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Costume. Chitons.

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I made a bunch of dried citrus garland and ornaments this year, and if you’re looking for low-budget high-impact gift ideas for the holiday season, I cannot recommend this enough. I have had nearly all of my aunts reach out to ask me for these already.

All you do is take oranges (and grapefruit, in my case, but you could use any citrus fruit, lemon and limes included. You could also do slices of apple or other fruits, but they don’t dry as pretty) and cut them into slim, even slices. Blot the slices as dry as you can get them with paper towel, then lay them flat on drying racks, if you have them, or cookie sheets if you don’t. The cookie sheets will take longer, but will probably produce flatter slices at the end. If you want to, you can take cloves and push them into the slices before you dry them; the oranges should contract around them and hold them in place.

Put these into the oven at 200-220 degrees F (93 C), and bake for at least 4 hours. Check them hourly; it may take up to 7 hours, depending on the thickness of your slices and oven air circulation. Take them out when they no longer feel wet or sticky to the touch. 

A 5 lb bag of navel oranges was enough to garland most of this tree. All you need for that is a thick needle and some string (DMC embroidery floss works well, and is less than a dollar a skein at walmart and other chain stores). You just tie off the first orange, and then use the needle to go in and out each slice near the edges. If you’re making ornaments, check your local dollar store for bits of ribbon, jingle bells, beads or whatever else seems good to you. A hot glue gun is helpful but not necessary; all the ornaments here are just tied together. 

I have plenty of herbs drying in my cupboard, so I also used some sprigs of rosemary and lavender, plus cinnamon sticks, cloves, and allspice. Rosemary is easy to find as live plants in the grocery section, and you can trim some off without killing the plant (and then you have i n f i n i t e  r o s e m a r y). Get creative!

These smell fantastic, and should last multiple seasons if they’re dried allll the way and stored in airtight containers. (I chucked some of the odd bits into my mulling spices, which is lovely.) They’re a very old method of decorating and look beautiful even when they’re not perfect. If you’ve made these before, I’d love to see what you made!

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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship

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@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

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what if the reason nobody can tell fred and george apart is because they really are interchangeable

not in a ~it doesn’t matter~ way but like. molly and arthur used to worry that fred and george might turn out to be squibs because they weren’t doing any accidental magic as children, but they were, THEY TOTALLY WERE, it just wasn’t anything flashy, instead they were just like idly switching bodies all the time

and like sometimes it doesn’t make much of a difference, whatever, wake up in the opposite bed you went to sleep in, but it gets like dangerous and weird if you’re on a broom or in the pond or letting your mum teach you to cook or trying to be mad stealth, so for a long long time everybody presumes they’re clumsy maybe-squibs and that they’re doing their twin lying thing when they try to explain what’s going on, so they learn to handle the issue their ownselves

they just. don’t go anywhere without the other. they start each day deciding which body is going to be which (because at this point they really don’t know which body is technically fred and which is technically george), and they learn to reorient FAST when they switch, and what things set them off, and eventually they learn how to act like nothing’s up even when one of them’s in the air and one’s on the ground or whatever, and then they burn past that til they can finish each other’s sentences — til they can switch midsentence — til they can play beater together — til they can switch in a split second in the middle of a game — til there’s room for other kinds of accidental magic to start showing up

at hogwarts they keep each other awake in history of magic by switching back and forth. in potions they take turns brewing and keeping lookout for the slytherins. in transfiguration and charms they keep their grades up because one of them will always get a spell right on the first try so they switch and make it look like both of them do and then they practice on their own later in private. it keeps the mystery alive.

at first they thought lee was just a lucky guesser but no, lee can always tell one twin from another twin — it’s not exactly telling fred from george, because while they are definitely two distinct personalities neither one of them feels like fred all the time or george all the time — but lee knows who he argued with yesterday or who he lent his notes to or who’s best to ask for help in astronomy and who’s best at runes. 

the weasleys are pretty bad at it for the longest time, but then bill comes home from his first year cursebreaking and he can tell, and over a holiday he teaches his trick to charlie so charlie can tell. alicia and katie and angelina can tell. the twins honestly don’t know if oliver can tell or not; so long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to on the quidditch pitch he doesn’t really care about much else. harry can tell. luna can tell. tonks can tell.

the problem is there’s no way for this to end happily

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Facts from the 2014 UK Editions of Harry Potter

Before the Hogwarts Express, some young wizards and witches made their way to Hogwarts on broomsticks and in enchanted carriages

There are other fractional platforms at King’s Cross station. Try 7 1/2 for a trip to wizard-only villages in Europe. 

It took five and a half minutes for the Sorting Hat to decide whether to place Minerva McGonagall in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw

Several Hogwarts students have caused mayhem at King’s Cross by dropping suitcases full of newt spleens or biting spellbooks all over the Muggle Station.

Peeves the poltergeist caused a three-day evacuation of Hogwarts in 1876 after escaping a trap set for him armed with several dangerous weapons. 

The one exception to the general magical aversion to Muggle technology is cars. Even the Ministry of Magic owns a fleet, modified with various useful charms. 

Many wizards were unhappy with the invention of the Muggle-like Knight Bus, and refused to use it when it first hit the streets. 

Headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts can teach their magical portrait to act and behave exactly like themselves. 

Sir Cadogan’s most famous encounter was with the Wyvern of Wye, a dragon-like creature, whom he accidentally killed with his broken wand. 

Only one non-magical person has ever managed to get as far as the Hogwarts Sorting Hat before being exposed as a Squib. 

Of the Eleven wizarding schools in the world, the African school of Uagadou is the only one to select pupils by Dream Messenger, leaving a token in the child’s hand whilst they sleep. 

The 1809 Quidditch World Cup final turned into a human versus tree battle when one of the players managed to jinx an entire forest to attack the stadium. 

The Hufflepuff ghost, the Fat Friar, was executed after senior churchman became suspicious of his ability to cure the pox by poking peasants with a stick. 

Every year St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries treats at least one injury caused by homemade Floo powder. 

Before she became a teacher at Hogwarts, Minerva McGonagall used to work for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic. 

Part of the process of becoming an Animagus requires you to carry a leaf from a Mandrake in your mouth for an entire month. 

A Dark wizard called Raczidian was devoured by maggots that appeared from his wand when he unsuccessfully attempted to cast the Patronus Charm.

Any part of a person’s body can be added to the Polyjuice Potion to allow the consumer to take their form, including hair, toenail clippings, dandruff or worse…

Remus Lupin’s father, Lyall, was a world-renowned authority on magical creatures like poltergeists and Boggarts. 

It took 167 Memory Charms and the largest mass Concelment Charm ever performed in Britain to modify a muggle steam engine and create the Hogwarts Express. 

Students from the Russian Wizarding school, Koldovstoretz, play a version of Quidditch where they fly on entire, uprooted trees instead of broomsticks. 

Yes, these are all canon. Thought I’d type it up to have it as a text reference. Enjoyyy. 

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tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”

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I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

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I’ve just realised Harry’s fame is not just something that will haunt him and his kids for years but he literally made history. One day kids at Hogwarts will complain that they have to write essays about some fucking guy called Harry Potter who died like 1000 years ago.

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Remove the White Supremacists

Dear Tumblr @staff, 

In light of the recent white supremacist terror attacks worldwide: 

We, the Tumblr community (your community), implore you to change your previously passive policy against white supremacy and white nationalist extremist ideologies. 

Every major news station, social expert, and experts on extremist ideologies have identified that these extremist ideologies are spread and grown on online platforms: specifically social platforms. They have identified the major ways that communities can confront these violent extremist views; the biggest one being for social media groups to actually start removing user accounts that post and spread extremist white nationalist dog whistles, memes, and rhetoric.

Your users are begging for your help in stemming the rising tide of xenophobic violence. As has become evident by the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, these ideologies don’t begin with violence, but with strategically spouted rhetoric and hate speech that riles up others who are vulnerable to being persuaded by their subtle methods. 

Please.  If you support the safety of your users.  If you support the Muslim Community. If you support the Jewish Community.  If you support People of Color.  If you support your users regardless of color or religious background. 

Then it’s time to start taking a proactive stance against extremist white supremacist and nationalist ideologies and remove them. 

The signatures and reblogs below should serve to show you how strongly your userbase feels about this. We all stand for a world without Hate. Do you?

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@staff are you fucking kidding me right now?! You’re limiting text posts to 100 text blocks (aka paragraphs). What the absolute fuck.

Since you couldn’t take out fanfic writers with the purge so you’re just fucking up formatting for text posts until they leave? Is that your plan?

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reblog this to support luna lovegood

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if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it. 

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So I was rereading Harry Potter, when I came across this and thought- what if instead of Cedric Diggory, Cassius Warrington had been chosen to compete in the Triwizard Tournament?

Imagine Dumbledore calling out the name of the Hogwarts champion and it isn’t a Gryffindor, or a Ravenclaw, or even a Hufflepuff, but it’s a Slytherin. A student from a House most people hate.

Imagine Cassius Warrington getting up, and three out of four Houses are booing at him and shouting things like “NO!” or, “We can’t have a Slytherin champion!” or demanding a retry. But he’s a Slytherin- he’s been dealing with this shit since he got sorted, so he keeps his head high and joins the other champions.

Imagine Harry trying to catch Warrington alone because he doesn’t really want to associate with Slytherins (plus Malfoy has this tendency of being around the guy ALL THE TIME since he got chosen), but at the same time he’s also fair enough not to want him to walk into the first task unprepared.

Imagine Warrington walking over to Harry a few months later, and Ron and Hermione both jump into a protective stance, wands out, but instead of attacking Harry he just tells him to stick the egg underwater. (Because Slytherins don’t forget those who helped them out).

Imagine Warrington and Harry helping each other out in the labyrinth.

Imagine Harry being devastated when Peter kills Warrington- because Voldemort doesn’t care what house they’re form, a spare is a spare.

Imagine the uproar that causes among the Slytherins, because some of their parents really are Death Eaters and they know what really happened.

Imagine Slytherins fighting in the Battle of Hogwarts and shouting “This is for Cassius!”

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