New WIP Intro

Since I finished outlining the first act of this WIP, y'all deserve a formal introduction. Especially because I am going to blabber about it a lot.

You might like it if you like...

If any of this sounds like your cup of tea, read under the cut!

Since I just started being active on here again, I tought about making a new intro post to pin and reblog!

On this blog I will mainly post about my Wips, do tag and ask games, post about worlbuilding, and reblog writing tips. All asks are welcome, and if you want to be added to the taglist or if you would like to receive asks, let me know! My intro is under the cut!

Writing Share Tag

Because this is, in fact, still a writeblr (hard to believe i know!), have a tag game! I was tagged by @oh-no-another-idea, here thanks so much, my dear friend!

This snippet comes from something I recently edited for AASOAF 3:

Tagging (gently): @mysticstarlightduck @void-botanist @acertainmoshke @monstrify

train AU wherein Mariel is a conductor and Axtapor is a regular passenger. she always trips over her feet when she goes to tear Axtapor's ticket and she keeps all the stubs in her sweater vest pocket over her heart. one day he sees her put it away and asks her if she wants to get dinner but she says she cant bc she has to take the train all the way to the final stop so he says he'll buy a ticket to there and she asks if he's sure bc it's far and then he says he'll wait because 'yer my heart's last stop'. anyway I think she faints and the train is VERY delayed

#this AU is perfect in every way including that Mariel has a hat

YES and when she swoons the little hat comically flies off her head and lands in Axtapor's lap haha

perfect. but what if: train AU but it's a musical and that's part of the choreography

omg yes! and the train set pulls away until its just Mariel and Axtapor in the scene and he helps her up and they both start a meaningful duet under a spotlight as they dance together 😭 and during the dance, their outfits change and so does the scene around them to suggest they've gone on lots of dates and when the song ends, they end up on a beach watching the sunrise

Looking for active writeblrs to follow!

I just realized that most of the writeblrs I follow aren't posting much anymore. A hazard of being on this site for so long, I guess. I'm particularly interested in:

I'm a writer and editor who mostly posts/reblogs writing advice and inspiration, although I occasionally share about my WIPs or recent publications/zines. Interact with this post, or follow me & I'll follow you back. Can't wait to fluff up my dash with new writers and writing! It's been dead much too long.

Keep 'em coming!

in my mind if dragons were real then western and eastern dragons would be only distantly related species filling the same ecological niche across different continents. but due to visual similarities got called the same thing in English. and it would be one of those things that you hear on trivia game shows and go "oh that's neat" about and then move on with your day, like how tanuki get lumped in with racoons even tho racoons are musteloids and tanuki are canids. do you see my vision.

I see your vision

I steal the vision

I implement the vision in a wip

what kind of things would y'all expect to see in a thriving pirate city in the middle of the ocean?

I've noticed a lot of different ways to comment on someone's writing, whether they've been offered to me or I've said them myself, and it's making me curious. There's comments that quote lines back to you and some that talk as if the characters are real people with feelings and some that pinpoint specific linguistic traits of a sentence or paragraph...

All of them are lovely, but I have noticed a definite preference in how I receive them. The ones I keep coming back to, the ones that always make me smile, do follow a theme. So, that said,

No there is no "any" or "all of the above" option I know we're all frothing at the mouth for interaction but that's not what I'm asking. Suspend your disbelief with me and assume you will get every single one of these comments. I want to know which one has you giggling and kicking your feet the longest <3

The one bizarre thing to me about textiles is that warp-weighted weaving is at least 6500 years old, but our oldest knitted artifacts are only ~1000 years old, and crochet 200 years old. Even though you need less equipment to knit (two sticks) or crochet (one hook) compared to warp-weighted weaving (frame, loom weights, batting, heddles). Why the big gaps between these inventions? And why did each one appear and spread when it did?

Oooh, I know this one! Well, the knitting one. The commonly given reasons, at least.

Firstly, you don't just need two sticks. You need at least two (fairly) identically sized, (fairly) identically weighted, straight, smooth sticks that are strong enough to carry the weight of what you're making. Which isn't impossible to do with bronze age technology, but it's gonna take time or money. And every time you change gauge of thread, or want a different tightness of fabric from the same artisan, you need a new size of needles. A loom is more flexible about these things. Nalbinding, which looks very similar and fills a similar niche, is more flexible about these things and uses way less resources.

Secondly, it's probably older than the 12th century sock find. That thing has colorwork and a shortrow heel. Not something you do instinctually, not something you figure out on your first or second or fourth attempt if you've never seen it done. So we know it's older. We also know from contextual evidence that it doesn't show up in texts or art or myths before the Middle Ages, so... Not hugely older. It's hard to find archaeological evidence because almost every part of knitting, until fairly recently, was made of material that loves to decay. And if you were to find a knitting needle... It's a pointy stick. Made of wood, maybe bone. Even in the context of lying in a dwelling, that could be many, many things. Loom weights are slightly easier to categorize.

Then there's the fact that most knitted garments, while wonderfully stretchy and drapey, have a tendency to wear out fast. (It's why most commercial sock yarns these days tend to be reinforced with nylon.) Since the panels are made of one continuous thread without knotting off, you get a hole bigger than what can be easily mended much more quickly. So you need incentive to choose it over other, older, proven methods.

Good points, and when you mentioned "thread" something clicked for me - it's really hard to knit thread, i.e. laceweight yarn or thinner, into solid fabric. You need needles no bigger than toothpicks, which break easily even if they're solid steel, and if the size is even just 1mm off it'll make the fabric too stiff or too loose. And every knitter will need a different size of needles to produce a particular gauge of fabric, and you can't have more than one knitter work on the same fabric at once. It may also be slower and harder on your hands than weaving, since there's no way to form "sheds" and knit multiple stitches at once with only Neolithic tools.

So: Harder, and probably slower to work. Fragile tools, which are probably difficult to make in standardized sizes. Hard to get a consistent gauge you can price for the market. Like you said, these issues aren't impossible, but they might make it less economical, and less likely to become popular.

It's probably not a coincidence that our earliest knitted artifacts are socks, which are A) more durable than most knitted clothes, B) normally knit with heavier yarn than thread, and C) an item much more suited to knitting than weaving, so there's a stronger incentive.

I don't know much about how durable knitting is compared to weaving, but I'm not sure if that'd be a big factor in limiting its spread. Either kind of fabric can be felted for strength, and you can reinforce knitting with heel stitch or duplicate stitch, even years after you made the object. (My socks start wearing thin after about 6-8 years, and reinforcing an old sock takes about an hour.) But if this is easier to do on woven fabric, I'd be delighted to learn about that, too!

Weaving is also faster and takes up less yarn, since the threads are all running parallel to each other and not making loops. Plain weave is fast compared to knitting or crochet.

When you have to produce all textile goods for your family, of course you’re going to go for economy. I saw somewhere that it would generally take two or three hand-spinners to produce enough yarn for one weaver, so I can’t imagine how that would translate to knitting or crochet which use a lot more yarn.

Also, worn out woven fabric can be cut down and repurposed into other useful items, while knitting and crochet would come apart if you tried to cut it.

So it makes sense that knitting and crochet would take longer to gain popularity, since they take up more resources.

These are also great points, thank you! (Also, the work on your blog is beautiful!)

As a multicrafter I'm going to point out another thing here, too! We've talked a bit about how woven items are efficient, but naalbinding, more than knitting, is truly an efficient use of your resources in conjunction with weaving.

Naalbinding, as mentioned above, is much older than knitting! It uses what is essentially a single large-eyed needle similar to a tapestry needle. A type of needle that you could also use while making your weavings. But additionally, while knitting and crochet are ideal for using a long, single length of yarn, Naalbinding excels at using shorter lengths of yarn - If I use anything longer than 3 ft (about 1m) I run into problems very quickly.

Now when you're weaving? Any loom is going to have waste yarn in the warp - this is how it holds the tension needed to weave. Even on the small table looms I've worked with these scraps can be about 1-2 ft of yarn - a great size for Naalbinding, but extremely difficult to use for knitting or crochet. It's very efficient to take these weaving ends - yarn and thread that's already been worked heavily to simply get into yarn for the weaving! - and use them for naalbinding.

We don't really weave socks because, well. They're a tube. And not just a tube, but to be comfortable, it's a closed tube! With a curvy end! and decreases! This would be really hard to make via weaving, which excels in Flat Rectangles (see: why a lot of Ancient clothing was Flat Rectangles with Fancy Pinning) and simpler shapes.

Even knitting has some issues with socks - though I'm fairly sure knitted socks are going to be more comfortable than naalbound ones, as the fabric has a more even drape. It's not just two even sticks of the same size that you need for knitting a tube - it's a minimum of four. Usually five!

It's also easier to make increases and decreases in naalbinding than knitting, IMO. A closed tube is honestly ideal for the craft, especially if you are fitting it to yourself or a close relative as a mitten or a sock. Like, say, when you're both crafting next to the campfire and every row or two you can hold up the item against their body, and be sure you're on the right track for the fit.

Naalbinding is slower than knitting, overall, but in a more resource poor society it makes a lot more use of those scraps of yarn that you've already put hours and hours of work into making. And they won't go to waste.

god what I would give to be in the headspace to write again

I feel you