far the most common material that buttons are made from. It's cheap and sturdy, but obviously it doesn't compost. So what are some alternatives?

Liz Haywood, a pattern maker who focuses on zero-waste designs, has thought a bit about this conundrum here. There's photos of several different DIY compostable and recycled buttons in her post.

For a completely compostable garment, wood, leather, horn, fabric, and thread buttons are your best bet. If, like most sensible people, you remove the buttons from something that's about to be worm food before you ditch it, the options expand considerably - metal, clay, recycled bottle caps, even glass buttons are all possible. You can have a lot of fun with making your own buttons - to match an outfit, or contrast with it, or maybe you'd like a different button for every buttonhole...

Another, related option is cufflinks - 18th century shirts often used cufflinks on the sleeves and one or two small thread buttons on the collar. That way one set of cufflinks could be used on multiple shirts, showing off a bit of wealth, while saving them from the (admittedly harsh) laundry practices of the day.

[*]: I have no doubt that buttons became popular in other parts of the world, too, but unfortunately I don't know much about it. Europe in the 14-15th century is my main area of study, mostly due to the fact that the historical re-enactment group that I'm a part of operates in that time period.

[^]: The tailoring revolution refers to the period where garments for the higher classes underwent a dramatic change in the way they were cut out. The very short version is, fashion garments shifted from primarily rectangular construction to more form-fitting, using the precursors of many standard cutting practices used today.

Elastic

While elastic isn't technically a closure, it's used that way in many different objects. Most elastic nowadays is made from polyester and synthetic rubber. No composting there.

But, all is not lost! You can now find elastics made of natural rubber and cotton! (I was quite impressed by this, to be honest. I thought I'd have to give up elastic for good.)

The downside, as is usual when you actually give a crap about the planet, is cost. You'll mostly only find it for sale online (Etsy has several options), and it can be more expensive (especially factoring in shipping). Prices on the compostable elastics I found were comparable to a mid-range polyester elastic at Spotlight (before shipping). I think that's actually pretty good, all things considered. (I don't trust the cheapest elastic, it loses its stretch ridiculously fast. A fact I discovered to my sorrow only after buying a 20m roll of it.)

As a bonus, supposedly natural rubber elastic lasts longer than synthetic elastics - this has been my experience with many natural vs synthetic things, but I haven't tested natural elastic specifically to know for sure.

The biggest downside here is the rubber - if you're dealing with a latex allergy, this is not the solution for you.

Hooks and Eyes

While these have fallen out of favour over the years, they do have their uses in a compostable closet. They're easy to buy, and easy to make if you can get hold of the wire - all you need is a set of needle-nose pliers.

Being metal, the hook/eye can be re-used until it breaks - which takes a while. Like buttons, they're easy to take off a garment and move to another one. Unlike buttons, they don't need a buttonhole - you can move both the hook and eye almost anywhere on a garment, really refining the fit of an item.

They are, however, somewhat limited in that application - hooks and eyes work best if they're under a small but constant amount of tension, pulling in opposite directions. I once tried to use hooks and eyes on a loose-fitting medieval tunic, and it just didn't work.

Laces and Ties

Before buttons became The Big Thing in medieval Europe (and for quite a few centuries after), laces and ties were the closure method du jour. Why did they stick around so long? The same reason pyjama pants often have a drawstring in them - they add adjustability to garments in a simple and easy to use (and create!) way. Stays and corsets are one of the most recognisable examples of this concept in action.

Lacing does work better on some things than others, but just about anywhere that you'd put elastic nowadays can likely use a drawstring instead. And there are some patterns (YouTube link) for adjustable garments that use lacing as an integral part of the design.

The main downside for me? They can be slow to use, and awkward, if you have difficulty with fine motor control. Mine is variable enough that I'll usually opt for a different closure, unless lacing or ties really is the best or only option.

Snaps

Confession: I adore snaps. They're fast and easy to use when my hands don't want to co-operate, and they can be wonderfully decorative as well as functional.

There are two general types - those you sew into place like you sew on hooks and eyes, and ones that are applied to the fabric using a press. The former takes more time to install, but can be replaced relatively easily if they stop working. The latter can technically be replaced, but it's a LOT harder and you risk damaging the fabric behind it while you try. They're also more likely to rip out of the fabric in the first place.

As for material, it's pretty much just metal and plastic (sometimes a combination). From a sustainability standpoint, metal is the better option - as long as you recycle it at the end of its life.

Zips

Zips are everywhere nowadays. They're easy to use, but can be hard to replace when they break. Putting them in correctly isn't always a cake-walk either. And in terms of compostability, the answer is definitely "no".

The vast majority of zippers on the market use a polyester or poly-cotton tape, with plastic or metal teeth set into it, and plastic or metal tabs and pulls. Because of the mix of materials, and the size of a typical zip, most municipal waste streams can't take them for recycling. However, textile recyclers` such as Upparel usually take zips (and the things they're attached to!).

I also found a couple of different manufacturers creating zips out of post-consumer recycled materials - a pleasant surprise, and a strong move towards closing waste streams.

[`]: Clothing retailers are increasingly taking responsibility for their part in reducing waste by offering recycling programs through their stores. Recycling Near You and Frankie list some of the major programs in Australia, though it's worth noting that most of those listed only want whole textiles or large pieces - to my knowledge, Upparel is the only place that will take scraps, broken textiles, and related.

If I've missed a closure type, or you know of places selling compostable or truly recyclable versions of any of the above, I would love to hear about it. While I'm (currently) a far less prolific sewist than the blog name implies, I want to be deliberate and thoughtful in my sewing choices going forward.

Also, as a last random thought, I wonder if anyone has started making bioplastic versions of any of the above? *Wanders off to do some research...*

Originally published at my blog: https://garaksapprentice.blogspot.com/2023/09/in-search-of-compostable-closures.html

#sewing #produce no waste #use and value renewable resources

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