Japanese artist Nana Akua photographed her grandmother's embroidery folk art called Temari.
A colourful thread-wrapped & embroidered temari ball is given as a token of love and good luck to family and friends.
Western Cree & French settler ancestry living in Canada. Also a partial hand #amputee An ability I call my super power.
My blog timeline will be #indigenous related. Various tidbits of life here and there. Mainly a lighthearted escape. I enjoy sharing people's creativity and expression.
Today I was one of many who helped save two trucks of "we don't know how many" coming from a warehouse full of textiles that was going to be dumped. It was mostly lingerie fabric and trims, all perfectly good and usable. This is why I volunteer at the Lair! So much good shit is sent to landfill and we see .000000001% of it! If that!
I'm not mad at the people clearing the warehouse - it's a sad backstory and it must happen all the time. This is why community is vital, we need to link up and distribute resources that would otherwise be sent to the tip. With these resources we can share low cost and free items that help people make stuff they don't have to buy. We can take down capitalism... Well... A little bit of it.
Witch: I see you are desperate. Yes. I will teach you how to make dresses, but this skill will come with a terrible price.
Me: Anything! What is it?!
Witch: You will have to hem them.
Me: That doesn't seem that bad.
Later, at a sewing machine:
Me: That bitch.
[In the distance the witches' cackle carries on the wind.]
After reading @pluralistic's latest piece on planned obsolescence as technofeudalism, I stumbled across this Tumblr post about how a rusty old 100-year-old Singer sewing machine can be restored to FEARSOME, SUPERIOR working order compared to any newish machine, by swapping in standard-sized parts that attach with standard flat-head screws
Meanwhile the modern machine's plastic parts wear out quickly and very little is attached with standard screws. It also depends on software that's now glitching
Did you already know every single garment you wear (with the possible exceptions of socks and some machine knit tops) was made by human hands, by a human? Somebody sat in what was likely a grim or bland factory and made that thing. Unless you made that thing yourself!
In which case you also know what a fucking hassle it is to hem a button up shirt nicely when the button placket is even a little bit thick, fuck.
Pay humans more to sew!
There’s an epic thread trimming session ahead of me yet, but Jorge’s denim vest is otherwise complete! Even I am impressed with all of this deco stitching. Whereas the vest itself used up less than a whole bobbin, the deco stitching used over six bobbins’ worth of thread. A new personal record. #sewing#tailoring#couture#MenWhoSew#artist#lgbt#ElfkinLaunch
Members of the #sewing hive mind in the general vicinity of Los Angeles, I have a request for assistance. Do you have a sewing machine that you're not currently using? Would you be willing to loan it out for couple of months?
I'm going to be teaching a sewing class at the local trans community center soon, and we need machines for folks to use. I'm looking for about 8 machines. Old is okay.
PSA: If you want to learn how to sew clothes (or housewares) you need this book, “Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Sewing.” If you know a kid who wants to learn to sew, please buy them a copy. Want to know how to sew a waistband? It explains 11 types. Mine is copyright 1978. The new versions are textbook prices, but the old ones are cheap, and sewing techniques haven’t changed much over time. If I had a copy growing up, I would have been sewing my own clothes twenty years sooner. #sewing
After several failed attempts using a complicated technique, I successfully sewed a simple pattern to make a SMD resistor phone case. I forget to fully include the seam allowance in the size computation, so it just barely fits my phone. It makes a nice set along with my PTH resistor glasses case! #sewing#sewingproject
I guess instance migration is a good time for an #Introduction post. Hello lovely people, I'm here both as a scientific researcher and as a human being, and you can expect a range of genres of posts and interactions from me.
On the work side, I'm a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the field of biological X-ray crystallography, specifically at free electron lasers. It's a glorious interdisciplinary mess, and the description I give to non-scientists is that i use my degree in chemistry to write software to do math that models the physics of experiments that we're running to learn about biology.
For fellow structural biologists: I work on crystallography data reduction software for the steps between photons hitting the detector and a merged set of structure factors. I also support XFEL experiments, both on site and remotely, and assist in post-experiment data processing as needed. My PhD focused on using simultaneous XFEL crystallography and XES spectroscopy to probe the water splitting reaction in oxygenic photosynthesis. I did a postdoc in computational methods development for cryoEM, and I'm now back to XFEL crystallography but still in methods development.
For fellow software developers: all of our work is open source and mostly under the cctbx project/repo. It's mostly python with a bunch of C++ under the hood (including some low-level stuff redundant with scipy and numpy because those weren't around yet!), plus a user-facing wxPython GUI. More recently we've done a ton of work with GPU acceleration (using Kokkos, for NVIDIA, Intel and AMD architectures) and scaling up at three different national labs' supercomputing centers in anticipation of next-gen experimental capabilities. I derive too much joy from writing bash-sed-awk monstrosities on the occasions we need them to fix an urgent problem during an experiment, and I guess I'm most proud of the fact that I somewhat understand git.
As far as hobbies, the longest-standing one is probably #coffee, followed closely by #language (s) / #languageLearning and a love of #patterns and #symmetry in various contexts. I have too many different ways of making coffee (they have overrun my coffee cupboard), but my favorite remains the classic latte, and by now I can make a better latte than I can buy. I'm trying to refresh my #Japanese and learn #Dutch and #German simultaneously/comparatively, which of course is terrible for speed of learning, but fascinating. So far I've found #ASL the most challenging but also deeply satisfying -- I only have one semester under my belt but hope to take a lot more. I studied and continue to study all the #math and #science I possibly can. Right now I seem to be pretty engrossed in #electronics, #CAD, #3DPrinting, and just generally #DIY-ing/fixing/repairing things. Other active interests include #sewing, #reading, #cooking, #bike commuting, and #publicTransit. My journeys in #aikido and #pottery are on hold but I definitely want to pick them back up when I'm not already overcommitted. I'm casually interested in #neurophilosophy, #neuropsychology, #neurodivergence and #neuroscience. I've taken one course in neurophilosophy and can read literature in the rest, with effort.
On a personal note, I'm trans and nonbinary and very open about it -- I transitioned back when I had to explain what that meant. I've retired from some forms of community engagement and support but I'm very happy to answer any questions I can about the US legal and medical landscapes, available resources, policy and terminology best practices, or whatever you know you shouldn't ask [person in your life].
Finally, I spend a lot of time with my cat Rory (pictured), who is perfect and the most affectionate creature I have ever met. I promise to share photos of him from time to time.
So very pleased with how this bag came out. If I was ever to make it again, I would have matched the brown leather top stitching thread. I thought I'd like the contrast look, and I don't hate it, but matching hides a multitude of sins.
Still, this piece is a beautiful bag that is going to last me a long time.
Harris Tweed (did you know it's a protected fabric, like champagne?) and leather. With a fun canvas lining.
I finally found a good offer for a hand-cranked grinder on the local classifieds. The seller didn't know the model, but the "Ixion" logo was still recognizable to me – an old German make, probably from the 1930s, that usually goes for twice the asking price… 🙂
It only needed a bit of light clean up with soap and a wire brush. The insides were still good as new, but the screw hole holding the hand crank tight needed a small reminder that it once was an M5 thread… #HandTools#ToolRestoration