Yes, I am THAT Mad Gastronomer. Whichever one you're thinking of, that's me. The one and only. If you know me from elsewhere, feel free to say hi, just let me know who you are.
Queer, cis, white, mentally ill, pagan fat woman.
My Hellenic religion and magic blog is hexdotink.
I consistently fail at tagging anything ever. Not an ideological stance, I just fail at it. Not a safe blog to follow if you need things tagged.
It’s not a ‘scientists have found’ and much more ‘people have been already doing that for thousands of years and it’s just gaining more attention recently’
Scientists didn’t know. It should be “Scientists just found out”
There’s actually been a load of vitriol leveled against folks who try to raise traditional colored cottons, because a lot of cotton growers don’t want the colored cottons cross-pollinating with their standard white cotton.
But anyway cotton can be grown in lovely natural shades of greens, reddish-brown ochres, and browns, all of which deepen with a good boil in water with a bit of washing soda thrown in.
The color obviously doesn’t fade or run, because it’s not dye. It’s the intrinsic color of the fiber itself.
I….I want clothes made out of those colors. They don’t hurt my brain!
Aren’t they lovely?
I’m biased because I love the natural earth tones of many fibers, of course…browns, blacks, creams, copper-reds, ect…but I think they’re just gorgeous.
If anyone wants to know where you can get yarn or cotton like this!
This is gorgeous. Absolutely astounding.
I grow cotton every year from plants I get at Maryland Sheep and Wool festival, because the flowers are lovely. So far, I’ve grown white, green, brown, and ‘butternut’ (a golden tan).
There is an effort among the colored cotton breeders to improve the fiber length and diversify the colors, but like all plant breeding, it takes a long time and the results are never certain.
Actually, here’s what I’ve picked so far this year – I only had 1 green cotton plant this year, the rest were brown. I’m hoping this warm spell lasts a little long so more of the bolls mature.
My fiber mentor grew her own Baja hoodie out of colored cotton, 20+ years ago, in shades of green and off-white. Grew it, ginned the bolls with a pasta machine, spun it up, wove it, and stitched it by hand. It was SO FREAKIN COOL.
i meant to make some big well-written post abt it but unfortunately my brain was otherwise occupied experiencing The Horrors so instead, have some wordvomit
this past monday marked twenty years since i went on a field trip to the library and ran my hand along a bookshelf in the children’s fiction section and found a book called So You Want To Be A Wizard* and brought it home and read it cover to cover in like. a day. and i couldn’t even begin to explain how that day has shaped my life but i do just wanna acknowledge it and say that i’m so glad my friend let me borrow her library card (cause i didn’t have my own yet) so i could bring the book home and i’m so glad my mum special ordered the rest of the series from the local independent bookstore almost immediately after i finished it and i’m so glad i discovered the forums and i’m so glad i found so many cousins on tumblr—including my best friend and platonic soulmate @astraldepths—and i’m so glad i got to help plan and execute crossingscon (twice!!) and that i got to meet so many of you in person—INCLUDING DD HERSELF—and i’m just. so glad i discovered this series
i have like twelve copies of SYW but i think my favourite is the twentieth anniversary edition (which is now, itself, twenty years old—wild), because it contains both the short story Uptown Local, which i adore, and an afterword by DD, which i have read entirely too many times. anyway, i wanna share a quote from that afterword, bc it seems fitting:
Wizardry, too, changes with the times, because its practitioners do…and indeed it must change, to keep up with the Lone Power, Itself never averse to using new means to Its old end. Even the Wizard’s Oath will seem to change from time to time, altering its appearance according to species, age, cast of mind, and (sometimes) simply according to where you’re standing, in time and space, when you examine it. But beyond that, as the series continues, I can promise that some things will always stay the same—the knowledge of a partner’s dependable friendship; a shared go-for-broke determination to get it right when the Universe is watching; and the glad adrenaline rush caused by the sudden incursion of the unexpected…as when you run your hand down a row of books on a library shelf and one of them catches your finger.
so yeah. in lieu of a more coherent post abt it, i just wanna say. thank you @dduane. for everything 💚
You’re ever so welcome. I’m delighted that the books were there for you…the order in which you found them (or were found) being, as we see, irrelevant.
Meanwhile you’re all going to have to excuse me now, as I seem to have something in my eye. :)
ETA: For folks who’re curious to see if memories are joggled by any of the English-language covers, check out this page at YoungWizards.com.
Seriously, as funny and contemptible as this is, what a clever fucking lie. The people who (rightly) treat this lying posturing with the contempt it deserves (if you want a glimpse into JKR’s moral courage in her stands when it might actually cost her something, consider Dumbledore’s sexuality), she already doesn’t give a shit about us. She knows we despise her, and she feels likewise.
The people who ARE credulous enough to believe this posturing, well. They’ll eat it right up, with one noteworthy benefit for her: suddenly the notion of being jailed for being a transphobic bigot is suddenly on people’s minds and their lips. Never mind that, no, JKR, even if you had a fraction of the spine necessary to face any jail time you need two hands to count, it’s not going to happen. It’s not even close to being considered possibly going to happen. It’s so far removed from possibility that not even fucking Trelawney would see it happening-on a good or bad day.
But she gets to continue to invoke the fear that she’s persecuted. Just because she’s a gutless bigot doesn’t mean she’s not clever.
I already posted once tonight about my awesome fiber mentor Ann, and here I go again.
Once upon a time, it must’ve been at least 25 years ago by now, but it was like 5-7 years before I met her… Ann went on a fiber tour of Mexico, which, if you paid extra, included a trip to a secluded cove with the Mexican variant on murex snails. These snails didn’t have to be crushed or rotted, you just annoyed them until they puked on your stuff, and then (or possibly before, I forget), you did some additional stuff so the indigo reaction worked. You couldn’t do it yourself, you handed over your fiber to somebody who waded out and annoyed the snails for you. Got to protect those snails!
Well, Ann handed over her homespun yarn, and got it back, and it was very pretty like that but it stunk to high heaven because marine snail puke. So she stuffed it in a plastic bag, and then wrapped it in more and more layers of trash bags, and stuffed it in her suitcase.
She and Bob, her impressively nifty husband, got chosen for a random customs search on the way home. Naturally, when the customs agent saw a package wrapped in layers of garbage bags, he was very interested.
“What’s this?” he demands, pulling out a knife to cut it open.
“Ohh, you don’t want to open that,” says Ann.
“I think I do!” says the customs agent, and opens it. And promptly covered his mouth and nose and gasped out, “You’re right, I didn’t want to open that!”
Like I said, it was like 5-7 years later that I met her, and she kept the yarn carefully secluded from everything else. It was definitely not as stinky as it had been, but it also definitely had a whiff to it.
THAT FABRIC IS NOT CALLING TO YOU! LEAVE IT ALONE!
boy it’s me the textiles speaking to you inside your head. you need the yarn. you need thread. your soul hungers to participate in the act of creation. you must feed it. you must buy so many beads.
The spirits of all my ancient prehistoric ancestors are telling me that I need to start another blanket so who am I to say no to them?
However, those creepy dolls at the thrift store? You could repaint them to look even creepier. And of course you need to buy more fabric to enhance their dresses.
For all the US-based folks, here’s Celiac.com’s annual GF candy list for 2023! Please remember (as always) to double check your ingredients, and contact the manufacturer with questions or concerns.
THIS is what you check candy for. Nobody, nobody, drugs or poisons or puts pins and razors in Halloween candy. It has not happened. It is an urban legend.
28th October 2023
Reblogged From white-throated-packrat
Notes: 65349
ALT
