So my sister wants to start sewing more, because
a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.
b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton
c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance
So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.
And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’
And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this
Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16uhmMb8kE4P_vOSycr6XSa9zpmDijZSd?usp=sharing
this is a poem
i think abt the part in the golden compass where it was noted that if your daemon chose to assume the form of a fish or some kind of ocean dwelling creature you could never leave the water again. at best you could dock, maybe walk a bit away from the shore, but that's it. chained to the water because your physical soul form commands it.
Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
tuesday is what u make it
good morning and happy is it really tuesday tuesday
I swear if we are gonna get a scene of Crowley’s fall in the next season, I will not be okay… I will not recover from that! 😫
I did add this piece to my InPrnt, if you wanna grab a physical copy! ♥️