The creature who fell in love with the light

[Watercolor and gouache, based on ‘The Fog Horn’ by Ray Bradbury]

This is just a post of me collecting previous tutorials and things I've written, because I'm going to use them again in a future review.

So here's my EGL/lolita fashion resources from across some time

Fabric selection:

Lace:

How little details change lolta vs loliable

How to research on lolibrary

I say a lot about mood boards because I believe that, when it comes to handmade lolita, being able to research trends and articulate your thoughts to other people is more important to making good lolita than, like, having a sewing machine is.

Adapting cosplay concepts into lolita Some more stuff on lolita and cosplay, and adapting drawings into lolita when you don't have a foundation to know how to construct lolita.

Few thoughts about getting started wearing lolita few thoughts about getting started sewing lolita

Why you should copy an existing lolita garment's construction for your first (and maybe many) pieces (I still do that quilte a bit)

How to actually do that copying

It's getting late and I'm tired and maybe I'll add to this later. If anyone out there thinks I've missed something in error, please let me know. I will not be going back to fix the formatting of this post and this time and I do not suspect that I will ever do that ever.

witches !!

the question of if the mirror world really reflected the regular world or if it was a creation of the train is so fucked. i know lake ultimately decides it doesn't matter if their memories are false, because their life is in their own hands now. still, i was trying to decide which option is More fucked bc i knew that would be the one Owen Dennis etc would choose. but honestly they're both so dystopian and horrible i just don't know. like, option 1: oh great, everyone's existence is tied to puppeting an unwilling person who can't be saved in a world we can't reach. option 2: oh great, if you pass through the train's chrome car, you immediately create an autonomous person who remembers being puppeted their entire lives and are now still being heavily policed to support you even though they have great cause to despise you. yikes!

Please come peek at the new dragon builder version! Here’s a link to the preview of the next big release, where I’ll keep fiddling and bug-fixing before replacing the current live version. You can choose any color you want for your parts now!

Aw yeah dragon time

i miss her (dashboard unfucker)

i miss her too, nameless stranger

they fucking killed me. they erased me

Good news! It's now a Firefox extension, and the latest tumblr web UI update is already unscrongled.

If Tumblr's API had a method for programmatically updating a blog's avatar I would be so annoying with it.

So it turns out that Tumblr's API actually does support updating avatars, it's just undocumented. Thanks to @wasabipesto for providing the details.

so... you just gonna change your avatar at regular intervals?

Not regular intervals, no. I'm thinking of writing a script that will turn my avatar into a cat for a randomly selected five-minute stretch of each hour, for a start.

Encounter: a friendly Emolotl

Murderbot meets ART (who knew transports could be smart enough to be MEAN)

My blog is now sponsored by No Name Brand

Not anymore it's not

I don't know who needs to hear this but

Most non woven interfacing still has a grain line and you need to line your pieces up with it

All right, kids, I hope you're ready for this.

There are many types of nonwoven fabric. One that was popular for like 30 seconds in Covid times was melt-blown, because sometime in April 2020 there was a single study that showed that a melt-blown middle layer in a mask might catch virus-containing droplets better than other nonwoven fabrics, so a lot of masks (even today) will say, "with melt-blown center layer" on the box, even though we don't really think it matters anymore. Melt-blown nonwoven fabrics are made by heating up plastic pellets until they become stringy, and then sticking that in front of a fan pointed at a nonstick something so that the stringy bits all slap on top of each other until you basically have a fabric made of unaligned fibers.

Melt-blown fabrics aren't actually relevant when it comes to interfacing but textiles are cool so I'm making you learn it anyway.

Most nonwoven interfacing is a carded-web nonwoven fabric. Let's take a look at the two words there.

In this case, "web" means "pile of fibers that aren't woven together but that still resemble the properties of fabric."

And "carded" means, well, carded.

This is some fiber on an old-fashioned wool card. When we card the fibers, we run one brush against the other until the fibers all end up lined up in the same direction. Carding is the process of lining all the fibers up so that they face the same direction.

This is two different weights of a nonwoven interfacing. It's easier to see in one weight, but there is a consistent direction to all of the fibers. In most cases, the fibers are lined up to go in the lengtiwise direction.

What does this mean for your interfacing? Well, when you pull the interfacing in the direction of the threads, you're pulling on the threads themselves, and the fabric will be stronger. When you're pulling across the threads, you're pulling the threads apart. The interfacing will stretch, distort, and might even rip. This means that you can line up the interfacing grain to give the fabric you want the properties you want. Shirt cuffs, for example, are likely to have strain in the long direction (the direction that the cuff wraps around your wrist) but not as much strain in the short direction. You can get a better result from putting the lengthwise grain along the long direction. A waistband is also going to have more strain in the lengthwise direction, because you're not going to be pulling the waistband to be taller, so you can put the grain running along the length.

If you need the interfacing to provide strength in both lengthwise and crosswise, this is a great chance to use woven interfacing. You need to be aware that woven interfacing will still have stretch in the bias, but it will still add stiffness and reinforcement to a fabric. If you need stiffness in one direction but actual stretch in another, this is a good time for tricot interfacing.

And some interfacing, but not a whole lot of it, will have multiple layers of carded web laid in multiple directions, to deal with the fact that some directions of carded web are less strong. Some will be made of less oraginzed threads, so that there really isn't a direction with different properties. Embroidery stabilizer, for example, really doesn't have a difference in any direction.

But most new sewists are going to come in and get an inexpensive interfacing like Pellon Fusible Featherweight, and so it's not really ideal for a pattern for beginners to say that there's no grainline on interfacing. If you're not giving advice on how to find interfacing with no grain, don't tell people they can cut the pieces at any angle. It does actually matter if you cut them on grain, and it also matters if you're doing it lengthwise or crosswise. Does it always make a huge difference in final product? No, not at all. But is there a difference, and does it make a difference? Yes. Very yes.

APRIL FOOLS!! …except the joke is me because I made a 4.6k visual novel on how to make visual novels in a day.

A clown girl breaks into your computer and holds you hostage while yapping about visual novels?!

Yes, this is actually informative and intended to be a beginner's guide to visual novel development!

play it here:

POISSON D'AVRIL!

have a good April fool everyone!

by Andris Polikevics