heroes-of-scarif: greysummers: i would kill a man for

via http://ift.tt/2iwmTKC:
heroes-of-scarif:

greysummers:

i would kill a man for cassian andor’s tragic backstory™

Cassian Andor already killed lots of men for his tragic backstory.

I spent yesterday doing laundry and assembling a box

via http://ift.tt/2zgq8Oe:
I spent yesterday doing laundry and assembling a box full of clothes to rip apart to remake. (Here’s a good post on how to cut up a used men’s shirt to reuse as much fabric as possible! My technique varies from this one but it’s a good start.) I have an art quilt idea, but I also want to make a bunch of little zippered bags to give as gifts. Partly because I want to use up smallish pieces of fabric and have easily-done projects, and partly because I need to learn to set in zippers. (It’s not that hard. It literally cannot be that hard. I just haven’t done it.) And because I think people are likely to use little zippered pouches a lot more than they are likely to Genuinely Appreciate a possibly wonky-looking wall hanging or lap quilt which I may not be able to finish in time.

So.

(I’ve started doing some embroidery on reclaimed bits of fabric. Last night I made an extremely elaborate unicorn machine embroidery on some 70s polyester suiting with sparkle-pink holoshimmer machine embroidery thread my mother-not-in-law pulled out of the donations bin at her quilting charity– none of them use machine embroidery in their quilting so the machine embroidery thread winds up just sitting there, so she saved it all for me, which I appreciate enormously. I personally have no need for pink holoshimmer embroidery thread, but I do have two nieces under six, and some friends whose aesthetic is still pretty youthful.)

Some of the clothing I’m pulling apart to refashion is stuff my mother made for me. Back in high school she made me a couple of dresses, and as I’m considering them, I clearly wore them a lot. But, like. This one is a below-midcalf mandarin-collar flannel dress, that buttons all the way up the front. The buttons are animals– penguins, sheep, cows, rabbits. I mean, yes it was the 90s, but also, I was a deeply weird kid. I mean. We knew this. I just am looking at this dress and thinking about what the adults in my life must have thought of me when I showed up in this thing. (It had a white cotton petticoat with eyelet lace that would have showed. I had decided I gave zero fucks by then. I’m only just getting back to that aesthetic, really.)

Also it doesn’t fit me. But.

It’s one thing to go at a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch corduroy pants from 1998 where the thighs have worn through with a big pair of shears. It’s fun and sort of freeing, especially if you can get the seam unpicked enough to just yank and open it up.

It’s another thing to start picking out the hand-stitches holding down the facing in a dress your mother made you.

But I’m not going to wear this flannel dress again as-is. It doesn’t fit, for one. And it’s a lot of usable fabric. (The skirt alone could back an entire quilt– and it’s gathered, so the panels are square.) I wore it, I used it, it was lovely. It’s not a waste to unpick it.

And it frees up space in my closet. 

I just. Still feel bad, that’s all. It feels weird. It’s actually harder to unpick handmade garments, it turns out; commercial stitching rips right out, but my mom sews with the machine stitch length turned way down, good Christ mother this is really something. (I’m also deconstructing a wool skirt she pulled out of her closet, which would fit maybe a size 6, no one in our family is that petite, and it’s definitely pure wool but the lining is cheap crinkly degraded acetate and it’s flat-lined, not bag-lined, so I gotta unpick every seam to pry the plastic out. Holy shit you can’t even find these stitches, they’re so small.)

having perused the internet and pinterest perhaps too extensively i return to muse that i have never

via http://ift.tt/2zf4Al5:
having perused the internet and pinterest perhaps too extensively i return to muse that i have never succeeded in free-motion embroidery and would it be cheating if i just, you know

made an embroidery pattern that looked like free-motion embroidery and pushed a button and made my machine do it

i mean i’m traumatized because my fancy sewing machine is defective and needs a $300 repair every time i lower the feed dogs so i’ve never mastered it and i’m just Not Gonna but really honestly

free-motion embroidery looks so whimsical and cute and i’d love to accomplish that but i’m going to do so by using an expensive software program to make an even more expensive machine look like I just dropped the feed dogs on a $40 wal-mart special machine because guess what I’ve never truly been a Free Spirit and I’ve never mastered Whimsy so WHATEVER

where is the shitty uneven wobbly running stitch setting on this embroidery software?

the west side bike path; cars as weapons

via http://ift.tt/2AmUKhu:
umruik:

a thing that’s not being said about yesterday’s attack in manhattan:

this isn’t the first time folks have been killed or injured by cars on the west side bike path and footpath. there’s a whole string of ghostbike memorials there, where cars and trucks have killed cyclists. injuries, and folks killed on foot, don’t have such obvious markers. the ones that i remember details about have all been exactly like yesterday: a car or truck turns off the west side highway, or out of one of the driveways that cross the paths, and drives down the path, hitting people.

but despite that, the city government has done nothing to make it harder for cars and trucks to get onto the path. in the last 16 years, they’ve put hundreds of antiterrorist flowerpots in the middle of sidewalks across the city - which has never seen an outdoor carbomb attack (ok, fine, there was the horsecart bomb on wall street… in 1920) - making the blocks around dozens of government buildings and businesses far less accessible to chair and scooter users. but on the west side path? at some driveways there are floppy plastic sticks. they might stop a kid on a plastic tricycle, but probably not. mostly there’s nothing.

if the deblasio or bloomberg administrations had put even a bare minimum of effort into protecting cyclists’ lives, the attack yesterday could not have happened. one bollard on each side of each driveway and curbcut would’ve prevented this - and however many other deaths and injuries have been and will be caused by cars and trucks in this known danger zone.

but no. deblasio has used his “vision zero” pedestrian safety slogan as a reason to hire hundreds of new cops, who’re deployed to do vehicular stop & frisk in gentrifying workingclass black and latinx neighborhoods like mine (take a look at fulton & nostrand the last week of any month - but do it on foot if you don’t want a ticket). and the nypd uses bike safety as part of its ‘quality of life’ attack on those same communities: there are almost no cyclists ticketed in white neighborhoods like park slope; many in black neighborhoods like east new york; and even more along the front lines of gentrification in places like crown heights and bedstuy.

no surprises here. new yorkers’ lives don’t matter to the city government, whether it’s held by a plutocrat like bloomberg or a real estate industry puppet ‘progressive’ like deblasio. they won’t keep us safe from reckless drivers, drunk offduty cops behind the wheel (like the one who hit my ex on an east village sidewalk), or folks deliberately trying to hurt people. all they’ll do is use our real lack of safety to justify expanding the same old white supremacist police apparatus that is a military force occupying our neighborhoods’ streets and schools, and a spy force infiltrating our neighborhoods’ mosques and community organizations.