@rgarner I have installed Signal and messaged you!

@issyl0 @rgarner Absolutely, yes! Just send me your address (oh, and let me know any dietary restrictions or general allergies e.g. contact allergies).

@rgarner A small contribution, but if you’d like to have a nice little surprise in the post, DM or email (kake@earth.li) me your postal address.

@mike @sparrowsion It’s just an extra-thick Cup-a-Soup, right?

@Kymberly @bob A bit disappointing, alas. The chocolate was bland, and I’d hoped for more coconut flavour. I did appreciate the cultural reference though :)

@Kymberly I thought lamingtons were the most Australian thing ever, and then @bob brought me back some lamington-flavour macadamias.

@rgarner “Hands over the kettle with the lid open after you’ve poured the water into the teapot” is quite nice too.

@triffen Ahh right. The purpose of the elbow dart is to handle the way (most) people’s arms hang, i.e. not straight down but angled forward from the elbow. It makes the bottom part of the sleeve move forward to match the arm. Plus, the point of the dart should match the point of the elbow, so gives more room for your elbow when you bend your arm fully.

You'll see it more in tailored and/or narrow sleeves, and especially in tailored jackets, which tend not to be made from fabrics with a lot of give.

I don’t mind the actual mechanics of easing a sleeve in all that much, but I don’t like the way it looks — I like a smooth transition with no puffiness.

@triffen Thanks! The top dart is because I don’t like using ease. The bottom dart is a standard elbow dart. The darts are all on the back of the sleeve.

The middle dart is to add more curvature to the upper arm without making things too baggy, and I think that’s probably the least standard part of my sleeve. I added it to my pattern when I first developed my short sleeve pattern and found I disliked the way most short sleeves stick out at the bottom when you have your arms by your side, so I darted out the excess. Then when I wanted to make a long sleeve, I rotated that dart to the back seam first.

@JillsJoy I wish they were more different! They’re similar enough that I think it’d look weird if I just put them together without the embroidery. (Having said that, I suspect they’ll age differently.)

Incidentally, it’s hard to get hold of floche in the UK. I ordered it to bob’s mum’s address in Australia, and he brought it back for me after his last visit. So I’d better not run out.

Things that might go wrong:

1) I’ve never embroidered an entire sleeve before, let alone in a way that’s meant to look roughly like straight lines running from shoulder to cuff. My sleeve pattern is Weird (it has three darts, for a start), so I have to embroider in curved lines in order to make it look straight.

2) I’ve never embroidered an entire sleeve before, so I don’t know how much the embroidery is going to make it “draw in”. So I’ve left an extra 15mm of fabric around every edge and will wash and re-cut the pieces before sewing them into the shirt.

3) I’m using a new-to-me thread — DMC floche, which is very loosely twisted — and although I made some samples and washed them several times, it’s still possible that after, say, 50 or so washes, it’ll look hideously messy.

4) I’m joining threads by knotting rather than working the ends into previous stitches. I ummed and ahhed about this for a bit, trying to decide which method would be most robust. Kantha traditionally uses knots, and kantha quilts are designed to be washed and used over and over, which suggests the knots won’t come undone, but then again kantha is traditionally done on layered fabrics, which allows hiding the knots between the layers.

We shall see what happens!

I’m making a Frankenshirt!

I have enough linen in one shade of purple to let me make the body of a shirt, and enough linen in a slightly different shade of purple to let me make the sleeves. But the shades are similar enough that it isn’t totally obvious that the difference is on purpose, so I decided to embroider the sleeves in yet another shade of purple, to make it clear that the sleeves are supposed to look different and I haven’t just made some sort of mistake.

Obviously this process got slightly delayed because I wanted to make yet another improvement to my sleeve pattern, but I finally got started on the first sleeve today. Apologies for bad lighting — the colour in the close-up photo is truest. My plan for the stitching is to use kantha-inspired designs.

There are several experimental aspects to this, any of which might go wrong, but that’s OK; it’ll let me learn something. (Details will be in a reply for those who’re interested.)

#Embroidery #Kantha #Sewing

@dvdgc13 @joost I started with trousers too! A friend came round and talked me through it (mainly all they needed to do was to encourage me and tell me I could do it, but I was very grateful to have them there).

@gwenbeads Wow, congratulations!

@inarticulatequilter According to Google Street View there’s a KFC too....

https://maps.app.goo.gl/vSCd9pBcTdrdG4HN7

I like this a lot: partially-cross-stitched photos taken along the route of the former Berlin Wall, by Diane Meyer. From the artist’s statement: “In many images, the embroidered sections represent the exact scale and location of the former Wall offering a pixelated view of what lies behind. In this way, the embroidery appears as a translucent trace in the landscape of something that no longer exists but is a weight on history and memory. [...] Often the embroidered sections of the image run along the horizon line forming an unnatural separation that blocks the viewer. This aspect of the sewing emphasizes the unnatural boundaries created by the wall itself.”

https://www.dianemeyer.net/berlin

#Berlin #Embroidery #TextileArt

It turns out that my mastodon-archive/Python problem might have been Homebrew-related. I managed to get it running in the end by removing the previous install and then doing:

brew install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install mastodon-archive

Goodness knows if this’ll break anything else down the line, but it does at least seem to be working now. Thanks again to all the people who offered suggestions for investigating this — you helped me feel like it was fixable :)