#there's hand embroidery all over it

[immortalsins]

glad i had 3 glasses of wine tonight because my dad just gave me my great-grandmother’s bunad (norwegian national costume). didn’t give me a warning just hit me with this

[anbaisai]

Happy belated birthday Jamil! I hope you know just how loved you are ❤🐍

[likethevalley]

The jackalope jacket, front and back of the sleeve.

[rivilu]

I DID IT!

A lad you can definitely trust to lead your adventure

[starlight---starbrights]

Undertale yellow flowey embroidery

This took about 40 hours, give or take a few

[sysig]

I’m turning you all into marketable plushies, you watch (Patreon)

Bonus eyes because embroidery brain:

[eyebagstudio]

Some recent eyeballs 👁️👁️👁️

[theworldisabrokenbonebutitishome]

Guardian Bingo Fest fill for the prompt 'Fluff'.

It was always going to be my beloved Da Qing <3

I have never attempted needle felting before just in case that isn't glaringly obvious and clearly have a very long way to go but it was fun! I didn't realise the wool would be so bad at shedding but I guess that makes it an even more perfect medium to make a cat out of. Stabbing things is very therapeutic, even if sometimes the thing getting stabbed is my fingers. The light in this house is awful but I'm impatient so photos out in the snow it is. Fourth photo is purely to show off the 3dness of the piece because I love it, the ears!!

[lizzstitch]

I simply don't know what I would do if this man brought me flowers, I'd probably just die

[visgae]

I'm very normal about nettles. I found a patch of winter retted nettles that were the perfect level of dead for fibre extraction! Will do an update video about what I make with it soon :)

[bhaalsdeepbat]

Going to preface this by saying I love Tailor Astarion, these are just some thoughts I'm having tonight

I don't think Astarion would be able to make garments, beyond eying something he owns and replicating it. I think embroidery served a purpose and it was an outlet that took up minimal space, plus easier to store in a chest. The room the...less favored Spawn share isn't that large. It would just feel smaller as more spawn were introduced to their corner of hell.

It's also one of those cases where I'm not certain if he would genuinely enjoy the craft or not, since it less seems a skill developed with love and more like a necessary skill. It doesn't seem he cares as much for it if he's adventuring (based on his doublet having paint instead of embroidery at the epilogue party), but that also checks out for needing a break from something you did that you enjoyed while in a traumatic situation bc it reminds you of that trauma when you try to get back to it.

But he absolutely knows he is not your guy for anything complicated but would want to pull an Emperor's New Clothes situation for anyone who tried to make him do work for them

[be-good-to-bugs]

i am so so tired lately

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[sysig]

what's your favorite part about making art?

Getting it out of my head (lol)

To give a more complete answer haha, each step has its own charm! Sketching is nice to have it Out of me, alleviates the itch of having a Thought or Feeling that just needs to be Out and onto paper already

If I'm drawing digitally, lining has gotten rather meditative, or if my sketches are particularly scribbly then it's like a puzzle haha

Toning on paper is a fun exercise in tool usage - I have specific pencils I switch back and forth between to get The Effect I'm looking for, or filling in with the same pencil for the whole piece is nice to just have it done all at once, it's satisfying both ways

Editing has kinda fallen by the wayside for me lately (as evidenced by my lack of uploads - I keep wanting to share, but there's a stopper in my brain that says "No, they're Not Done!" which is like......half correct? It's done when I say it's done, but they haven't been edited "properly" so) but it also has its good points! It took a bit to find the fun again because editing is definitely Not my favourite part of the process - it's not Creative or Exciting or Expressive in the same way as the other steps but it is something I can do for my art that makes it appear how my hand, eye, and brain want it to - my hand is messy, my eye is very particular, and my brain parses between the two, takes away the lines that muddle the final image until there's only The Picture left :) And sometimes it's all I have the energy for! Sometimes all I can do is take my backlog and make it pretty rather than make something new - but it's still Making Art :)

The only part I really don't like is scanning lol, it's just annoying, why can't my pictures be uploaded in perfect quality directly from my sketchbook to my computer haha

And most of this is to do with drawing since it's still my main art form, but a lot of the same applies to writing and papercraft and whatever else I try my hand at - it's nice to Have and Do and see where it gets me :)

I'm doing well! I've been writing more than - ever? I think? I think this is officially my up-to-now peak of Finished Writing by wordcount and time spent on it lol, it's been very fun!! And also a little overwhelming haha I still haven't quite found a New Normal about it, it being The Most haha, but I want to work towards that balance! More practice means more time to implement it so lol

[ilookattextile]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[arsenicflame]

It used to be that he and Ed would sit together upon an evening, sharing a drink and some quiet time together after a long day. Ed would do all manner of things, puzzles, smoking, whatever's captured his attention at this moment- but Izzy would always do the menial tasks, the things he didn't have time for in his day, too busy running around from dawn till dusk. But in these quiet moments, he would get to do those small things, he'd get to turn his brain off and sharpen knives, or blacken leathers, but most often, he'd do the mending.

It became such routine that Ed stops noticing, it becomes just another thing Izzy does for him, another part of his job, add it to the list.

Eventually, as their relationship breaks down, they stop having their evenings together. But Izzy never stops mending Ed's clothes. He brings the pile back to his room, working by the light of a candle, returning the clothes before Ed ever notices they're gone. It continues even on The Revenge, Izzy scooping up Ed's repairs as he spends time distracted by Stede, by the crew, by his rediscovered zest for life. All the while Izzy goes on unnoticed, declaring his love in every stitch.

When things settle down after the reunion, Izzy starts picking up Stede's mending. He picks it up before he restarts with Ed's, still (justifiably) angry at everything that happened. But Izzy's duty has always been to his captain, and Stede's his captain now, even if he might not be ready to say it out loud.

He drags the clothes to his room, at first, things damaged in their sword fighting training and found in their raids, but Stede's way more aware than Ed, especially about his clothes, especially when he has so few, and he notices the repairs quickly. It takes him a lot longer to pick up that its Izzy doing it, assuming its the usual Frenchie / Wee John repair team, but one night Ed's telling tales from his past, and his nights together with Izzy come up, and it all clicks.

Stede wont stand for Izzy doing the mending in that tiny cabin of his, and drags him back up to the captains cabin. Its awkward at first, with tensions still running so high between all of them. The obvious issues with Ed and Izzy, the yet unspoken words between Ed and Stede, and the now new bond between Izzy and Stede that has this sitting between them- the fact that Izzy did it, and the fact that Stede noticed.

It was never a thing he and Ed addressed and Izzy doesn't quite know what to do with himself, with Stede taking an active interest in what he's doing- to be fair, Stede doesn't know what to do either. Even if he never said it in as many words, Ed's story showed him the sentimentality of this for Izzy, and he doesn't quite know how to react to this being offered to him- of Izzy offering this to him- he doesn't even know if Izzy truly understands the weight of why he does this, but Stede, looking in from the outside can see the meaning plain as day.

All he knows is that he likes it and he wants more- and maybe he wants more from Izzy in other ways too. Having him sat on their sofa with their mending, a kind of domestic bliss that he never had, but is maybe beginning to realise he wants. Its never like that with Ed, they feed off each others energy too much, get too amped up, but here, with Izzy, he can sit in complete silence but know he's not alone.

The first time he kisses Izzy is on one of those nights. He's just finished fixing Stede's favourite shirt and offered it to him to check over and Stede all of a sudden finds that he's unable to help himself, pulls Izzy down by that fucking necktie and kisses him so hard it knocks his glasses askew- things progress quickly after that.

After, Ed will be told what happened. After, Stede and Ed will stop dancing around where they stand. After, Ed and Izzy will finally talk about all the things they never said.

It ends much as it starts, with them sat together on an evening, with a drink or a book, chatting and laughing, with a pile of mending, fixed with love.

imagine izzy pulling out that sailor’s sewing kit and quietly mending stede’s torn clothes, without being asked to. this is something he did for ed all the time (ed Can sew but he gets too restless so it never gets done) and now it’s what he does for stede. stede loses his mind in a combination horny/sentimental way.