#i shouldn't be shopping anyway

[fazcinatingblog]

I should be black friday shopping tonight

[cjgladback]

I went to my first fiber festival this past weekend! Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival; if I'm still in this state come June next year, I'll probably be back and would love to meet anybody else there. Socializing/hanging out/talking to people without feeling like I was obstructing Real Customers was the one thing I missed, though I didn't really get to any of the free lectures so maybe that's where I could've met some people. Since it was an unknown situation with a lot of people and nearly an hour drive each way, I strategized to make sure I'd go:

First day, I signed up for a couple volunteer shifts. Absolutely a recommended strategy.

Got to be helpful!

They happened to have goodie bags, to help me justify the gas and time (I now have a nice tape measure to replace the one that's been vacationing with a missing sewing kit for a couple years and a lasercut wood two-inch gauge window that might help me with consistency versus my suboptimal practice of just trying to knit perfect squares when swatching in pattern)

I got to learn things about the layout and schedule I wouldn't know to ask when answering questions and acting as a gofer -- especially true working two different locations

And of course, some people were pretty much guaranteed to be happy to see me!

Second day, I signed up for a workshop in the morning so I'd be there and able to shop for anything I needed at the end. Ombre yarn dyeing was the class! It's acid dyes, something I'm several years off from wanting to get into enough to commit to dedicated cookware, full pots of dye powder, etc. The room with the workshop was a barn that had plenty of outlets--but they did not represent plenty of breakers. So there weren't quite enough functional heating elements for the class to have sufficiently cooked our yarn before leaving, and I did need to risk a giant stock pot at home for three batches of four jars, almost-simmering in a water bath for thirty minutes each, of the yarn that hadn't proven it was done (all but the two palest greens). I was a little worried the delay/drawn out heat situation would affect the results but if it did it wasn't much; I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with my two color gradient and the single is great too!

The single dye gradient is the color Moss, which did some interesting things with the red portion separating out once they were heated. Every skein has redder blotches, so I'm not bothered about any inconsistency -- if anything it'll help my finished product camouflage stains. Though it was definitely a surprise for me and the other Moss user in the class when our first yarn to have exhausted the dye was the complementary color to what it went in as.

The two color gradient used Rhodamine Red on one end, which was one end of one of our instructor's samples where she chose a cool-green for the other end to show how multi-component dyes mix less predictably than most paint. (It was kinda like shading with markers where you can still see washes of the pink and green in what you squint at and call a grey-brown.) The other end was Cantaloupe, which was one of the maybe three colors she didn't have a sample cut of yarn for. But she described it as the flesh of a perfect ripe cantaloupe and obviously I had to see that, and it sounded like it would be fairly guaranteed to combine nicely with the magenta while being just enough around a bend in the color wheel to be interesting--warm orange versus cool pink. As I said, it turned out pretty much exactly as I was picturing. Not anticipated was how much the jars looked like they were full of some delicious dragonfruit-mango beverage. Were I still a barista I'd be trying to recreate this for my shift drink.

Image descriptions under the cut.

[ID: Five images following fourteen small skeins of sock yarn dyed in individual glass jars, in two gradients. One gradient is six skeins from a medium forest green through a pale creamy pink, the other is eight skeins from a vibrant yellow orange through an even more vibrant magenta. The first photo is inside under fluorescent lights, showing the 32oz glass canning jars with metal lids and rings, full of dye and yarn on a table at the end of the class in which they were filled and heated for a short time.

The next two images are animated gifs. The first gif is two frames showing the finished dye jars sitting in grass, with their yarn and with it removed. The green gradient left only transparent blue color in its jars, and most of the pink to orange gradient's water looks more orange without its yarn, aside from the third and fourth jars from the orange end, which shade toward a neon lilac with the peachy pink yarn removed. The second gif is a view of the inside of the bright green wash bucket, with just the pink-orange yarn in it, then all of them mixed up, all as they were after a soak with the rust-brown water, in the first rinse, and that rinse water alone showing its transparent but still brown tint.

The last two photos show the gradients lined up along a weathered wooden bench on the side of a deck. The first photo has the wet piles of yarn bundled in front of each of their respective jars with remaining dye. The final photo has the clean, dry yarn wound into center-pull balls and still vibrant in the direct sunlight. End ID]

[once-delight]

Hey guys, do you want to see something?

Here's the Danish covers for the Vampire Chronicles.

Yes, these were the books I proudly lugged around everywhere as a pimply goth teen ❤️

[boyruggeroii]

wanted to check something out completely unrelated but instead I discovered that I'm just three days older than efp? weird. anyway

[gayriddleussy]

Whaaaat i dont project onto characters i would neeeeeever! *Runs quickly to hide this*

[tethrras]

my mom literally trying to gaslight me in real time is sooo funny

[steinbit]

ok i Know it's like 22:15 but i really really wanna make some rice.. .

[kuwdora]

i have a bounty of fanart this week!! my geralt and yennefer print from @llorithaine arrived! not hung up yet but ahhhhhhhh!!!!!! look at them 😍

@llorithaine i am so happy, thank you so much for this!

@llorithaine's shop is here and he's also taking commissions over on ko-fi! Definitely check it out.

[beaft]

a random OC ask for you (for chanterelle): what is your OC's favorite memory?

also: if they were dropped in a random city for a day with a pouch full of gold/relevant currency and no obligations whatsoever, what would they be doing?

oh what a nice treat! i love to receive random OC asks <3 thank you!

favourite memory... i think maybe one time his elder sister took him out of the city on a little daytrip to explore the underdark - or at least, some of the less everything's-trying-to-kill-you bits of it - and he brought along a sketchbook and a bag in which to collect Interesting Things, and had filled them both by the time they got home, and for weeks afterwards he had dreams about glowing flowers and clouds of spores and the weird, bioluminescent creatures that kept appearing and disappearing out of the corner of his eye. he nearly got eaten by a hook horror at one point. it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him.

(i think most of his memories of his sisters are happy, actually - he was the youngest one and the only boy, so they made a big fuss of him until their mother discouraged it.)

for the second ask: he's not much of a city person, but i imagine he'd either make a bee-line for the nearest library or he'd find an apothecary and bother the owner with questions about where did you find this, what does that do, what happens if you mix x with y, and so on, cheerfully oblivious to the queue building up behind him. and after that he would head for the food market and go absolutely nuts in the confectionary department. the idea of "free samples" is a novel one; he's amazed to discover that these stallholders are just giving food away for free, and doesn't realise you're meant to just eat one or two, as opposed to the whole tray.

[obstinatecondolement]

Having a random panic attack about my stupid Work Trauma from this year. It never fucking ends.

[tyrannuspitch]

i think. i should read more comics.

[emile-hides]

Bought a $60 blanket at Walmart with my dad today because the texture was good and it seemed thick and what're the chances of finding another blanket I can stand so we bought it and I get home and cut the tags off and unfold it over my bed and I

i've been lied to

For some Un God Ly Re Son the blanket was folded in such a manner to hid the fact that it's top texture and internal texture are DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT.

And yes I COULD just use the top as the bottom and move on but THEY'RE TWO DIFFERENT TEXTURES. THAT I HAVE TO TOUCH BOTH OF. AND I'D RATHER EXPLODE HONESTLY

[loverdude]

My senior show is also so stupid lol like I am never again in my life gonna put my artwork in a gallery setting that's just not something I enjoy at ALL or aspire to do but I have to do this whole big terribly stressful thing in order to graduate and it's SO DUMB

[dmumt]

driving is so fun apart from the horrors (parking)

[desperatepleasures]

in today's I Hate Etsy So Much news i lost my "star seller" status last month because i "didn't respond to all my messages w/in 24hrs" except the messages i didn't respond to were like. the end of ongoing conversations with customers. like shut the fuck up etsy sometimes conversations just END

[doggirl-narcolepsy]

.........................................i haven't slept all night and i have a job interview in 2 hours :)