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Today I've had an idea for a simple top, low waste, with an elastic drawstring neck that can be adjusted at different widths, including off-the-shoulders.

I've almost finished cutting a piece of fabric that I've had in my stash for a while, waiting for a suitable project (it has a non-uniform print that made it hard to decide a good pattern to make use of it).

It's most definitely a modern project.

So now the obvious thing to do is to sew everything by hand, right?

(I'm not sure whether this is to procrastinate cleaning the table with the sewing machine, or to be able to use tiny sewing allowances, since the fabric is very lightweight.)

#sewing #selfInducedProblems



Problem: I only have one set and a half of vintage linen bedsheet.

Fact: I have about 7 m of vintage bedsheet-linen (~100 cm wide)

Obvious consequence: I now have to sew almost 3 m of a seam that should be extremely flat, plus two hems, on a deadline of “next sheet change”, during a heatwave.

#sewing #selfInducedProblems

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

operazione per niente semplice quella di "sbiancare" i teli di lino "di una volta" però con ste temperature sono una salvezza e sticazzi le macchie, se pure dovessero essercene! @Elikorokoros
Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''

@LaVi 🕊️📚🐈 @Elikorokoros in realtà la foto (e la spiegazzatura) aiuta a nascondere un po', ma sì, posso essere soddisfatta del risultato.

grazie!



health, ~

I love it when I wake up with a pretty low blood pressure, it's already starting to get hot, I have¹ to walk to the pharmacy, stuff happens and I don't manage to have breakfast before doing so.

at least it's a short walk, and there is also a convenient post box very close, so I also sent a postcard :)

¹ technically I could have asked my SO to go, instead we went together, but that meant that we had to go earlier

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

salute, ~

Adoro alzarmi con la pressione bassa, sta già iniziando a fare caldo, devo¹ andare in farmacia, succedono casini e non riesco neanche a fare colazione prima di andarci.

di buono c'è che è qui vicino, e c'è anche una comoda cassetta della posta quasi sul percorso, quindi ho anche spedito una cartolina :)

¹ tecnicamente avrei potuto chiedere al mio compagno di andarci, invece siamo andati assieme, ma la cosa dava più vincoli di tempo



ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-tryi…

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My mother's washing machine is breaking down, and she lives close enough that I'm washing all of her laundry.

Now, I like being able to fill more loads and wash things more often, rather than have them accumulate until the laundry basket is overflowing, so I'm not encouraging her to buy a new machine (an attempt at repairing hers has already been done, and failed).

My real question is: should I do the proper #victorian thing and embroider my husband's initials on all of our household items? should I do a radical feminist thing and embroider my own initials¹? And what should I do with the bedsheet that already has my great-grandfather initials on it?

¹ or rather design. which has the advantage of having a form that is extremely easy and quick to embroider, and I already use on my conference t-shirts that are identical to @Diego Roversi 's ones :D

#historyBounding #selfInducedProblems

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in reply to rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua

@Rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua

like @Fabio said, this is too practical, there isn't enough overengineering, it can't work (I mean, it would work as a way to separate the laundry, not as whatever it is that we're doing here) :D

Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Fabio no, you were right at the margin of my field of vision, I wasn't looking at you!

but text only lesana can work with something like zbarcam through the shell, Collector would need some QR-code reading of its own :D



New #inkplate 6 arrived and got git.sr.ht/~fabrixxm/inktoday running on it.

next: get the weather forecast data again (the service I was using vanished from the web some time ago)



twitter, shitposting, en, it

Finally, the twitter shitstorm reached a point where I was personally affected and I had to do something. I just added a key combination to my keyboard map to easily get 🍿.

E alla fine, il casino di twitter mi ha coinvolta personalmente, dandomi cose da fare. Ho appena aggiunto una combinazione di tasti alla mia mappa tastiera per poter digitare rapidamente 🍿.

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And I've just managed to refactor a long file with tons of #ifdef into a hierarchy of classes, in C++, a language I have vague notions about, through the establish industry practice of copying stuff from stackoverflow.

No, the code isn't anywhere where it can be seen.

Yes, if this fails somewhere the worst that can happen is that I have to get up from my chair to know whether the temperature is higher outside or inside.

And I really needed a project where I could give myself permission to do things that only work for me, rather than having to consider other possible usecases, and possibly even to do bad things, like this one.

Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''
@Kermode exactly the problem I'm having!


filed under: palazzinari

“(passeggiando per Roma) scorgiamo in fiamme un isolato¹ di notevole altezza, a molti piani; già tutta la zona vicina bruciava in un incendio spaventoso. Allora uno degli accompagnatori di Giuliano disse «La proprietà urbana offre grandi proventi, ma i rischi sono enormi, senza confronto. Se si potesse trovare un rimedio contro gl'incendi di case tanto frequenti in Roma, giuro che avrei già venduto le mie campagne e comprato in città».”

(Aulo Gellio, trad. Giorgio Bernardi-Perini)

per carità, apprezziamo l'onestà e la mancanza di ipocrisia, but still…

¹ io avrei tradotto condominio o palazzina



E per la gioia di @LaVi 🕊️📚🐈 e @Fabio il 2156 da Como a Cadorna ha investito una persona a Cesate, circolazione bloccata tra Milano e Saronno.

#trenò

Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''
@LaVi 🕊️📚🐈 ecco, in effetti il sito parla di malpensa che terminano / ripartono da Saronno, ma del resto dei treni (varese / como / novara) non dice niente
@LaVi
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

@LaVi 🕊️📚🐈 mi correggo, sono uscite le notizie su un tot di treni per le altre destinazioni, che come si può immaginare…
@LaVi


Anyway, tonight I've dreamed that a *soccer player* from Torino FC (serie A italian league) had joined the fediverse.

Himself, not his PR staff or something.

And I received a boost of one of his posts, about his struggles with impostor syndrome.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

E stanotte mi son sognata che un *calciatore* del Torino si era iscritto sul fediverso.

Non il suo staff, proprio lui.

E mi era arrivato un boost di un suo post in cui parlava del fatto di soffrire sindrome dell'impostore.

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e niente, ci sono 27°C in casa, e sto facendo merenda con polenta e zucchero.

#ThisIsInsubria!

in reply to Oblomov

@oblomov
Nessuna faida per la gran Carità. Noi adepti della Suprema Scuola della MonoPentola aborriamo la violenza 🤪😜
@valhalla @fabrixxm
in reply to Paolo Redaelli

@Paolo Redaelli @Fabio @Oblomov niente violenza! solo guardare la vostra polenta fatta male con aria di compassione e superiorità :D


Shawl Calculations


Posted on June 16, 2023
Update 2023-06-17: I had missed an N in the formulas, they have been updated, and since I was editing this I’ve added the haskell bit.

I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.

This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.

It’s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every two rows (but these calculations should work for any uniform top-down shawl with a regular number of increases), so each block of 10 rows should use an approximately fixed weight of yarn more than the previous block of 10 rows.

So, let w0 be the weight of the first block of rows, wr the (average) difference between two consecutive blocks and wT the total weight of the shawl. Then the weight used by block i should be wi = w0 + wr ⋅ i and the total weight of the shawl should be:

$$w_T = \sum_{i=0}^{N}w_i = N ⋅ w_0 + w_r ⋅ \frac{N ( N + 1)}{2}$$

where N is the number of blocks in the whole shawl.

This gives:

N2 + (1 + 2 ⋅ w0/wr) ⋅ N − 2 * wT/wr = 0

and the only positive solution will be:

$$N = - 1/2 - w_0/w_r + \sqrt(1/4 + w_0^2/w_r^2 - w_0/w_r + 2 ⋅ w_T/w_r)$$

or, in a few lines of python that can be easily copypasted (changing the values in ws and w_T, of course):

import math
import statistics

w_T = 200
ws = [2, 4, 6]
w_r = statistics.mean(map(lambda x: x[0] - x[1], zip(ws[1:], ws)))
-1/2 - ws[0] / w_r + math.sqrt(1/4 + ws[0]**2 / w_r**2 - ws[0]/w_r + 2 * w_T / w_r)

Or, in Haskell:
let ws = [2, 4, 6]
let w_T = 200
let w_0 = head ws
let w_r = ( sum (map (\(x,y) -> y-x) (zip ws (drop 1 ws))) ) / (fromIntegral (length ws - 1))
-1/2 - w_0 / w_r + sqrt (1/4 + (w_0/w_r)**2 - w_0/w_r + 2 * w_T / w_r)

Which right now (using the actual measured values) tells me I will have about 135 rows in my shawl, but I’d really want to do a few more blocks of 10 rows and have more datapoints before I trust the numbers I’ve put in.

Which means that this shawl will also take forever.


blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/0…



Shawl Calculations


Posted on June 16, 2023
I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.

This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.

It’s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every two rows (but these calculations should work for any uniform top-down shawl with a regular number of increases), so each block of 10 rows should use an aproximately fixed weight of yarn more than the previous block of 10 rows.

So, let w0 be the weight of the first block of rows, wr the (average) difference between two consecutive blocks and wT the total weight of the shawl. Then the weight used by block i should be wi = w0 + wr ⋅ i and the total weight of the shawl should be:

$$w_T = \sum_{i=0}^{N}w_i = w_0 + w_r ⋅ \frac{N ( N + 1)}{2}$$

where N is the number of blocks in the whole shawl.

This gives:

N2 + N + 2/Wr ⋅ (w0 − wT)

and the only positive solution will be:

$$N = \frac{-1 - \sqrt(1 - \frac{8}{w_r} (w_0 - w_T))}{2}$$

or, in a few lines of python that can be easily copypasted (changing the values in ws and w_T, of course):

import math
import statistics

w_T = 200
ws = [2, 4, 6]
w_r = statistics.mean(map(lambda x: x[0] - x[1], zip(ws[1:], ws)))
(-1 + math.sqrt(1 - 8 / w_r * (ws[0] - w_T))) / 2

Which right now (using the actual measured values) tells me I will have about 140 rows in my shawl, but I’d really want to do a few more blocks of 10 rows and have more datapoints before I trust the numbers I’ve put in.

Which means that this shawl will also take forever.


blog.trueelena.org/blog/drafts…

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

also, lol, I see that the support for math in pandoc (which I use to generate my blog) is somewhat partial, and what gets here to friendica is even less.

But then, everybody who knits also reads LaTeX, right? :D



Yesterday evening we've put the mosquito net over the bed (sigh, the Season has started late, but it has started).

/me, just before going to sleep: should I also engrave Elbereth on the net, just to be safe?

#nethack

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

Ieri sera abbiamo messo la zanzariera sopra al letto (sigh, la Stagione è iniziata tardi, ma è iniziata)

io, subito prima di dormire> devo anche engravare Elbereth sulla zanzariera, tanto per andare sul sicuro?

(sì, lo stavo dicendo in italiano è ho proprio detto engravare. non mi pento di niente)

#nethack

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itpol, morte di celebrità, richiesta di cw

visto che ci aspettano settimane di celebrazioni e quant'altro, cosa ne direste di mettere un CW quando ne parlate, in qualunque modo lo si faccia?

grazie

in reply to nihil22

meta, cw
@nihil22 content warning, quella cosa che dovrebbe nascondere il contenuto di questi post fino a che non ci si clicca sopra, mostrando solo l'argomento.


/me, making a set of drawers for coloured pencils

my mother> oh, you're also making separators for each individual pencil

me> not making these fiddly things. was. an option?

some reconsidering of lifestyle choices may be in order. or maybe not :D

#crafting #CraftingPersonProblems



Project #linocut steampunk #piecepack is under way!

Quite a few months ago I started the project by making this

and buying some supplies (such as non-black linocut ink :D ), and then procrastination happened and I got quite stuck.

Today I've actually drawn all most of the pieces on tracing paper, I need to add the smaller suites, trace everything from the reverse, and then finally carve the linoleum.

And then maybe I'll start procrastinating again, or maybe I'll actually do some test prints in the weekend?

I may also be thinking of regular piecepack suites and playing card suites in the same style, but first I need to actually assemble a piecepack and discover whether it will work.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

For Linux Days:

- carve a fancy Tux not wider than a pasta machine

- bring paper, ink and a pasta machine on the event site

- have people printing their own Tux with their hands ("Ooooh, look, I'm skilled!")

- gather contributions



Yesterday @Diego Roversi gave me 3 (three!) new #notebooks from a loot of old branded gadgets at work. I've found the courage to actually write on it (ink samples on the last page) and two are even good quality paper (and the other one is an expensive moleskine, but maybe I can use it with pencils?).

And then today in the post I received another, fancy, notebook, a gift from my Aunt!

I didn't buy them so they don't count for “trying not to buy too much 2023”, right? :D



irreverence towards religious rituals

Thanks to a chat with friends, the universe provided me with:

blessed bleach: will destroy up to 95% of bacteria, viruses and sins.

(it was related to a purification rite after a naked man has been close to an altar, the article is in italian)

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

irriverenza nei confronti di rituali religiosi

Grazie ad una chat con amici, l'universo offre:

candeggina benedetta: distrugge fino al 95% di batteri, virus e peccati!

(tutto è partito da “Altare di San Pietro profanato da un uomo nudo, si celebra il rito penitenziale” roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/202… )



I may have accidentally a thing.

This came from wikimedia commons
No dogs sign (a dog behind a red circle with a diagonal line)
openclipart.org/detail/342614/…

And it was remixed as:
The same sign as above, but this time it's a cat
openclipart.org/detail/342615/…

which isn't a sign that is very useful, but was needed for
A blue circle mandatory sign, with a cat
openclipart.org/detail/342616/…

and since I was already working on this, I decided I might as well
Same mandatory sign, with a dog
openclipart.org/detail/342617/…

(if you're reading this on mastodon you probably can't see that the images are in the middle of the text, before the URLs).

#clipart #svg #cats #dogs

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I've just soldered a few cables wrong on a perfboard: I counted pins as if I was on the right side, while I was working on the reverse side.

Since the cables were between sockets, and in a somewhat symmetrical shape, I've found that if I shift the boards that plug into them a bit, the connections are right.

The problem is: 3.3V and GND are in purple, and the data cables are red and black.

Some part of me is screaming “NOOOOOO, REDO THEM. NOW!”. Another, just as important, part of me is going “meh, it works, call it done”.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

<joking> electrons don't care about colors! </joking>

Personally I would redo them to remove the cognitive load of remembering to not trust colors in that specific board... since I will, for sure, forget it.

in reply to Daniele Tricoli

@Daniele Tricoli in theory, this is just a temporary thing (i.e. something that will remain as is on a shelf somewhere for a few years, with the only interaction being recharging the battery now and then), so it shouldn't be a big problem.

Also, the things that go into it have clearly marked pins.

But still, cognitive load.



More than a year ago I started #knitting a #shawl. It's still not finished.

Yesterday I helped my mother translating instructions for a shawl she's going to knit.

Yesterday evening I had an idea for another shawl (different from either one).

Of course I had to start it, right?

(but this time I'm being wise and I'm working a prototype on 12 mm tree trunks with big-ish yarn that I have no other use for, from the stash, not 15/1 wool and silk yarn worked on 3mm needles)

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

oh no!

I decided last autumn that I'd knit myself a shawl for the winter. But I put off even starting it until spring. Now I'm just hoping it'll be finished by *next* winter.

in reply to Tattie (old account)

@Tattie spring is just (FSVO just) before another winter :D

I had notes with the hope to be able to finish that shawl last October. I stopped working on it and worked on sewing projects. *surprisingly* the shawl wasn't ready for October :D



One of my pet peeves are polls that ask you how many books you read per month/year/whatever.

What counts as “one book”? Right now I'm reading a book that is divided in two brick-shaped tomes, each one significantly above 1000 pages (but I'm only reading about half of them, since the other half is in Latin). That's about four time as many pages as your average Pratchett novel, but I'm taking significantly more time at reading it (I don't know whether it's because it has a smaller type (not by much), it's a harder read, or because I *will* lose sleep to finish a Pratchett novel, but up to now I've managed not to with this one :D ).

Then another book I'm reading right now is book one of a series of 15 doorstoppers: probably a faster read than the Latin book above, especially since it's a re-read, but still it's not something I can manage to read in a week, if I want to do something else. Since it's not the only thing I'm reading I'm expecting the whole re-read to last me a few years.

Some of the police procedurals my mother reads are, I don't know, maybe 100 pages and a bit? and the pages are even smaller than the ones of the doorstoppers. That one is easy to read in a day or two, and then you can easily claim that you read more than a hundred books per year, while reading less than if I was reading, say 10 doorstoppers.

And this is still stuff with some literary value, we're not talking about, say the collection of jokes from a famous soccer player.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

Also it's the ORIGINAL (that is, 1800 and some) German text.
Questa voce è stata modificata (1 anno fa)
Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Nicholas Laney :copyleft2: it is! round and it turns!

and there is no beginning, but there are beginning*s* :D



Correspondence Book


Posted on May 26, 2023
A Coptic bound book open to the first page with the title “Book of <space&gt; Correspondence / Volume &lt;space&gt; Years &lt;space&gt;”

I write letters. The kind that are written on paper with a dip pen 1 and ink, stamped and sent through the post, spend a few days or weeks maturing like good wine in a depot somewhere2, and then get delivered to the recipient.

Some of them (mostly cards) are to people who will receive them and thank me via xmpp (that sounds odd, but actually works out nicely), but others are proper letters with long texts that I exchange with penpals.

Most of those are fountain pen frea^Wenthusiasts, so I usually use a different ink each time, and try to vary the paper, and I need to keep track of what I’ve used.

Some time ago, I’ve read a Victorian book3 which recommended keeping a correspondence book to register all mail received and sent, the topics and whether it had been replied or otherwise acted upon. I don’t have the mail traffic of a Victorian lady (or even middle class woman), but this looked like something fun to do, and if I added fields for the inks and paper used it would also have useful side effect.

A page with writing lines with the title of the field below it: it has a number and then date, sender / recipient (at the ends of the same line, in reply to / replied, ink, paper, pen, topics / notes.

So I headed over to the obvious program anybody would use for these things (XeLaTeX, of course) and quickly designed a page with fields for the basic thinks I want to record; it was a bit hurried, and I may improve on it the next time I make one, but I expect this one to last me two or three years, and it is good enough.

I’ve decided to make it A6 sized, so that it doesn’t require a lot of space on my busy desktop, and it could be carried inside a portable desktop, if I ever decide to finish the one for which I’ve made a mockup years ago :)

Picture of book open to the correspondent pages: the fields are name, letters sent, letters received, address and notes.

I’ve also added a few pages for the addresses of my correspondents (and an index of the letters I’ve exchanged with them), and a few empty pages for other notes.

Then I’ve used my a6_book.py script to rearrange the A6 pages into signatures and impress them on A4; to reduce later effort I’ve added an option to order the pages in such a way that if I then cut four A4 sheet in half at a time (the limit of my rotary cutter) the signatures are ready to be folded. It’s not the default because it requires that the pages are a multiple of 32 rather than just 16 (and they are padded up with empty pages if they aren’t).

If you’re also interested in making one, here are the files:

the book open to the page of letter two, which is repeated twice.

After printing (an older version where some of the pages are repeated. whoops, but it only happened 4 times, and it’s not a big deal), it was time for binding this into a book.

I’ve opted for Coptic stitch, so that the book will open completely flat and writing on it will be easier and the covers are 2 mm cardboard covered in linen-look bookbinding paper (sadly I no longer have a source for bookbinding cloth made from actual cloth).

The grey cover of the book with the word correspondence, a stylised envelope and a border in blue.

I tried to screenprint a simple design on the cover: the first attempt was unusable (the paper was smaller than the screen, so I couldn’t keep it in the right place and moved as I was screenprinting); on the second attempt I used some masking tape to keep the paper in place, and they were a bit better, but I need more practice with the technique.

Finally, I decided that for such a Victorian thing I will use an Iron-gall ink, but it’s Rohrer & Knlingner Scabiosa, with a purple undertone, because life’s too short to use blue-black ink :D

And now, I’m off to write an actual letter, rather than writing online about things that are related to letter writing.


  1. not a quill! I’m a modern person who uses steel nibs!↩︎
  2. Milano Roserio, I’m looking at you. a month to deliver a postcard from Lombardy to Ticino? not even a letter, which could have hidden contraband, a postcard.↩︎
  3. I think. I’ve looked at some plausible candidates and couldn’t find the source.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/0…

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Late Victorian Combinations


Posted on May 26, 2023
A woman wearing a white linen combination suite, with a very fitted top, small sleevelets that cover the armpits (to protect the next layers from sweat) and split drawers. The suite buttons up along the front (where it is a bit tight around the bust) and has a line of lace at the neckline and two tucks plus some lace at the legs.

Some time ago, on an early Friday afternoon our internet connection died. After a reasonable time had passed we called the customer service, they told us that they would look into it and then call us back.

On Friday evening we had not heard from them, and I was starting to get worried. At the time in the evening when I would have been relaxing online I grabbed the first Victorian sewing-related book I found on my hard disk and started to read it.

For the record, it wasn’t actually Victorian, it was Margaret J. Blair. System of Sewing and Garment Drafting. from 1904, but I also had available for comparison the earlier and smaller Margaret Blair. System of Garment Drafting. from 1897.

A page from the book showing the top part of a pattern with all construction lines

Anyway, this book had a system to draft a pair of combinations (chemise top + drawers); and months ago I had already tried to draft a pair from another system, but they didn’t really fit and they were dropped low on the priority list, so on a whim I decided to try and draft them again with this new-to-me system.

Around 23:00 in the night the pattern was ready, and I realized that my SO had gone to sleep without waiting for me, as I looked too busy to be interrupted.

The next few days were quite stressful (we didn’t get our internet back until Wednesday) and while I couldn’t work at my day job I didn’t sew as much as I could have done, but by the end of the week I had an almost complete mockup from an old sheet, and could see that it wasn’t great, but it was a good start.

One reason why the mockup took a whole week is that of course I started to sew by machine, but then I wanted flat-felled seams, and felling them by hand is so much neater, isn’t it?

And let me just say, I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t depend on streaming services for media, but I have a healthy mix of DVDs and stuff I had already temporary downloaded to watch later, because handsewing and being stressed out without watching something is not really great.

Anyway, the mockup was a bit short on the crotch, but by the time I could try it on and be sure I was invested enough in it that I decided to work around the issue by inserting a strip of lace around the waist.

And then I went back to the pattern to fix it properly, and found out that I had drafted the back of the drawers completely wrong, making a seam shorter rather than longer as it should have been. ooops.

I fixed the pattern, and then decided that YOLO and cut the new version directly on some lightweight linen fabric I had originally planned to use in this project.

The result is still not perfect, but good enough, and I finished it with a very restrained amount of lace at the neckline and hems, wore it one day when the weather was warm (loved the linen on the skin) and it’s ready to be worn again when the weather will be back to being warm (hopefully not too soon).

The last problem was taking pictures of this underwear in a way that preserves the decency (and it even had to be outdoors, for the light!).

This was solved by wearing leggings and a matched long sleeved shirt under the combinations, and then promptly forgetting everything about decency and, well, you can see what happened.

A woman mooning by keeping the back of split drawers open with her hands, but at least there are black leggings under them.

The pattern is, as usual, published on my pattern website as #FreeSoftWear.

And then, I started thinking about knits.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras knit underwear was a thing, also thanks to the influence of various aspects of the rational dress movement; reformers such as Gustav Jäger advocated for wool underwear, but mail order catalogues from the era such as archive.org/details/cataloguef… (starting from page 67) have listings for both cotton and wool ones.

From what I could find, back then they would have been either handknit at home or made to shape on industrial knitting machines; patterns for the former are available online, but the latter would probably require a knitting machine that I don’t currently1 have.

However, this is underwear that is not going to be seen by anybody2, and I believe that by using flat knit fabric one can get a decent functional approximation.

In The Stash I have a few meters of a worked cotton jersey with a pretty comfy feel, and to make a long story short: this happened.

a woman wearing a black cotton jersey combination suite; the front is sewn shut, but the neck is wide and finished with elastic. The top part is pretty fitted, but becomes baggier around the crotch area and the legs are a comfortable width.

I suspect that the linen one will get worn a lot this summer (linen on the skin. nothing else need to be said), while the cotton one will be stored away for winter. And then maybe I may make a couple more, if I find out that I’m using it enough.


  1. cue ominous music. But first I would need space to actually keep and use it :)↩︎
  2. other than me, my SO, any costuming friend I may happen to change in the presence of, and everybody on the internet in these pictures.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/0…



In giro ai margini del centro di Varese con un'asciugamano rosso appeso alla vita (per la precisione era appoggiato attorno alle bretelle, ma quelle non si vedevano): FATTO.

(se qualcuno ha detto qualcosa, non l'ho sentito)

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

walking in downtown Varese with a red towel hanging from the waist (it was wrapped around hidden braces): DONE.

(if anybody said anything, I didn't hear them)

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This is interesting. I've just asked okular to print page 128 of a 32 pages document (I know. I had my reasons¹), and the printer spewed out a single page with the word "UNIR" at the top left and nothing else.

¹ it was a pdf with 128 A6 pages laid out on 32 A4 pages, and I mixed up the two numbers. could have happened to anybody! :D

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

Try outputting that single page into a separate PDF or even PS file then printing that instead. I once had this very issue and I solved it that way


Filed under: hard choices.

I'm writing my second letter to a penpal, and I have to decide which one of my *cough* #inks to use.

#selfInducedProblems

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some years ago one of the places I buy fabric from had some plastic fleece on sale, and I bought 3 meters of green fleece to use mostly as a green screen.

I don't usually like green, and it's a colour that I don't really wear.

And now that I've put away most of the winter clothing, but this was still around, I'm a floating head and hands, wrapped in 3 meters of warm green screen.



#TIL: running a gathering stitch sashiko-style with a long needle (a darning one) and the thimble at the base of the middle finger is faster than doing so in the way I had always done.

I wonder whether it also works with two needles, to run two gathering threads at a time, but that's something I'll try in another garment.

#sewing

in reply to MaryPot

@MaryPot for sashiko (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashiko) the needle is guided with the thumb and middle finger, and moved forwards with the base of the middle finger, so that's the part that is covered by the thimble.

Using the base of the middle finger allows to push with a bit more strength, enabling one to sew more stitches before pulling the needle.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

#TIL what Sashiko is and about the special thimble!

athreadedneedle.com/blogs/with…

#TIL


Dear #HistoricalSewing -verse, have you ever stumbled on late victorian / early 1900s instructions on how to sew knit fabric at home?

I don't think I have, and all of the references to knit garments I can think of are of things that one would buy ready made, and thus sewn in an industrial setting.

Which is not any kind of proof that people weren't sewing their own knit underwear at home, of course.

#historicalCostuming

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

I have only come across knit fabrics within lists of materials used in an object. For example collections.museumoflondon.org… I imagine the wonderful dress and textiles people at The Museum of London might have information (in case you haven't already contacted them)
in reply to Faith Caton

my focus is earlier so I don't have much first hand experience, and I realise my link was not the right one! Still, lots of textiles for personal making in London in the early 1900s so MofL might still be a good place to find stuff out.
Questa voce è stata modificata (1 anno fa)


ok, this morning I'm going to cut a new set of pajamas, the ones I'm currently using are full of holes and I badly need a new one or two.

* gets the appropriate fabric from the cupboard

* prepares the appropriate fabric on the table, stats to lay out pieces on the fabric

* realizes that the fabric has been put away before it has been pre-washed

and the forecast for these days is a bit of rain today, more rain tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day and…

I'm trying to pre-wash it anyway (but just the amount I need for the pajamas, not the whole 8 meters)

#sewing #sewingPersonProblems

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

Thankfully, the jersey for the combination suit was ready, so I could cut at least that (it was the second thing I wanted to cut today).

#sewing




promotion of commercial products (sewing patterns), but they are from an independent designer

The Dreamstress has had some unexpected big expenses last month, and now all of her patterns are on sale to raise some money to cover them.

I've bought many of them, both modern and historical, and even sewn some ( O:-) ) and they were really good (both as patterns and as detailed instructions and extra material), but also from the blog she looks like a really nice person.

#sewing #sewingPatterns

thedreamstress.com/2023/05/scr…

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

promotion of commercial products (sewing patterns), but they are from an independent designer

Thank you for this prompt. I have been meaning to get a mantle pattern, and have used her patterns before as well.

So off we go! Now, I just need to make about 10 yards of lace for the trim....

in reply to mem_somerville

promotion of commercial products (sewing patterns), but they are from an independent designer

@mem_somerville yeah, that may be an unwanted side effect :D

I'm tempted to buy something, but I've already bought a lot of them, and I'm not sure I really want to add another era (the 1910s) to my wardrobe.



Hei @PHP @PHP Foundation #php , what's up here?

How firefox is doing "unusual traffic from [my] computer network" (requiring a captcha to continue) , while GNOME Web isn't ?



Oggi è il 13 maggio, secondo sabato del mese: questo significa serata craftaggio, con ritrovo dalle 20:30 in poi all'indirizzo meet.gl-como.it/craftaggio

Il piano è sempre lo stesso, portate il vostro lavoro creativo, qualunque esso sia, per passare la serata facendolo mentre si chiacchera con gli altri; siete tutti¹ benvenuti!

¹ con le ovvie eccezioni, paradosso della tolleranza ecc. ecc.

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I hate proprietary software


Posted on May 12, 2023
Even when it’s \m/.

Years ago I watched my SO play Brütal Legend and of course loved it, but I’ve been only using used computers for a long time, and none of them was really able to run modern games.

Admittedly, he told me that I could use his computer to play the game while he wasn’t home (and I do have an account on that computer, that I’ve sporadically used to do computationally intensive stuff, but always remotely), but it was a hassle, and I never did.

This year, however, he gifted me a shiny new CPU and motherboard, and among other things that meant games from this century!

The first thing I’ve spent time on was 0ad (which admittedly already worked on one of the old computers, as long as the map wasn’t too big), but now it was time to play basically the one recent proprietary game I had been wanting to play.

So, this afternoon I started by trying to copy the installer (it was bought from an humble bundle, I don’t have steam) from the home server to my PC, and the home server froze. Ok, I could copy it through something else than git annex (or from the offline hard disk backup, as I did).

Then I tried to run the installer, which resulted in the really helpful error message:

bash: ./BrutalLegend-Linux-2013-05-07-setup.bin: cannot execute: required file not found

ok, then surely ldd can help:
not a dynamic executable

maybe it doesn’t like being a symlink (remember, git annex), but no, that wasn’t the problem. ah! maybe file can help, and indeed:
BrutalLegend-Linux-2013-05-07-setup.bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable

argh. Why does proprietary software hate us?

Oh, well, wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWT… , dpkg --add-architecture i386 followed by apt update and apt install libc6-i386 and the installer started.

Of course this didn’t mean that the game could run, but at least it was spitting out the right error messages, and I could quickly see what the other missing packages were:

apt install lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386 libgl1:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386

and the game started!

and…

no. audio.

I often play games with no audio, because I can’t wear headphones, but here the soundtrack is basically 50% of the reason one would play this game.

Back when my SO had played the game audio was still through pulseaudio, while now I’m using pipewire (and I wasn’t sure that the game wasn’t old enough to be wanting to use alsa), so I started to worry a bit.

And this time, there was no error message to help, but some googling (on searx) and trial and error gave me this list of packages:

apt install pipewire-audio libpipewire-0.3-0:i386 libpulse0:i386 pipewire-alsa:i386

and that was it! the game started AND I could hear music!

And then it was time for dinner, and I couldn’t play.

(You may notice that this post has been posted quite some time after dinner. Most of this time wasn’t spent writing the post.)

Anyway, as soon as I’ve defeated and crushed Doviculus I’m going back to 0ad. or maybe wesnoth. or some other Free Software and frustration-free game.


blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/0…

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Unknown parent

Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Paolo Redaelli I agree that there are more valid reasons to hate proprietary software than the frustration it causes when trying to play a game.

The thing is, I've been lucky to be able to make lifestyle choices that allow me to avoid using proprietary software everywhere that it counts, so the only exception happens to be games and other narrative media, where you can't really get a free software / free culture equivalent (you can often get free works that are in same general category / genre, but if I want to follow the story of the world where Ormagöden, The Eternal Firebeast, Cremator of the Sky, and Destroyer of the Ancient World is real I can't really play a free software RPG or RTS instead.)

And this means that most of the proprietary software I deal with are games from the Humble Bundle, and they are all full of frustrating issues and bugs that a Free Software game would have fixed (such as being built for 64 bit).

And when your desire to play a game that you have wanted to play for years is frustrated, is easy to rant, even when you're otherwise writing notes to remind yourself how you've fixed the problem in the future :)

Also, this morning I wanted to keep playing, and guess what: another gamebreaking bug.

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

I missed your lamentation was against a game. If I recall correctly games were one of the few situations where RMS somehow relaxed his free-sw-only ethos. Games are also my soft spot, I would make some concession about licensing


This morning's #tea failure mode:

* put the bread in the bread heating appliance¹
* heated water in the kettle (100°C)
* put the filter in the mug
* put the leaves in the filter
* poured water in the mug
* set the timer
* heard the timer
* turned the bread heating appliance off

notice the lack of “removed the filter with the tea leaves from the mug”

luckily I came back to get the mug only half a minute later or so, the tea is a bit strong, but not horribly so.

¹ it's a sandwich maker, if you're curious, but I tend to abuse it a bit

#tea


“ Strong-minded women who have never worn a pair of stays, and gentlemen blinded by hastily-formed prejudice,alike anathematise an article of dress of the good qualities of which they are utterly ignorant, and which consequently they cannot appreciate.On a subject of so much importance as regards comfort (to say nothing of the question of elegance, scarcely less important on a point of feminine costume), no amount of theory will ever weigh very heavily when opposed to practical experience.”

From The corset and the crinoline : a book of modes and costumes from remote periods to the present time by Lord, William Barry, 1868

(Disclaimer: the historical accuracy of the book is, let's say, peculiar :D )

edit: I forgot the link to the book: archive.org/details/corsetcrin…

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