#specifically yarn I found at the thrift store

[the-fibre-stuff]

I'm sensing a theme in my new projects...

[gay-sin]

crocheting yarn is praying to god

i have spent a good amount of my free time lately thinking about yarn. i won a bid on ebay and bought some white mohair from a seller in florida for a great price. today i spent a very long time trying to get to a yarn store in cambridge. i had a lot of transit complications and had to walk a long time in the rain. i got there with my jeans and belongings soaked. my phone is in rice at the moment. it was worth it though because the store was amazing. it had so many kinds of quality yarns. i went around feeling them all for what must have been an hour. i tried to intuit what worsted vs woolen yarn was. there are so many things i don't know about yarn. all of the plastic yarns were very cheap. some wool yarn was cheap but the cheap wool felt very scratchy. i wanted soft yarn. i got two balls of 100% merino wool in bubble gum and rococo pink. i think i will make leg warmers with them. i'm not sure yet. i spent a long time feeling the alpaca yarn. i let myself splurge and get a $20 skein of 100% alpaca yarn in a muted blue color. the tag said that the yarn was "non-mulesed" which i read as non-molested. turns out mulesing is "a painful procedure that involves cutting crescent-shaped flaps of skin from around a lamb's breech and tail using sharp shears designed specifically for this purpose." i looked up photos but i don't recommend that you do.

as an artist, there are always so many factors to consider when choosing materials. i have always preferred trash/found materials as they are the most affordable. there is so much that ends up in landfills so why not use these things to make art? i love the poetics of things that were thrown aside being given new life. i've always preferred thrifting clothing, yarn, fabric. but what i have realized with yarn, though, is that it is very hard to find quality yarn like that. most yarn is mixed with acrylic or polyester. before i took a class on fibers in the spring, i had no idea what my clothes were really made of. now i think about it a lot. i'm trying to train my senses to decipher these things. i had no idea that clothes could even be made out of plastic and now the thought that most clothes are made with plastic really disturbs me. if you can't tell if yarn is plastic, you can burn it and tell by the smell. i'm becoming a detective, trying to find the imposters in a world where the plastic version is so goddamn convincing. it makes me uneasy. it feels very metaphorical.

in my fiber arts class, we read chapters of books written by anni albers. she was an artist that co-founded the black mountain college. i want to go back and dive deeply into these things that i only had the time to skim in school. i wanted to reread this article we had to read of hers from class. it is called "tactile sensibilities" but i needed an institution login to read the whole thing. i hate academia.... i could access the first page though and it had the main points. i wanted to use them to discuss yarn. so here are a couple quotes...

"No wonder a faculty that is so largely unemployed in our daily plodding and bustling is degenerating. Our materials come to us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread." "We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided."

i spent a long time wanting to make pointless art, just art for the sake of art. i still do sometimes but i have been very invested in fiber arts. they are the opposite of pointless art. it is so practical, ancient, useful. i have found a deep love for it that grounds me in ways i didn't even know that i needed so badly. i think there are so many things about the way we live now in such an industrialized, hyper-individualist plastic world that we are completely unaware the harms of.

i am very interested in religion and ritual and i love how this intersects with fiber arts for me. crocheting feels like a prayer. it feels like healing. i don't really like to crochet with plastic because it feels like it cuts me off from the cycle of it all. yesterday i started my day by crocheting for a long time before work. it put me in a beautiful mood and i felt patient and at ease all day. i have been needing that. i've been in such a bad mood for awhile, so tense, always in a rush. the yarn was wool and it sorta looked like the yarn that i had spun when i tried to spin yarn. it was thicker in some spots than others, making it feel real. i could imagine someone spinning it. spinning is such a beautiful process and i respect it so much. i hated it because it was so hard. it requires so much balance. i love the look of a spinning wheel. it reminds me of fairytales. i guess that just shows how far we have come from doing these things with our hands.... but anyways, i could imagine the sheep that grew the wool, the person that sheared the sheep. the yarn was probably spun by a machine, not a person, but i like to imagine it was spun on a wheel by a person. then, i crochet with the yarn. my crocheting is not a work of individual artistic genius, but the finishing step in a long process of labor and art, across time, species, places on earth. i'm employing techniques used for such a long time before me by so many wise and beautiful human beings. techniques i didn't invent and that i am still a humble beginner at. i make things that i can feel, touch, use, give. they can be used to keep me or those i love warmer in the winter, to hold my things, to make me feel more like myself. then, the things i make with these fibers can be reused or reworked when i no longer use them. when they fall apart, they can be reabsorbed into the earth, maybe they will become soil that will grow grass, that will be eaten by a sheep that will grow wool... the process continues. i am a small participant. that is a prayer to me. that is god to me.

this is what we lose when we don't make things with our hands, when we don't know where things come from. these are the skills that are deemed frivolous and inessential, not fast enough to turn profit. i think that these things are legitimately essential to being a person. most of fiber arts is historically women's work, based in traditions of indigenous people. it is not taken seriously in this culture and it is a shame because i really think that this is having grave consequences on everyone's wellbeing.

i was talking to my roommate's dad about how he had a maid when he lived in africa. he paid her very little but he said that it was still more than the norm. he said she could go get an education and "better herself" to get more money like him. it was a long conversation and there are so many layers to that mentality that are fuckedddd. but i just really don't understand how people actually believe that doing busy work for a corporation on a computer all day does anything of importance or requires any real intelligence at all. how is that "bettering yourself"? to alienate yourself even from your own space, never even touching the things you live with except to use them and toss them wherever for someone else to clean up?? the countless skills that come with cleaning are baffling to me. i have so much respect for cleaners. i am always learning the importance of cleaning and trying to do it well. i am naturally terrible at it and am currently trying my best to be better. to me, an office job is the place most void of intelligence. it's not at all the sort of intelligence that really matters to being alive or understanding what that means. whatever.

anyways, i made a bunny hat last weekend and i haven't been able to stop wearing it. it makes me so happy. i am very content with the idea of it getting colder because i will stay inside and crochet things. i will get to wear silly hats. i have been wearing the hat to work and the kids love it. people on the streets smile at me more. lots of people compliment me on it. for some reason, it makes me feel more like myself. maybe i'm a little bit of a furry. i made it with acrylic yarn because i had bought some awhile ago but i still really like it. maybe i will make one out of mohair. i want one with bigger ears. i want a collection of animal/monster hatwear.

here is a photo of me in the bunny hat and a drawing that one of the kids drew of me in the hat. i let the little girl that drew the picture try on the hat. it was so big on her little head. she is 5 and i love her very much.

[lightlyknitted]

Start crafting on a budget

So you want to get into knitting/crochet or any number crafts and don’t know where to start? Or you’re on a budget and worried about spending a bunch of money on something you might not like?

There are a few places you can go to find discounted supplies. It will take just a little bit of work and dedication to get there. I’ve listed a few places to start below in order from what I think are cheapest to more expensive.

Local buy nothing groups

Hands down, the cheapest way but might take the longest. If you have a facebook profile (or make one specifically for the groups), asking a local for free and for sale or buy nothing can be a great place to get a start. Just remember to be polite and follow the group rules and it could lead to some good bargains. Because these groups are heavily dependent on you I can’t really recommend any good ones. Even in craft supplies don’t pop up in these groups my local free and for sale groups often help me find #2.

2. Yard sales/Estate Sales

Yard sales or Estate Sales can often be a treasure hunt, much like buy nothing groups. If I am looking for vintage materials or simply older craft supplies I will prioritize Estate Sales. This is because of an important distinction, estate sales generally happen after a death or a sudden move. Estate sales can have good deals but it’s important to remember this doesn’t always happen – some estate sale organizers will raise prices if something has a high resale value online. Generally I haven’t seen a big increase in yarn or already finished projects.

(One estate sale I went to even offered doilies and linens up by the bag.)

Yard sales can have a good selection but it’s important to know that this doesn’t always mean unused craft supplies. If you find one of these listings online, it would be a very good idea to check any photos listed or the description to see if you see supplies that might interest you. For some yard sales, you can try haggling, I am not sure on estate sales, but that might depend on who’s running it.

3. Second Hand stores

Second hand stores can include your local thrift stores and or chain thrift stores (ie Goodwill, Salvation Army ect). These stores will vary each week in what is offered, in person. Prices are generally good, it can depend on your location and who’s running it. I’ve found that the chain stores have raised their prices to be a bit more for yarn bags than they used to be but some mom and pop shops will give you bags for cheap.

Another option is to go the online second hand store route, like Ebay, Craigslist or shopgoodwill.com. Ebay can be good for lots of things and for more vintage patterns / old and out of date booklets. A lot of the things on these stores might not be brand new or fresh but might be a bit cheaper than starting fresh.

4. Dollar Store

Now, if you have a Dollar Store near you there is a good chance they’ll have a decent starter selection of yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks. There are a few different types of yarn and because each ball is $1.25. I wouldn’t recommend this for the long term for at least normal acrylic because it’s a bit more expensive to shop the Dollar Tree than the sale section of a box store.

The needles and hooks are pretty limited in sizes so I highly recommend looking at a second hand shop for those.

5. Sale section of your local big box store

The sale section of an online retailer or big box store is another great place to look for discount craft supplies. The yarn selection can be great and the coupons can be used for other notions. I personally like Joann's or Michael's for big box stores but for online retailers I like knit picks. Your local yarn store (if you have one near you), is also a great place to get help or find other crafters. Some even carry budget friendly yarns. (I personally like Berroco as a budget yarn!)

[goatmilksoda]

I wanted to find a match for some yarn I got from an estate sale but I couldn't find any at the crafts store so I got so frustrated that I went to a thrift store and bought a massive yarn grab bag and basically it turned out that the yarn I found was very specifically curated and is all very high quality wool and cotton, almost all of which are brand new or have 2-3 skeins of them so you won't run out. Like I cannot even begin to tell you how lucky I got.

For reference, here's a photo with my hand.

[tipsycad147]

Essential Steps for Starting Witchcraft as a Beginner: Your Guide to Getting Started 2

Let’s Talk About Tools: Use What You Have

The witchcraft community can feel overwhelming, with endless lists of “must-have” tools and supplies. But the truth is, you don’t need expensive items to practice. In fact, some of the most powerful magic can be done with everyday household items. Let’s explore how to use what you already have on hand.

🏡Use What You Have

Your kitchen is a treasure trove of witchcraft supplies. Things like vinegar, lemons, rosemary, bay leaves, and cinnamon can be used in all sorts of spells and rituals. And don’t forget about those trusty tea light candles – they’re inexpensive, widely available, and perfect for quick workings.

Beyond the kitchen, look around your home. Pens and paper can be used to write spells, create sigils, or make paper spell dolls. Mirrors, bowls of water, and recycled jars – they’re all fair game for your magical practice.💰DIY and Low-Cost Alternatives

Get creative with repurposing items you already have. Old journals, sketchbooks, and binders make great junk grimoires. Fabric scraps can become charm bags or spell dolls. And don’t underestimate the power of natural items like dirt, sticks, and flowers – they’re perfect for home protection spells and offerings.🛒Thrift Store Finds

Thrift stores are a Witches best friend! You can find all sorts of useful items, like glass candles, candle holders, ceramic and glass plates, I’ve even found crystals and un-opened Tarot decks. They also have great options for small tables or chests of drawers, which make perfect mini altars or storage for spell ingredients and tools.🎨Craft Store Essentials

Craft stores are a goldmine for witchcraft supplies. Yarn, string, cord, paint, chalk, and air-dry clay can all be used to make charm bags, draw sigils, and create various spell tools.🧠Creative Spellwork

Don’t be afraid to get crafty! Use air-dry clay to make unique candle holders or offering coins. Birthday candles are perfect for small, discreet candle magic. And if you’re not a fan of drawing, you can always print out tarot cards or sigils.

✨The key is to view everyday items through a witchy lens and think creatively about how you can use them in your practice. Witchcraft isn’t about expensive tools; it’s about using what you have and focusing your intention. So get resourceful, and watch the magic unfold!

🔮 Altar Basics: Your Sacred Space, Your Way

Altars can feel intimidating, with all the “rules” about what’s right or wrong. But the truth is, your altar is a deeply personal space. It’s not about perfection; it’s about creating a meaningful, intentional environment for your magical work. Let’s dive in and demystify altar basics.

🧘Altars vs. Shrines

First things first: Altars and shrines aren’t the same thing. A shrine is an offering space for a specific deity or person, while an altar is a working space for your magical practice. I have both – a cozy kitchen altar for everyday spellwork and a minimalist vanity altar for my morning rituals.💫Altar Essentials

My vanity altar is all about self-care. It has a vintage mirror, a simple white candle, and a few of my favorite perfumes and crystals. I activate it each morning with intentions of confidence and self-love. On the other hand, my kitchen altar is a vibrant, eclectic space. It’s an old dresser filled with herbs, tarot cards, and a collection of trinkets that hold personal meaning.🎨Personalize Your Altar

The key is to make your altar emotionally and spiritually meaningful. Think of it as a vision board – include items that make you feel good and powerful. Ritual knives and altar cloths are optional; the only “must-haves” are the things that resonate with you.🌀Altar Maintenance

Changing your altar is entirely subjective. You can do it based on the seasons, holidays, or personal milestones. Let your altar evolve with your practice, reflecting your growth and changing interests. And don’t forget to use it for manifestation – place symbolic items for your goals and desires.🔒Altar Etiquette

Many witches prefer to keep their altars private. Activate and deactivate your altar through personal rituals, like lighting and extinguishing candles. If you’re on the go, create a travel altar in a shoebox or other container.

✨Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to set up an altar. It’s about your personal connection and intention. So have fun with it, get creative, and let your altar be a reflection of your unique magical essence. Your space, your rules!

Banishing: Removing Unwanted Energies and Entities

Banishing is the process of actively removing unwanted energies, entities, or even people from your life. While it may sound intense, it’s a crucial skill for any witch to master. Let’s dive into why banishing is so important and how to do it effectively.

🧹Cleansing vs. Banishing

Cleansing and banishing are related but distinct practices. Cleansing is about removing negative energy, like mopping up a mess. Banishing, on the other hand, is specifically about removing unwanted presences or entities, like evicting an unwanted houseguest. It’s a more targeted and intentional process.🔍Types of Banishing

Banishing can take many forms. Energy banishing involves actively removing negative vibes from a space. This is different from a general cleansing, which is more about maintaining a clean energetic environment. Banishing can also be used to cut ties with toxic people or remove unwanted spirits and entities.🌿Banishing in Action

Let’s say you’ve been feeling a heavy, oppressive energy in your home. You decide it’s time to do some banishing work. You gather your supplies, which include sage, cinnamon sticks, and a bell. You start by opening all the windows to allow fresh air to circulate. Then, you light the sage and walk clockwise around each room, visualizing the negative energy being pushed out. As you do this, you ring the bell, commanding any unwanted entities to leave. Finally, you place the cinnamon sticks in the corners of the room to maintain the protective barrier.🌿Banishing Levels and Tools

The intensity of your banishing work will depend on the situation at hand. For mild negative energy, you can use herbs like cinnamon, rosemary, and lavender. For slightly stronger energy, try orange or lemon peels, cedar, and juniper. And for more moderate entities, consider using herbs like mullein, hyssop, nettles, dragon’s blood, clove, and guava leaves. You can also use banishing sprays, oils, bells, and the help of local land spirits or deities.📚Recommended Reading

If you want to dive deeper into the art of banishing, check out these books:

“Psychic Witch” by Mat Auryn, “The Witch’s Shield” by Christopher Penczak, and “Protection & Reversal Magick” by Jason Miller.

✨Banishing may seem intimidating, but it’s a crucial skill for any witch. Trust your intuition, be polite but firm, and don’t be afraid to adjust your approach if something doesn’t work. With knowledge and practice, you’ll be able to clear your space and your life of any unwanted energies or entities. Your magic, your rules.

[journeyman-tier-fibercraft]

Seconding all of this. Esp yarn weight, anything above aran makes my hands hurt.

For reference I have scoliosis and osteoarthritis. So a bit part of comfortable knitting for me is posture/back alignment. I personally have to have my elbows resting on something to comfortably knit and I’ve seen pillows specifically marketed to rest your arms on while knitting (which sadly don’t help me but could easily help someone with a less picky spine lmao). Hobbii sells a version here for an example of what they look like but you could probably find something similar for cheaper, maybe a body pillow?

A good option is to play around with different styles of knitting. I first started knitting continental for speed but once I got used to it I found it hurt my hands significantly less than what I was doing before. Norwegian purling for ribbing or swapping to Portuguese style knitting for long purl sections could be helpful if you’re having problems with moving between knit stitch and purl stitch.

Types of needle also can play a part, at least for me. Straight needles are hell on my wrists and wood/plastic needles make my tension too tight which hurts my joints. It’s worth experimenting with different needles if you can, when I first started knitting I spent a lot of time in thrift stores looking for a bunch of different needles just to try them.

Also don’t be afraid to picked seamed projects. Knitting a whole blanket or even a sweater seamlessly might be easier, but having to lift and turn a whole queen sized blanket is Not Great. Having to mattress stitch for 4 hours isn’t my idea of fun but I find it’s a lot easier on my body long term than the alternative.

Hi, you said in your bio that you're chronically ill. I was wondering if you had any tips for knitting with chronic pain (assuming that's your flavour of chronic illness)? Or do you know anyone who could give me advice?knitting/sewing is my sanity-saver.

I use compression gloves, only knit with specific weights of yarn (the ones that are the least painful for me), and try to take frequent breaks, which for me looks like switching hobbies every 30 minutes or so (knitting to spinning to knitting, etc). I also do my best to be very gentle on my joints when i can, altho i honestly rarely have the choice at work.

Personally i have joint problems and migraines, so thats what im correcting for/trying not to make worse. Helpful advice probably varies depending on what youre trying to correct for. Really my only general advice is "when it starts to hurt, try to stop" and "if possible, save the painfully difficult stuff for when youre doing well, and make the easier stuff your usual work"

If anyone who sees this has got other tips please feel free to comment them

[macgyvermedical]

The Weird Hat Adventure

I don’t know if you also live in the northern hemisphere, but two days ago it suddenly got chilly and decided to snow. That snow then had the audacity to stay intact on the ground for several hours.

Rude.

Anyway, in order to push back on the winter that awaited me, I needed a good winter hat. But I had an entire day of time to make this happen, and in the last few months I’ve been trying my damnedest to create as little demand for new products as humanly possible. Now, that’s fine, and my personal code does allow me to shop at any secondhand or antique store, as well as commission goods from independent creators/sellers (which is how I got my gloves) and accept gifts of new items. All of these gave me ample opportunity to either 1. Purchase a used hat from a secondhand retailer, 2. Commission a hat from a nice shop down the street, or 3. Ask to be gifted a hat for candlenights from a friend or relative.

But, as the true millennial I am, I decided that I also want to bulk up on my apocalypse skill. I was gonna learn how to knit myself a hat.

In the past, I had knitted (and unfortunately gifted) many a terrible scarf, but honestly my knitting skill does not hold up much beyond that. I’ve heard that hats are kind of the next step up in the knitting world, and wanted to try my hand.

So then... how does one come across balls of secondhand yarn? I wondered this to @alliemackenzie28​ who suggested thrifting and then dismantling a sweater. After perusing the two closest secondhand stores to me, I was shocked and appalled that neither had a suitable sweater for this. Also rude.

I came home and thought about it- I may not have had yarn, but you know what I did have? T-shirts. As a college student and former college student, t-shirts are thrown at you constantly. Most of them are advertising very specific university interests and are therefore useless for anything but wearing around campus (because on campus everyone else is also drowning in useless free t-shirts and its a no-judgement zone) or art projects.

I selected these t-shirts out of my stack because neither of them fit me and I liked the colors:

I then cut those t-shirts into strips and stretched the strips, creating the following two balls of t-shirt yarn:

I started knitting it, but realized it was killing my 6mm knitting needles. The pattern (as well as the thickness of the t-shirt yarn) I was using required 10mm needles and in hind-sight, I was having a lot of trouble because I cast on probably more stitches than I could possibly need, and was knitting them super tight:

So proceeded to visit another 3 thrift shops in my area to find larger and/or sturdier knitting needles. I did not succeed. Instead, I found multiple home goods shaped like the poo emoji, a weird doll with letter beads spelling “WORSHIP CHOCOLATE” as teeth, a life-sized cardboard cutout of Gale from The Hunger Games, and these horrible turtle-baby (parody?) lawn statues, and if I had to look at them, so do you:

Anyway, I returned home, saddened but not discouraged. I unravelled and then cast-on again, this time consciously looser, and continued my quest. It worked! It was killing my fingers, but it worked!

Woot! Less than 4 hours later, I completed my hat. I will definitely use this as a rough draft, and when the skin on my fingers heals, make another, better hat with the correct size needles and with some knitting trickery on the bottom edge to keep it from rolling up, but here it is!

Ta-da!

[rusalkii]

It's still the boring details of my life under the cut but this time they're cheerful boring details.

Ghost! I am very pleased with my life. 10/10 would import again, etc etc. This summer seems to have finally persuaded me that time with Ghost is not a fundamentally scarce resource that I mus hoard at every possible opportunity, so I am now capable of doing things like "doing work while they're in the same state as me" or, more importantly but less relevantly, "recognizing that no matter how much I like them if I spend another minute in the company of another human being I am going to shut down". Valuable life skills, those.

This week prior to the break I caught up with many misc homework assignments and generally found myself ahead of official work. As a result I did not have that much to do over the break but did some not very urgent homework anyway. I studied a little for stat (practice exam) but not for any other classes, which is not ideal but given the givens not something I'm going to worry about. Over the break also ran some errands, cleaned the house, helped my mom with cooking, etc. Could have done more given that dad's in Russia, but did enough not to feel like I was leaving mom with everything. I should likely be better to my parents in this respect but that's a character flaw to examine in more detail at a later date. Got my hair trimmed (it turns out that this predictably results in the horrible experience of my hair being shorter), looked at monitors (my family's approach to birthday presents is very low stress, it's great), bought yarn I've been meaning to get for my Minimum Effort Shawl Pattern, did a budgeting thing. Generally satisfied with productive output given break, although I had a somewhat nonideal pattern of avoiding my latest CS assignment because I don't understand functions in assembly enough that even figuring them out seems like a black hole. Need to make it a goal to diagram it out tomorrow, then actually have some code written, test, iterate- I know how to move towards understanding this and it's not staring at lecture slides in the hope the knowledge will imprint itself in my brain.

Conclusion of budget spreadsheeting is that even if I assume I get zero additional dollars other than what I have, ski job which I do mostly because it lets me ski for free and not the money, and next summer's internship, I can be slightly less paranoid with my money. Turns out even baby programmers get paid real human money, it's very nice. Should not internalize this too hard, but if I keep an eye on it I can in fact afford to do things like flying to visit people on breaks sometimes or getting myself a not-terrible SCA wardrobe or buying skirts new because no thrift store ones meet my extremely specific desirata.

I have one week of class, one week of exams, and then break. This does not translate too "ah, yes, end of the semester, no new assignments and I'm all caught up, I can just do nothing". Studying: it exists. This week I'm going to aim for at least 3 practice exams in both the classes for which that is a coherent concept, and going over the 2nd exam and reviewing constructive induction for Discrete. For stat I can bring my grade up to a B, possibly even a regular not-B-minus as long as I have my shit together. If I want to keep the option of going to a decent grad school open I cannot have a C in stat. Also, should show up to lab at least a little bit extra for the research class and actually practice my presentation. I will get an A but transcript show graduations, an A+ would be nice and there's any chance I could get an A- and that would be embarrassing. Both these things should not take that much extra time and could make the difference here. Actually, no, I have a more specific thing: get up tomorrow at a real human hour, get to lab before class, make sure you have your part of the presentation down then. Then in the afternoon you can rehearse it with M. Sleep: meh? Some of this was "sharing a too-small bed will predictably make me need more hours of sleep".  Didn't have my weighted blanket. Did exercise but not as much. Did not have sun lamp, did not use melatonin. Unsure how much these factors change. Starting to seriously consider asking a doctor about this but unfortunately I don't really have a doctor at the moment and don't want to go through the university health care system through this. Could go to the doctor my parent do, I guess? Should poke at this in case there's long appointment times involved in the option I end up wanting. 

Late cause Thanksgiving and also Ghost, I regret nothing.

[larpgourmet]

The Essential LARP Cooking Camp Gear List

Figuring out what to bring to game is always stress inducing. I have packing lists for my packing lists just to make sure I don’t miss anything (it doesn’t help that I drive four hours to get to my game. Forgetting something means I’m SOL all weekend, unless I feel like stopping by a Walmart to pickup whatever I left at home.) 

If you’re a new LARPer, this can be doubly stressful. You may not even know where to begin to pack for what you need. I’m pretty focused on only food needs on this blog, but to sidetrack for just a moment -- my advice is always to break it down from a meta level first. By that I mean, start with the big picture stuff:

- Camping Gear (tent, sleeping bag, etc.) - Food and Drink - Costume - Weapons - Decorative - Mundane Needs (medicine, first aid kit, hygiene needs) 

Once you have that list together, then you can start listing things by specific, and that’ll help you organize your head a little bit when things start to get crazy. Make a list on a word doc somewhere you can access it all the time, and keep the same list game after game, that way you have it on hand in case you run out of spell slots to think about it the Thursday night before you travel.

My list below will operate similarly, giving kind of a broad list, and then breaking it down, with only a few major items getting specific call-outs.

That said -- back to the food stuff!

If you want to cook at game, you’ll need a handful of things to make this possible. Listed below is a short list of what you’ll need, and what to look for in those items. Some of these were also referenced on the 20 Items under $20 post, found here (https://larpgourmet.tumblr.com/post/186401312414/20-things-under-20-for-eating-at-larp)

- A Decent Cooler Look for one that will easily fit in your car with the rest of your stuff, but has enough room to work with. Also be aware that you’re going to have to move your cooler in and out of your car -- while it’s full of stuff. Too big, and you risk it being exceptionally heavy.

I bought mine eons ago, but I want to say it’s somewhere in the 48 - 50 quart range. I generally want to be able to fit my cold brew coffee, a frozen gallon bottle of water, my food, at least half of my drinks, and my icepacks into the cooler easily.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating -- of all of the items to shell a little extra for, this is the one. Good insulation, a tight fitting lid, and well made handles will go a long way to ensuring your food stays cold, and you have a better time maneuvering it. Coolers are also just generally handy things to have around, even when you’re not LARPing, so there’s little chance this purchase will go to waste.

One side note on this -- I think wheels are a bit of a waste when it comes to coolers in a camping setting. The wheels do just about nothing over dirt and sticks, and are barely better than dragging the cooler on it’s edge -- at least in my experience.

- A Sturdy Table If no tables are readily available, OR those tables are wobbly -- pick up a good, sturdy table of your own, and be ready to throw a tablecloth over it. I like 6 foot hard plastic folding tables available at any hardware store. They are generally easy to pack and move, and give you plenty of room to work with.

Prepare to store your plastic bin of stuff, and your cooler underneath the table. The cooler being in the perpetual shade of the tablecloth, and the breeze of the outside means that your ice will melt a bit slower. I’ve managed July games in over 100 degree heat in southern California without needing to make an ice run, just because my cooler is stored under a table with a good tablecloth.

- Camp Stove This is another topic I’ve covered in some detail on this post: https://larpgourmet.tumblr.com/post/186746785742/what-to-look-for-in-a-camp-stove

Long and short -- though there’s many ways to heat up food at game, including campfires and the hope of a decent kitchen on site, I feel like Camp Stoves are the old reliable. They’re safe (you’re not likely to accidentally start a forest fire), easy to use and keep with you, and if you have your own, you’re not waiting in line to use it -- so you can just heat n’ eat at your leisure!

- A Trash Bin Get a collapsible trash container made for camping, and the appropriately sized trash bags. Invest in something big and flat that you can put over the trash bag to keep stuff out, or prepare to take it to a larger trash receptacle every so often.

- Dutch Oven If you’ve never looked at a dutch oven before, it’s basically a big soup pot with a good lid. Generally speaking, dutch ovens are thick walled and made of cast iron -- but for our purposes, any large pot with a decent lid will fit your needs.

I like these, especially if you plan to make any meals for a larger group. Big vats of soup or even cold salads can be served in a dutch oven, and automatically look more interesting as a result. The lid means you can close in your food to keep dust out, and even if you’re not using it to cook directly, you can fill it with water and cook sous vide style.

ProTip: If you get one big enough, you can fit a lot of your other gear inside of it, making it an excellent storage container for packing purposes as well.

- Frying Pan / Skillet / Griddle What we need is a large, flat surface to toast bread, pan fry food, or set stovetop coffee pots on top of to make sure they’re stable. A frying pan or skillet is probably best (as the walls give them a bit more utility -- but a griddle or flat top surface can be great in the long haul, if you don’t mind buying both options!

- Food Prep Items A cutting board, a good knife, bowls to collect items you’ve cut and prepared, and some bowls or covers to keep everything clean while you work. As with the below, this is really a situational need. If you plan to do any food prep actually at game, make sure you consider what you’ll need to bring!

- Servingware Wooden bowls, spoons, charcuterie boards, and other things are great to lay out your food for eating. You only really need these if you plan on serving multiple people, and will need to leave the food somewhere that photographers might find it. Honestly, source as much of this out of thrift stores as you can, big wooden bowls and big wooden spoons are silly cheap there. You can also get some fairly inexpensive slabs of marble and other easy to keep and clean stone from any home improvement store -- more on that in a future post!

- Flatware / Dishes You will want something to eat your food out of that looks good for the photographers! The 20 Items under $20 has a few links for things to look for on this front, but expect to need at least one of each of the basics -- a cup, bowl, plate, fork, knife, and spoon. I’ve tested my way through a lot of the disposables in this arena, and I find them to be both flimsy, and expensive. Set aside the scratch for one decent set that will last, and you’ll be much happier.

- Cleaning Station Here’s where I admit that I don’t do a full soap and water wash most of the time at game. I’m the only one who uses my own stuff, so most of the time I just wipe down my gear to get any food off, dry it, and wait to give it a good cleaning when I get home. Most of my cooking for game is tailored to this idea, meaning that I generally make a lot of things where I won’t leave a lot of food behind, and if I do, it’s in a mason jar where I’m just going to seal the jar and not worry about it.

I also (currently) use real cast iron for my fork, knife, and spoon -- so getting them in soap and water is really just a great way for them to rust. (I’m thinking of switching over to stainless steel. Cast iron has a taste, and I’m not particularly fond... additionally, it’s a HUGE pain to keep care of, especially at game if someone decides to be nice and wash your stuff for you, so I’m just kind of over it.)

If you’re eating anything that will get sticky or sugary, or where you’re leaving a larger amount of food (not just sandwich crumbs), you will want a way to clean it so you don’t get pests. This set should consist of at least a couple of things; a smallish plastic bin for you to catch your soapy water, a sponge, some dish soap, a drying towel, and clean water to rinse your soap off your dishes.

If you’re a knitter at all, consider making knitted towels out of yarn tailor made to the purpose. Knitted towels will always look great, and they dry up a lot of water! They do just take a little longer to dry, so prepare a spot to hang them up with clothespins, if you can! (I’m not a knitter, but my mom makes me knitted stuff all the time.)

- Plastic Bin with a Good Lid The reason I advocate for this is to carry all of your camping gear in one place, and make sure it stays clean and pest free until you can use it. Get all your stuff first, then decide what size you need -- but one of these goes a long way toward good organization, and ease of moving your stuff!

- Sundries This can be any sort of smaller items that I just catch all into one category. My current list for this is: Matches Paper towels First aid kit Propane Camp lantern Apron (to keep your costume clean) Spare water Trivets (if you’re going to have any hot pans on site)

If you’re worried about forgetting something, set your setup up at home, and mock going through everything. Think about what you’ll need to do for all of your meals, and make sure you have everything you need to that end.

Plan for emergencies! Plan for spills, plan to get cut, or burned on your stove! Make sure everything you need is close by (in your plastic bin) when you’re actually on site, so you always know how to find your stuff if something comes up.

[saffordstories]

Maybe some could argue that it was a bit selfish or her, but Marian was adoring it more and more when she heard Marcy giggle and smile. And felt a small sense of pride when she announced that her home was the most wonderful. She knew it wasn't the biggest or grandest.

But if anything she always wanted people to feel comfortable and at home here.

"You're very welcome, and welcomed to come over again anytime you feel like you need a bit of a break. I truly mean that. While Cassius and the others have their strengths, it can be nice to just have a little one on one girl time in my own opinion. Worst case scenario you would have to deal with a cat on your lap"

Taking a moment to stand, brush her hands together to get rid of any cat hair, Marian thought over what drink she would like herself before deciding on some of the tea blend Cass had made for her. Reaching into the cupboard she grabbed one that was a dark green clay mug with red roses on it and set to brewing. Admittedly this one was one of her favorites. She had found it by chance at a thrift store and knew in an instant if she left it behind she would regret it for a very long time. It had a nice weight to it too that felt comforting at times.

"Admittedly the mugs started out because of that one there that's designed to look like a ball of yarn. When i first moved in i had a matching set. But between a certain cat that likes to push things off table edges, and the set chipping rather easily, i was getting a bit put off by it.

Then Chris brought me that one as a souvenir and it grew from there ever since. It feels rather nice to not have to worry if i have a full matching set or not. That and it always makes me smile or laugh a bit when i get to see peoples' first reaction to seeing them. Also if one of them happens to break, then worst thing is  i might miss that particular one for a bit. I also have a big soft spot for puns."

For a small moment Marian wondered if Cass would mind or be upset if she was to offer the tea he had made specifically for her. But then again if there was anyone she could think of that he would be okay with sharing, she felt he would be okay with that person being Marcy. Plus it was her tea. If she wanted to share she could very well do so.

"Would you like some tea as well? Since i'm making myself a cup."

"Oh wow!" Were the first words out of Marcy's mouth. They were followed by "Gosh! I can't even!"

Her eyes scanning over Marian's home were as wide as her smile as she eagerly took in everything within. It wasn't that the home was particularly grand. On the contrary, the appearance was rather ordinary compared to the other homes she had been in. But that was what was wonderful about it. It wasn't stuffy, it wasn't polished and grand and it didn't scream 'look at all I possess.' No, instead it was lived in and loved and so comfortable it could have been the house equivalent  of fuzzy slippers and a snuggly blanket on a rainy day.

As she took off her shoes, she noted a pair of Lord De Beaumonts sneakers. The ones he wore when gardening. It was so odd to see them set by the door as he had certainly never done that at the Country Home or the office....There was something about the sight that felt more domesticated and almost funny and caused Marcy to offer a softly amused 'hmm.'

Once her shoes were off, she followed Marian into the kitchen, eyes darting over ever available surface to take in the details. Every homey touch from the bread box to the tea pot was adored absolutely. She loved it here. It felt easier to breathe here. The very atmosphere of the home felt the way her mother's hugs had felt. It was something she couldn't explain but also knew she didn't want to.

"Oh, I'm not allergic." Marcy smiled, ignoring the way the action pulled on her stitches. "I've never been around cats much before. Lord De Beaumont didn't allow pets other than the geese and those just sorta showed up one day and never left." She began to make her way to the cupboard that contained the cups. "There was a stray cat that hung around near the temple. It was nice and the priestess would-- No way!"

Once the cupboard door was open and the mugs visible, Marcy erupted into delighted giggles. None of them matched! Not a one!

She couldn't explain why it was funny to her without going into detail about her life with Lord De Beaumont. He detested when things didn't coordinate and the thought of him selecting a novelty mug for his morning tea was like hilarious irony. Marcy took a moment to glance over the mugs: one shaped like a cookie and another with pumpkin at the dentist. When her eyes landed on one--gray and decorated with tombstones--that proclaimed 'not a mourning person,' she had no doubt The Dark Lord selected that one more than others.

"Marian," Marcy gently announced while grabbing a cup decorated like Chip from Beauty and the Beast, "your home is the most wonderful place I've ever been. Thank you for inviting me over."

[buildingshitwithcrab]

Some collection spring cleaning, slow but getting there.

First pic is a drawer organizer (I’m guessing for jewelry) from the outlet, now keeping most of my miniature treasure chests in check. And a few barrels, but hey. There are around ten more on my bookshelves, that don’t fit into the cubbies by a little or a lot. The oldest is the dark green at the bottom, which my mom had when she was a kid. The purple & gold came with some Hunchback of Notre Dame playset or other, the blue with a ‘pearl’ in it came with a crab LPS, and the two brass-framed have been around for years. All the rest were thrifted over time. I do still have the treasure chest from the Crystal Castle, but it’s packed away with said castle, at the moment.

Second pic is where my princess dolls have been for about a year. It’s a 16″ square box, cut diagonally and reinforced with some extra cardboard layers in between. The box on the right was from a neighbor’s amazon order, again reinforced and then mostly covered with two white tri-folds. The box inside of it is just to keep the top from sagging. It doesn’t look like much added space, but it helps a lot.

The princesses got spread out nicely, and there was room enough for a few of my big-haired/big gowned Barbies, as well. The two in the red dresses are thrifted ‘97 and ‘98 Holiday dolls, now Holly and Ivy, respectively *cough* Those are the most holiday-like dresses I have, and while one’s a childhood survivor, I’ve found two more, which was lucky here. Both dolls were thrifted nekkid, although Holly still had all of her jewelry (as did a second ‘97 I found at the same store, the next week. weird.) and since I don’t expect to find their actual gowns easily, it’s nice that they match for now.

In front of them are a Happenin’ Hair Barbie, who already had a gymnast body and was found complete except for her pants and shoes, which is a very odd state of affairs; a Fairytopia on a Liv body, just because it’s hard to turn down fantasy hair colors that clean up nicely, and a Hula Hair Barbie who needs a boil perm to tame her floof, but that floof is really soft.

To the right of the Holidays are all of the oldest Barbies I have: a ‘72 Malibu Christie, 70s Sun Loving Skipper, 70s Francie that’s a pain in the ass to specifically identify because her hairstyle isn’t supposed to go with her face paint  and body type but there it is, and a mid-70s Barbie on a Gymnast body. (possibly 90s Esmeralda’s; I forget.) Christie’s hair was butchered, and so has been mostly rerooted with untwisted Bernat Mega yarn. Very soft and wavy and pretty much the best thing I’ve found that yarn to be good for. Her blue jacket is vintage 60s Barbie, found in a grab bag with modern clothes and that is effing awesome.

Among the princesses, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Ariel are childhood dolls (as is Esmeralda, but she’s on my desk.) With Ariel just today, they’ve all been rebodied for more joints, except Tiana and Merida, who have very hard skin to match. All the rest were thrifted. This is largely Snow White’s fault, as I’d found two of her with Disney Store joints, and got them with intention of using their bodies for other heads, but they were both different and had really nice faces. This Snow in particular is amusing for her enormous hair poof, and I found a dollar store dress in just the colors she needed, so she stayed. Then others turned up, like Mulan in her actual dress. Tiana still needs a jointed body, but at least she got one of her own dresses today, and I’d found her tiara a long while ago. Childhood Jasmine stole her tiara from a newer imposter, but hey, she has one now. I have tiaras for Elsa and Cinderella, but Sylva and Luna have them.

There’s a fourth Elsa in the Big Thing house, under the corner shelves, and I’m not sure why. I still haven’t seen Frozen and don’t really want to. But like the Snow Whites, all four Elsas are different, and that’s proving to be a weakness. The dress Official Princess(tm) Elsa is wearing is actually meant for a larger doll, but it works in an Edwardian kind of way, with a belt. I think Anna’s the only one with a piecemeal outfit, now that Tiana’s dressed. I do have a generic-but-Disney-like dress for Snow White that’s in a clothes trunk. Aurora had been in a really cheap pink version of her dress, with fraying edges, but the dress she has now came off of a $30 light-up doll, and was found just laying by itself in an outlet bin. Yeah, I’ll take that, thanks. I think Merida’s in her own dress, and she’s borrowing the hooded cape from the 90s BK Esmeralda doll. There are at least three of the same Rapunzels floating around, too, and I know one of them has the right dress on. I like restoring their hair, but I’ve really gotta learn to return them to the wild, afterwards.

The horses are all thrifted, and just ones that looked nice or seemed to deserve a home. (I have way more horses than this, but they’re boxed in my closet.) At least two are down a foot, and will get clay replacements eventually. I’ll get around to selling the Fashion Star Fillies sooner or later, and donating the golden retrievers as a bundle since I’m just not wild about Barbie pets since the 2000s, but they keep turning up in grab bags. If somebody needs an instant dog collection, though, I can hook you up.

[aprettystrangeblog]

Doctor Strange Cosplay Tutorial (MASTERLIST)

In honor of 2k followers, here’s my Stephen Strange cosplay breakdown! I’ll post my own photos of me in said cosplay when all parts are published!

Intro/Prep

This tutorial is, for the most part, pretty inexpensive and sewing-free, meaning I’m not using any pre-existing patterns and stuff like that! I’m making this specifically for those who don’t have access to sewing machines, don’t want to/don’t know how to sew, and don’t have a lot of money (...or you have a crippling fear of needles, like me). Of course, if you want to get fancy or have your costume last longer/be able to be washed, then you can alter the instructions as you see fit! I’ll be adding little alternative steps here and there if that’s the case, but this costume process runs on hot glue and love, babes! Oh, and a lot of time and patience searching through thrift stores for cheap deals.

This may not be 100% screen-accurate, and I tend to put my own touches on things here and there, so feel free to treat this as just a basic guide and improve upon it yourself if you see fit!

Here’s what you’re definitely going to need, organized by part:

Tools:

Hot glue gun (if you’re morally against sewing or don’t have access to a sewing machine)

Scissors

Seam ripper (or craft knife, or anything that will help you remove existing seams and thread without damaging the fabric/piece itself)

Pins (sewing pins are good, but if you have a massive needle/pricking phobia like me, safety pins are better)

A fabric pencil/chalk/something with which you can trace lines onto fabric and erase them later (NO. PENS. NO!)

Ruler, yard/meter stick, tape measure, whatever you got that can measure distance well

Needle and thread/sewing machine, if you want (you can pretty much universally avoid sewing for this tutorial if you’re creative, but there is one part I would very much recommend sewing)

Something to hang your costume on while you work. Hanger + hook is my go-to, but if you have a mannequin then firstly, what the fuck, and secondly more power to you!

Makeup brushes, cotton balls/cotton swabs, toothpicks/something disposable with a fine point

PART 1: Underclothes

A plain blue collared shirt (your typical collared men’s dress shirt, they’re easy to find at a local thrift store)

Attachments (I found that the cheapest way to attach stuff is velcro, but feel free to go ham with zippers or snaps or even magnets if that’s more your style!

Elastic (the wider the better)

Indigo-colored pants. If you can’t find that stupid off-blue color Strange’s pants are, see if you can snag some white ones and dye them the right color!

Quilt/blanket binding 

PART 2: Arm Wraps

Attachments (again, velcro/elastic is cheap, but go ham with whatever you want)

Several feet of one of the following in dusty blue/grey: ribbon, binding, thin strips of fabric, you get the idea. It should be roughly an inch in width.

Several feet of one of the following in dark brown: ribbon, binding, thin strips of fabric, you get the idea. It should be roughly a half-inch in width, ie a little narrower than the light blue mentioned above.

Multicolored, braided cord (I ended up making my own by braiding several strands of different-colored blue yarn together)

PART 3: Robe

Several yards/meters of loose blue fabric, actual measurements will depend on your size (I found an old, plain tablecloth at a thrift store for like two bucks, but you can also try to find old curtain material, sheets, etc! If you wanna get fancy hit up an actual fabric store for cool fabric, but for the sake of this cheap tutorial I would advise against it)

Thin blanket/quilt binding, preferably a similar shade of blue (y’know the satiny stuff that goes around the edge of blankets/quilts?? Yeah, find some! It’s not super expensive)

Optional: foam or thick fabric to stiffen the shoulders

PART 4: Accessories and Shoes

Old black boots, combat style (again, thrift around! If you have some you actually wear or own, you can use those too-- they won’t be damaged)

Strips of fabric or ribbon in a similar or same color as your annoyingly indigo pants

Roughly four to five belts, more or less depending on availability and your personal preference to how screen accurate you wanna be. Here’s a breakdown if you want the specifics: one wide, main belt, roughly the width of your hand, in brown. Two matching braided belts, also brown. One narrower black belt, looks to be braided leather? And one thicker black & brown leather belt.

Anything else I didn’t specifically mention already, such as small knick-knacks, tassels, chain, or various attachments for the belts if you want them!

Don’t forget your sling ring!

PART 5: Putting It All Together

Undershirt of some kind to protect your costume from sweat (especially if you can’t wash it)

OPTIONAL PART 6: Hands

Drugstore foundation (in the shade of the backs of your hands)

White foundation, eyeliner, whatever you can find

Drugstore blush palette

If you want to do the absolute bare minimum, like a fool, then just get a lip pencil/eyeliner/whatever in a natural, scar-colored shade

Most advanced: invest in some liquid latex

Makeup remover

Optional: black nail polish (not screen accurate, but I like to paint my nails black when cosplaying Stephen because he would Do That™)

[witchyphlossy]

Budget and Broom-Closeted Altar Ideas

So, as someone who is partially broom-closeted, and very much on a budget, let me share some tips I’ve learned with you. It’s sort of long, but I may come back and add more stuff to the list later. :)

1: Candles

White can be substituted for any color candle. Tea candles are super cheap and you can find them almost anywhere, and places like Walmart and the dollar store usually carry tea candles on various colors. My grocery store also carries white wax “emergency candles,” that have a long ass burn life. They’re more pricey but you have a logical reason to buy them (power outages) and you won’t have to buy them as often. Also, birthday candles can be used in a pinch as well. I especially like them for spells that require the candle to burn out entirely (I’m impatient), or for travel altars. You can also purchase candle making kits and claim you’ve developed a new hobby. Candle holders are super abundant at local thrift shops as well.

2: Incense

Not only does the dollar store typically carry some cheap incense and holders, but I noticed last night that my grocery store also carries incense and holders in their floral area! Also, in a pinch, a bowl or candle holder of pebbles or sand works really well for holding incense safely. If incense is too hard to explain, try scented candles, wax warmers, or oil diffusers. They’re all more expensive, but reasonably easy to explain. Also, something to think about: incense can also be found in gift sets with the holder, and sometimes boxes of incense (especially cone) will come with a holder. My box of Nag Champa cones came with a censor.

3: Crystals

So, this one really isn’t all that cheap or easily hidden to be honest (unless you buy a lot from Amazon). There’s some sellers on Amazon that sell bulk gemstone or crystal kits by the pound (either raw or tumbled), generally for less than $30 including shipping. It’s going to be a grab bag and you’re not going to be 100% sure what you’re getting, but it’s affordable as hell compared to buying crystals individually, and they work just as well. I managed to pass mine off as “just decoration,” by throwing them in a decorative glas bowl on my desk shelf. You can also explain having them by developing a new interest in jewelry making or geology, or by possibly putting them in the bottom of a vase of fake flowers. Bonus of keeping them in a bowl? Excellent impromptu incense holder!

4: Bowls, chalices, etc.

Again, this one can be sort of hard to explain. “Why do you have one wine glass?” “Real” chalices are fucking expensive (like I paid $16 for mine from a pagan website). The best place to purchase affordable glassware new is the dollar store. They also sometimes offer china/stoneware (like mugs, plates, etc) too, and usually in a variety of colors. Another place to look is local thrift stores. Frequently mismatched sets of things will be sold (like 5 wine glasses, or pairs). You can purchase the mismatched set and simply use four out of the five, or two out of three etc for kitchen ware, and the odd man out can become your chalice. The same goes for bowls. Single teacups are sold pretty often at thrift stores, and some of them are gorgeous. They can easily be used as offering bowls or chalices. Improvisation is one of the biggest gifts a witch can practice!

5: Bells.

Like chalices, bells can be pricey as hell. Thrift stores tend to carry decorative bells made of glass or porcelain, but..... breakage. Like those sorts of bells aren’t meant for daily ringing, if they’re meant to ring at all. I present to you an alternative: jingle bells. You can ge them extremely cheaply at craft stores, during Christmas in the form of ornaments, and my dollar store carries a children’s toy that’s essentially a Velcro band with jingle bells on it to be worn on the wrist. My first improv Bell was just a bunch of jingle bells wired together around a stick, like a handle. My current travel bell is just a Christmas jingle bell ornament on a ribbon loop. They make a gorgeous tinkling sound, and personally I find them more pleasing to the ear than “real” bells. I also have a friend who uses a triangle (like the instrument) rather than a bell, and I’ve heard of people using xylophones (like childrens toys), whistles, recorders/flutes, or wind chimes.

6: Cauldrons

Again, cauldrons are fucking expensive. Imo, you can’t beat a good cast iron cauldron with a lid. Unless you’re looking specifically for something small, a cast iron bean pot/dutch oven is the way to go. I found mine for $11 on Amazon, and it had prime shipping. Free shipping is great because cast iron is fucking expensive.

7: Color Magick

I can not recommend dyed hemp, yarn, ribbon, and embroidery floss enough. They’re reasonably priced (especially the floss), and so easy to find. I also keep a sewing kit with my travel altar for the thread and pins and such. Also, shop around your local thrift shops. Frequently you can find boxes of “sewing notions,” with thread and yarn and ribbon and such. I also use glass beads for color magick, and I’ve found some stuff like water buffalo teeth and gemstone and shell beads too. I’ve even found coral beads!

8: Herbs

You know what works just as well for magick as those herb packets you buy from pagan shops? Herbs from the grocery store. Not only do almost all stores carry an awesome selection of cooking herbs, but some carry more exotic spices in their international departments. I’ve also found some stuff in the tea aisle, like premixed herbs in herbal tea, straight chamomile, peppermint, etc. For travel altars or discreet storage, I purchased “pill towers,” which are essentially little plastic jars that screw together in a tower that are meant for medications. I bought mine at Walmart, but grocery stores usually also carry pill boxes and such.

[melissahappyplace]

Happy Place:  Gayle Graverson

I met her daughter first.  It was a warm fall day when I met artist, Jessica Graverson Flores, at her home in Bremen, Indiana.  It was a dark, rainy day in early spring when several months later I pulled up to her mom's 1890s farmhouse on 2 acres.  Gayle Graverson lives literally a stone’s throw from her daughter, Jessica, where she resides with husband, Terry, of over 40 years.  As soon as I saw Gayle, I could see how much she looks like her daughter and when I saw her home, I knew they shared the ability to carefully curate a home that reflects their story and makes guests feel welcome at the same time.

Gayle has lived in Bremen all but 3 years of her life.  This is where she raised her 3 children.  She loves the country life - the animals, gardening, bird photography, knitting, spinning, collaging and focusing on her spiritual growth as a woman of faith.  Now empty nesters, Gayle and her husband have 5 grandchildren and enjoy spending their golden years growing vegetables and running their ever-growing dahlia farm with 40 varieties.  They made their old farmhouse into a home over several decades of hard work. 

Gayle and I sat down to chat at the candle lit kitchen table specifically bought to fit her whole family for gatherings.  Purchased at an Amish auction, this is where her family eats, plays games, and spends quality time together.  "We do everything in here around the table," explained Gayle.  There is an original, partially open staircase in view from the table where we sat.  The red risers and shiplap on the walls are not inspired by HGTV.  They are original to the home.  A modern staircase around the corner represents the updates Gayle and her husband have made over the years, but along with the contemporary beauty throughout the home are nods to its historic roots.  Gayle's home is a balanced reflection of the past and the present in its design and the family that has grown inside it.  She explained that her children came down those old stairs on Christmas morning.  And as we chat, it’s clear these types of memories are abundantly present in the furniture and decor throughout Gayle's happy place, her kitchen.

When I asked her why this room brings her joy, she explained, "My kitchen has a long story!  When we moved into our old farmhouse, there was a small enclosed front porch that led into a dining room with a closet.  Through the dining room was a very small galley kitchen that was 5X15.   That front porch, closet and dining room have all been turned into my kitchen!  It still has the original chimney in it from the dining room and the front door is now my kitchen window overlooking the yard.  There have been many remodels over the years.  I love my kitchen because it is where our family congregates most of the time.  We decided to do the last update hoping it is our last one!  Being in a kitchen for 45+ years, I think I was ready to do it right and have everything the way I wanted it.  My daughters and daughter in law helped with keeping it updated along with functional.  Under all the updates, I can still look at it and feel the original parts of it that are gone but not forgotten."  

The framed art by her daughter, Jessica, has been lovingly displayed throughout the kitchen/dining area.  Several features of the kitchen put Gayle in mind of her grandma from the grates under the sink to the aprons laying out, her Grandma's actual rolling pin displayed with a recipe on the counter and one of her grandma's spice jars on a kitchen shelf.  The black and white cat clock with the roaming eyes makes her think of the one her grandma had.  "When I get something, it means something to me" she stated.  A Brewer's Mill flour bag is framed above a cabinet in the dining area because, "my grandpa lived next to Brewer's Mill and I would go down there & Mr. Brewer would come out on the porch of the mill and give us candy."  

Almost every item in Gayle’s' kitchen holds a memory, a story or reflects what she thinks is beautiful.  "When it comes to my home, I do it the way that WE want it.  I don't do it for anyone but us because we are the ones living in it.  If I need something to put on the wall, I wait until I find the perfect thing.  It may take a year or even three years, but I don't decorate my home with anything just to fill in.  It must have meaning.  I must love it; it must tell me a story and spark a memory.  That's why I have a 1935 Magic Chef Stove that I use!"  This is the stove that sparked our meeting.  In December, Gayle's daughter posted a picture of her mom's kitchen on Facebook.  I saw the stove and just knew Gayle was perfect for my Happy Place blog.  This antique stove is another nod to the era she loves, but with a conventional stove and microwave nearby allowing her modern convenience.  

A balance of the past and present, there is an authentic design found throughout Gayle's home.  She loves a cabinet her husband bought her 30 years ago and she is not going to buy something new to replace it just to keep up with fads.  Gayle will add modern features through accessories like pillows and other more affordable, easy to remove items:  "If the colors are changing, change your pillows...don't change your couch."  By sticking with a classic design and easy to remove contemporary touches, she avoids the fad trap.  For example, a rustic, antique butcher block counter with a beautiful bowl full of bright red apples serves as her centerpiece kitchen island.  By having black granite counters that add a modern feel to the kitchen, Gayle has expertly married the old with the new again.

During our time together, we also discussed why a beautiful space matters.  Gayle maintained, "It matters because this is our space, our nest, it's for us.  Not to impress anyone else, but just for us, our friends, visitors and family.  We want people to feel blessed in our home.  We want people to leave feeling warm and welcome.  Beauty isn't exactly perfection or cleanliness.  It is feeling happy in a home and comfortable.  Like you want to stay!  Beauty also matters to me as a woman.  It makes me feel like I can grab a cup of coffee, curl up my feet and smile because I love my home!  It doesn't have to cost a lot.  There are many thrift stores and second hand things that can help you create a home of beauty."  In fact, Gayle has been known to make her own art or a wreathe for her front door.  "Make something yourself and have that self-satisfaction," she suggested.

When your space isn't a happy place for you, Gayle believes there's stress in that and by bringing beauty and order to it you will feel much better:  "When your home is like you want it, you're just less stressed.  You're happier!  If I'm going to be here all the time, I want to love it."  On this point, I turn off the voice recorder app and explore the kitchen in more detail with Gayle as my tour guide and inspiration.

In our modern, complicated and sometimes upsetting world, I wonder how many gentle, loving, authentic people are left . . . then I meet someone like Gayle and step away from the stresses of life into her peaceful Happy Place . . . and I know all is not lost.  Authentic living still exists!  And we can all have the peace found in Gayle's home and kitchen.  We can have this by carefully curating our own Happy Place immune to fads and filled with beautiful items that bring us good memories and spark joyful inspiration.  Don’t wait until you have the money to create the ‘perfect space.’  Life is too short and too full of challenges to wait to have a space to call your own… a space that calls you home to your Happy Place. Make do with the resources you have. As Gayle said, it doesn’t take a lot of money to create a meaningful, beautiful space.  Get creative!  Don't wait until the war is over . . . to go home!  

 More About Gayle  . . .

Gayle has a yarn shop, Loft Art Studio, located in the barn on her property.  You can learn more about it on Facebook by clicking here.  Their dahlias are sold at the Bremen Farmers Market.  Click here to find out when its open.

[theresawelchy]

A Book Review of "Architecting Modern Data Platforms"

In December O'Reilly published Architecting Modern Data Platforms, a 636-page guide to implementing Hadoop projects in enterprise environments. The book was written by four authors, Lars George, Jan Kunigk, Paul Wilkinson and Ian Buss, all of whom either have worked or are currently working at Cloudera.

Cloudera has over 2,700 customers using its Hadoop platform offering and consulting services. 74 of these customers spend more than a million dollars every year with Cloudera. This puts Cloudera's staff in a unique position to discuss the key issues to consider when putting together the architecture of an enterprise data platform.

This book is aimed at IT Managers, Architects, Data Platform Engineers and System Administrators. If your role is supporting a single relational database which lives on a single server this book will do a good job at exposing you to a world where you can increase performance and reliability by adding more computers to your infrastructure. The book is less aimed at Web and Mobile Developers, Project Managers, Product Owners and other roles you might find on data projects. If you're a Data Scientist less interested in the underlying platform and its security then this book might not be for you.

Do note, the chapters in my physical book I ordered from Amazon's UK site don't match those listed on the O'Reilly product page. I have 19 chapters, not 21 and the chapter titles stop matching from chapter 14 onward.

Foreword & Preface

The book starts out with a foreword from Mike Olson, one of the founders of Cloudera, where he discusses how many of the concepts in Hadoop are decades old and only really came to life after Google's need for distributed compute and storage of massive datasets of the web's contents resulted in academic papers which inspired various Hadoop tooling authors.

The book's preface discusses how Big Data solutions have often had to sacrifice some features found in conventional relational databases in order to meet various scaling criteria. It also removes the misconception that many of these tools are schema-less by explaining the concept of "schema on read". The notions that there should be one copy of a dataset and one cluster that it should run forever are also dismissed.

In describing horizontal scaling it's clarified that although commodity hardware is used for infrastructure this doesn't mean the cheapest computers available. It's emphasised that highly efficient networks and storage systems are still key to taking full advantage of the software on offer.

Mike also reminds the reader that the authors of the book are not only practitioners in implementing Hadoop systems, they're also active participants in the open source community as well.

Part I. Infrastructure

The first chapter goes into further detail on how the architecture of Hadoop was inspired by academic papers published by Google in the early 2000s. It then discusses how various Hadoop ecosystem tools share data between one another and how they can control and support one another as well. HDFS, YARN, ZooKeeper, Hive and Spark are central in these descriptions.

There are also lengthy discussions around Impala, HBase and Oozie. The above tools enjoy good support from Cloudera but I'm disappointed to not see more than a few lines describing Presto, Cassandra and Airflow.

Chapter two's topic is cluster infrastructure. It discusses the need for deploying multiple clusters in order to allow for independence and different versions of software to be used. It also discusses the benefits of decoupling storage from compute. There might be a conception that any and all Hadoop tooling you intend to use should be installed on the same cluster but there is a suggestion that HBase and Kafka could live happily on their own clusters and use hardware more tuned to their needs while benefiting from isolated CPU- and disk caches. Multi-tenancy is also discussed in this chapter as well.

Chapter three goes into detail around the Linux API calls being made by various Hadoop tools and what their performance characteristics are like on the underlying CPU, memory, various NUMA configurations, storage devices and file systems. There is mention of various Intel-specific hardware optimisations that Hadoop takes advantage of both for data redundancy and security.

HDFS' architecture and behaviour patterns are described very well and this is probably the best written description of the technology I've come across. Erasure coding and replication is described in detail and is accompanied by detailed diagrams. RAID as a Hadoop anti-pattern is explained well and they don't fail to mention that underlying metadata stores could see resiliency benefits from being stored on certain RAID configurations.

There are several pages going over various storage options and typical server inventory part lists. Page 97 has a chart with compute and I/O intensity levels on the axes and plots of 20 workloads showing where they sit relative to one another on these two metrics. For example, data cleansing is neither compute nor storage intensive, graph processing is very compute intensive while needing very little I/O, sorting is I/O intensive and shouldn't be bottlenecked by compute capacity and large SQL joins can often be both compute- and I/O-bound.

There is a discussion around what roles various servers could play in small, medium and large clusters. Pages 102 and 103 contain diagrams suggesting which servers within two racks should house which Hadoop services in a hypothetical 200-node cluster.

Chapter four focuses on networking. It starts out explaining how Hadoop's tools use remote procedure calls (RPC) for monitoring, consensus and data transfers. There is a table on page 108 describing the client-server and server-server interactions for ZooKeeper, HDFS, YARN, Hive, Impala, Kudu, HBase, Kafka and Oozie.

Latency and how it does or doesn't affect various systems within Hadoop is discussed on page 109. Data shuffles are discussed over three pages with two helpful diagrams. Consensus and quorum-based majority voting systems and a lengthy discussion on networking topologies complete the chapter.

Chapter five discusses the various roles that can exist in a Hadoop project. It gives an example scenario of a typical business intelligence project. There are helpful diagrams outlining what sort of width and depth of the skill spectrum would be expected of various roles including Architects, Analysts, Developers and Administrators.

Chapter six covers data centre considerations. This book does discuss the Cloud at length but that's later on in the book. Cloudera has a sizeable number of clients running their offerings on bare metal so they're in a good position to give opinion and guidance on what to look out for when you're renting or buying the hardware your Hadoop cluster runs on.

Part II. Platform

Chapter seven discusses operating system configuration considerations to make when setting up a cluster. SELinux, Firewalls and Containers and their relationship with various Hadoop tools are discussed. This is one of the few chapters that has command line examples and they're geared towards those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Chapter eight discusses platform validation. It goes into detail around smoke, baseline and stress testing the hardware you're using for your cluster. Both disk caches and network latency are well explained in this chapter. There is short mention of benchmarks like TPC-DS.

Chapter nine focuses on security. In-flight encryption, authentication and authorisation as well as how these are addressed in Hadoop's KMS, HDFS, HBase, Kafka, Hive, Solr, Spark, Kudu, Oozie, ZooKeeper and Hue.

Kerberos is very well described which is very rare to come across. It explains how one Kerberos KDC can be configured to trust another without the other needing to reciprocate that trust as well as how long-running applications can be setup to use Keytabs as Kerberos tickets are time-limited.

Kerberos expertise is very expensive to bring in on a consulting basis and there isn't anything that handles authentication across as many Hadoop projects as Kerberos does. Enterprises don't just open up Hadoop clusters to their entire internal network nor do they commonly run air-gapped environments so this chapter alone pays huge dividends.

There is also a long discussion on encryption at rest and the trade-offs between full volume encryption, HDFS transparent data encryption and other service-specific configurations.

Chapter ten discusses integration with identity management providers. There is a lot of discussion around Kerberos in this chapter as well as Hadoop-specific certificate management with configuration examples and example OpenSSL commands.

Chapter eleven discusses how to control access to cluster software. There are tables detailing which pieces of software support REST, Thrift, JDBC, ODBC and which support a Web UI. Various access topologies are offered as inspiration of how one might want to setup their specific implementation. Proxies and Load Balancers are discussed at length as well.

Chapter twelve discusses high availability. This chapter is 47 pages long and goes into setting up redundancy in hardware and software using both active-active and active-passive setups for most Hadoop-related software and their dependencies.

Chapter thirteen discuses backups. There are a lot of different systems in a Hadoop that store data and state and each need to be taken into consideration when planning how you'll back up a whole cluster.

If you were to restore a non-trivial amount of data you'd need to consider how quickly the data could be transferred from another location and what sort of bottlenecks hardware might impose. There is also discussion around taking snapshots versus replicating changes and whether or not you should consider replicating deletes as well as additions to your system.

It would have been nice if Cloudera got one of their petabyte-plus clients to sign off on a short case study on how they've setup and had to use one of their backups.

Part II. Taking Hadoop to the Cloud

Chapter fourteen discusses virtualisation. There is an important concept discussed called "Anti-Affinity Groups". The idea is that you don't want to place cluster nodes that are meant to complement high availability on the same physical machine. If all the ZooKeeper nodes in a quorum are on one physical server and that machine or its rack goes down then there will be total loss of consensus. Likewise, if you have 20+ hard drives connected to your cluster via a single physical cable then scaling I/O horizontally could be bottlenecked and all storage will share a single point of failure.

Chapter fifteen discusses solutions for private cloud platforms. There is a lot in this chapter trying to persuade readers to not try and reinvent their own version of Amazon EMR. OpenStack and OpenShift are discussed as well as life cycles, automation and isolation. This is one of the shortest chapters in the book.

Chapter sixteen discusses solutions for public cloud platforms. This chapter goes over the managed Hadoop offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. They go over storage and compute primitives and then discuss ways of setting up high availability.

With these services it can be difficult to know if two nodes in your cluster live on the same physical machine but they suggest using different instances sizes as a way of trying to avoid having a common underlying machine. There are a few other suggestions for trying to get different physical servers for any one cluster.

All three cloud providers offer blob storage as a way of decoupling compute and storage but they aren't completely comparable to one another. The major differences are discussed.

Default service limits are also highlighted. If you're planning on setting up a large Hadoop cluster or many small ones there are a lot of default account limits you'll have to request increases for from your provider.

Page 474 shows a chart with compute capacity on one axis and memory capacity on the other. Across the chart they've plotted where various workloads would sit as well as where various compute instance types of AWS, GCP and Azure would live. For example, Complex SQL predicates are both compute- and memory-intensive and AWS' c5.9xlarge, GCP's n1-highcpu-64 and Azure's F64s_v2 might be good candidates for running this sort of workload. This reminds me of Qubole's "Presto performance across various AWS instance types" blog post.

This chapter does mention Cloudera CDH and Hortonworks HDP (which is used by Azure's HDInsight) on a few occasions as well.

Chapter seventeen covers automated provisioning. They make a good suggestion early on that Kerberos and bind as a well as IAM identities and firewall rules should probably be setup separately to any "Hadoop infrastructure as code" / PaaS provisioning. They also discuss considerations for safely scaling your clusters down when demand fades.

There is a section on "transient clusters" where a user submits a job as a workload and a cluster is provisioned for that job and destroys itself afterword. There isn't a lot of detail into how the architecture of this specific setup would work but they do mention the three big cloud providers, their Cloudera Altus offering and Qubole as providers that could help with this sort of workload.

Though this chapter focused more on listing features you might want to think about in your implementation rather than giving concrete code examples, Puppet, Ansible and Chef are mentioned early on.

Chapter eighteen discusses security in the cloud and has an excellent introduction. It states not knowing where your data is can be disconcerting. They discuss risk models, identity, connectivity and key management at length. They go so far as to state or try and guess the underlying hardware providers for the three major cloud vendors' key vault solutions.

There's discussion of service accounts for using Google Cloud Storage via HDFS' CLI and generating temporary security credentials for AWS S3 via the AWS CLI. There's also a reasonable amount of content discussing GDPR, US national security orders and law enforcement requests.

One great tip mentioned is that when you're using HDFS' encryption at rest and you delete someone's details from a dataset on a cluster, their data was possibly only unlinked from metadata describing where it is on the disk, not fully scrubbed away. If the disks go missing but without the metadata then the original data will only exist in as an encrypted blob on the physical disks and won't be recoverable without the original metadata and cryptographic keys.

The above could go some way to making an implementation compliant with GDPR's right to be forgotten with little effort being put into the infrastructure setup. Typically databases unlink rather than scrub so "deletes" aren't deletes and the original data might be recoverable.

I think there was a lost opportunity to discuss the threat of uncovering secrets in the history of git repositories used by an implementation team. It would be great to see a git bisect command example using Lyft's high-entropy-string to see if any developers accidentally committed credentials, removed them with another commit and failed to rotate or destroy those credentials afterword.

Final Thoughts

I'll first mention a few complaints about this book.

First complaint, the sales pitch for Hadoop's strengths is missing from this book. If you're pitching an architecture to a client you need to have arguments for why your software choices are better than anything else out there. Hortonworks staff have publicly stated that there are 600 PB+ HDFS clusters in operation. It's likely that only Google has authored software that supports single clusters with a capacity greater than this. The in-memory nature of a HDFS Name Node means it's possible to support 60K concurrent HDFS requests. A few pages on why Hadoop is still a good idea in 2019 would have been greatly appreciated.

Second complaint, this book doesn't pick-and-mix much outside of Cloudera's core software library they commercially support. There are open source projects not all affiliated with the Hadoop brand that can greatly enhance a Hadoop setup. A lot of firms that aren't Hadoop-focused businesses build a lot of useful tools for the ecosystem. It's a shame to not see more mentioned of Facebook, Uber, AirBNB and Netflix-lead projects in this book.

EMR, Dataproc and HD Insights are covered but other providers, like Confluent, Databricks and Qubole either aren't mentioned or only very sparingly. Hortonworks, which merged with Cloudera in 2018, are mentioned when they offer a competing solution.

Hortonworks helped out Facebook a lot with the ORC file format research they needed a few years back and since Cloudera merged with Hortonworks last year I can't see how this case study can't be owned and proudly discussed in one of the very few Hadoop books of 2018.

If the scope of the book needs to be limited then I can understand that but I've had enterprise clients comparing columnar file formats, asking how many files on HDFS will be too much and wanting some assurances that a reasonable number of providers have been considered to some extent.

A lot of companies that compete with one another also work together on all of the open source software in the Hadoop ecosystem. It would be nice to see if the other firms could volunteer an engineer or three to offer some expertise for comparisons. There aren't a lot of good Hadoop books released so it's an important occasion to try and make it as complete as possible.

All the above said, Netflix's Iceberg project was mentioned in chapter 19 which was nice to see but it would be nicer to see a larger catalogue of these complementary projects.

Third complaint, there should have been a chapter on orchestration. Apache Airflow has the momentum and the huge addition of value that Spark had a few years ago. I've never worked on a data project that didn't need to move data around in an observable fashion. Orchestration is mentioned but not enough given how central it is to data platforms.

Fourth complaint, there's no "Future Features of Hadoop" chapter in this book. Ozone will help break the 500 million file count barrier in HDFS and potentially allow for trillions of files of all sizes to be stored using HDFS primitives. This system will have an AWS S3 API-compatible interface which will make it easy to develop for and add support to existing applications. A third of the commits to the Hadoop git repository over the past few months have been Ozone-specific and I suspect this could be the biggest new feature of Hadoop this year.

With the complaints out of the way...

If you're only going to buy a single book and then supplement its teachings by going through JIRAs, examine source code, read blogs and run examples in VMs then this book is the most complete I've seen when it comes to covering the major sections of a data platform project using the Hadoop ecosystem of software. The topics discussed are all talking points I've had when consulting for large clients. Use this book as your roadmap.

The lack of command line and configuration examples does make this book more information-dense while not potentially out-dating itself too quickly. The English language can be a lot more powerful than pages of depreciated commands and poorly-formatted XML.

Before publishing this post I checked Amazon's UK site and there are 3rd-party suppliers selling this book brand new for £37. I believe the knowledge I've picked up from reading this book should produce an amazing return on the investment.

DataTau published first on DataTau

[itschloegao-blog]

Faustine Steinmetz

Faustine Steinmetz has utilized workmanship exhibit– style introductions to grandstand her work. She gets her trademark revised denim under way today with her first runway appear at London Fashion Week. It was promptly certain, nonetheless, that Steinmetz wouldn't restrict herself to pants. Faustino Steinmetz is known for her unendingly imaginative routes with textures — particularly denim — and specifically the pieces she made from reused pants. This season, Steinmetz said she needed to investigate denim "as a medium, as opposed to only a bit of apparel."

           The plans extended from the wearable to one-off, artier pieces. In the previous camp was a shirtdress in ombré shades of white and blue denim, weaved with Steinmetz's name rehashed as a logo. Also, in the last was a couple of pants tidied with a great many small blue Swarovski precious stones that resembled particles of clean, with shards of the clear gem at the belt (Coddington 2015).

           Her capturing introduction during the RTW Spring 2017 show saw models lying in the white recessed specialties of dividers set up in the Topshop indicate space in Old Spitalfields Market, their appearances painted brilliant blue, as though they were powerful animals. They wore unpredictably made denim pieces, roused, Steinmetz stated, by "the impact of light on a couple of pants.

           Faustine Steinmetz makes another specialty of mold from her East London studio. The Parisian creator twists, colors and meshes her textures into reconsidered famous pieces: the kind everybody has in their closet amid their life. Be that as it may, each of these pieces has been made carefully by hand, at times taking an entire week to mesh and bring into being (Shulman 2017).

            Steinmetz is a piece of another millennial monitor of originators in London stepping toward the runway. In the same way as other of her companions, her perspective is furiously ground breaking and unique. Notwithstanding hacked up business shirts and logo tees, there was a progression of slyly upset pants and denim coats, a gaze that additionally rose toward the turn of the thousand years. Regardless of whether they were layered up with paint or fit together with tons of little trailing cotton strands, the "pants" she indicated were out of this world uncommon and extraordinary. With a different throwing that included models of all shapes, sizes, hues, and ages.

              Steinmetz's strategy doesn't refute a business display. Indeed, she considers this accumulation her most business yet. "I surmise that is the reason I'm so content with this accumulation. What a great many people will wear is a typical match of pants. We're making reused denim – old of pants, improved with a little bend. However, when I do insane textures, individuals need them as well. So all my hand-woven things, the silicone, I chose not to bargain anymore and simply do what I need (Shulman 2017).

           The Parisian ability talks about the initiation of her line much the same as the decision to bring a tyke into the world: "It began truly when I contemplated making my name. As an individual, I didn't observe the issue excessively—I was reusing and stuff. However there's just so much you can do—yet when I needed to make my mark, I thought, That's a significant huge duty in case you will create." notwithstanding feel-great public statements and activities, there's something especially invigorating about Steinmetz's image of authenticity

(Dennison 2014). She thinks of her as garments that of an extravagance form mark as a matter of first importance, and feasible second.

Another type of form principle of Faustine is putting morals at the core of all that they do. Never again is manageability and social duty a token additional or negative showcasing ploy. The most intelligent brands are the ones making full obligation regarding each stride of the procedure, from the provider to the producer – and sometimes the aftercare of the item, as well. These are planners intrigued by quality, never amount – an era making garments we will esteem, that will influence us to devour less and settle on an ideal decision when we do.

                       At the point when Faustine Steinmetz learned how to weave, it seemed to be an endeavor to generate fabric that was not like the various material on the high road. If you would burn through cash on a thing of attire, she figured, it would feel extraordinary. Equipped with a couple of good YouTube about recordings, she initially examined herself on how to weave her particular rendition of and the famous Adidas tracksuit（Blanchard,T). She at that point proceeded onward to a couple of pants before propelling her particular gathering in 2013. She jumps at the chance to influence common garments to feel – and look – unprecedented. The picture below shows one of the shows she presented back in the year 2013 in London. She was promoting one of the famous lady fashion and hair styles.

           At the point when individuals discuss us and maintainability, they say this is because we weave manually and never utilize power. For her, it's all the more encouraging in making garments that take longer time than using the electrical sewing machines to make the garments. The extra consumption is the most exceedingly bad thing which is occurring on the planet at this moment." Steinmetz does not claim to deliver an economical mold mark, in spite of the fact that it is a long haul objective. "From the minute you deliver a bit of attire it isn't reasonable itself. Nothing is 100% feasible, yet you can simply endeavor to do as well as can be expected.

           For the Selfridges window, Faustine Steinmetz is concentrating on them denim. Faustine banded together with the Spanish denim processing plant, Royo, which was named as an eco-economical organization in 2012 by the Oeko-Tex Association. Faustine likewise takes a shot at other options to cowhide. Faustine loves the thoughts of individuals purchasing less and purchasing all the more attentively. Faustine calls it negligible purchasing. Faustine dispatched her e-shop one year later, and pieces were made to arrange and will arrive in a documenting parcel to be put away with a couple of other negligible items bought (T Blanchard 2017). It's another method for purchasing. It just makes you more joyful because you purchase something you truly like as opposed to going to Primark and purchasing heaps of easily overlooked details you don't like. Individuals have lost sparing cash to purchase decent garments.

           Faustine Steinmetz does not make a major issue of her qualifications as a dependable disapproved of form architect. Faustine distinctive image it bodes well that she should get the crude materials from providers she is familiar with, especially because that raw material is cowhide. "A calfskin which is hand-woven is the trademark of the organization. They convert the cowhide into an alternate surface with smocking, weaving, gap punching and interwoven.

           The animal skin is not a maintainable raw material, Faustine Steinmetz said, who has explained that she been working for as far back a couple of years with the Center for Sustainable Fashion to influence her fashion business activities as straightforward. Faustine says that she uses the left residuals of the meat business, once in a while working specifically with slaughterhouses (Coddington 2015). "It is essential for me. I don't work with hiding or extraordinary cowhides – for the most part, sheep, sheep, and dairy animals.

Faustine's social and natural soul is at the center of what she does. However, it doesn't bring down her inventiveness. For this season, she says she is truly content with her gathering. It is extremely engaged. She added floor covering making to her collection of hand specialties and her show pieces would incorporate a couple of pants with an undulating scene of hand cut, hand-circled cover in rich shades of blue.

           ­­­­­­

 Faustine Steinmetz Spring/Summer 2015 Ready-To-Wear Collection

 The pants and-denim based looks of the spring accumulation are made out of a texture which Faustine has made herself in the studio. The material? Old denim pants found at thrift stores. She has disentangled the old pants into strings – just to meshed them once again into a new texture. New pants. We removed the yarn from old sets, at that point we unpicked them and refelted them into a new texture that turned into these new jeans. Normally, it takes between three days and a month to make a couple of Faustine Steinmetz pants. These assumed control over a month to do, per piece.

           Denim, which is one of the principle components in Faustine Steinmetz's accumulations, is the aftereffect of association with Spanish denim process Royo who have been delivering and reusing denim for the greater part a century. Faustine was assigned for LVMH Prize and British Fashion Awards (however tragically, didn't win). In the dismissal of "quick design," she twists, colors and weaves all her particular textures – by hand. What's more, she doesn't utilize such troublesome procedures to make excessive garments; she utilizes them to make ordinary ones. She said it herself that her principle motivation is standard individuals in regular day to day existence. A standout amongst the most critical things is that Steinmetz is hyper-mindful of our approaching ecological fate, she is tied in with reusing and sparing water. Making her SS16 collections, Faustine drew motivation from two specialists - Joseph Kosuth and Salvador Dali. She has concentrated on the transformative components show in Dali's work. Likewise, Kosuth's work incites her to address regular standards and demonstrate the easygoing watcher articles in the sporadic state(Casely-hayford A,2015).

           The specifics of her stripe of manageability change from the season. For Fall, every last bit of her denim pieces was 50 percent reused denim, and all the water utilized as a part of re-pulping those old Diesel and G-Star sets was reused, because of her organization with a sizable production line with that kind of limit(Anderson K). By the day's end, however, Steinmetz is essentially worried about debilitating overconsumption: Rather than purchase, say, three shabby coats, perhaps you put resources into one of her delightfully cobwebby styles, apparently as much a gem as it is a piece of clothing.

           Steinmetz's peculiar, handcraft-serious ethos isn't without its offer of faultfinders, especially in a mold scene that is more deals arranged than any other time in recent memory. As even settled houses turn up disillusioning benefits, developing architects are, should we say, emphatically urged to ensure their brands are fittingly retail-confronting.

           In spite of Steinmetz's moderate design approach, her latest shabby Monday cooperation—a unisex six-piece case accumulation (with two new styles yet to come) of annihilated denim coats, shirts, pants, and extras—fills in as additional confirmation of her fast achievement. At 30, the French originator is keen, wise, and inquisitive. In any case, don't be tricked by her sweet-sounding voice—she's a straightforward faultfinder with regards to disposable culture.

           Note that Steinmetz has been a London transplant as far back as her understudy days at Central Saint Martins (she holds a graduate degree from the esteemed school). Her studio is a recovered wood production line in North London. It's a calm yet reasonable space for the creator's sizeable weaving machines string group of three—the ideal place for a developing fashioner. Past the intermittent episode of understudies, Steinmetz has no plans to up her speed. Talking via telephone, the test architect speaks sincerely about shabby Monday; she once dressed as a massive chav.

           Faustine's work starts with an exemplary shape, for example, a smaller than usual skirt or denim coat, she builds pieces, joining however many distinctive materials and systems as could be expected under the circumstances. "It resembles crafted work by a painter; she makes the visual, to begin with, at that point she includes the detail with a needle." She revises texture, making a surface with work serious strategies, for example, hand weaving, weaving. The level material is changed into a right around the three-dimensional model, in one accumulation she cut second-hand pants into different unsettled strips, making a 'denim-hide' coat.

           Each buy accompanies a remarkable number which enables the purchaser to check precisely how the article of clothing is made. On the off chance that you purchase a made-to-arrange piece, the well-ordered subtle elements of the creation procedure are sent to you. Faustine needs to guarantees that her customers know precisely where, how and by whom her gathering is created.

             References

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Anderson T (2016) https://www.vogue.com/article/faustine-steinmetz-designer-sustainable-fashion

Casely-Hayford A(2015) http://www.hungertv.com/feature/lfw-ss16-faustine-steinmetz/