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everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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I love when 9 pm looks like this ❤️❤️❤️ almost solstice!!!

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me and my bf did bleach dye and this came out so cool

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by Alessandro Comotti

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happy dhmis day

hope they find those weirdos soon

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Happy solstice! And for the northern hemisphere, happy summer!

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Reminder that generations of abolitionists lived and died being told that their cause was fruitless because slavery was simply the natural way of the world.

Reminder that John Brown’s raid failed, but he still managed to leverage his imprisonment into martyrdom.

Reminder that slavery went from being legal in all countries to legal in none.

Reminder that the abolitionist movement suffered many devastating setbacks before succeeding in the end.

Do not let anything discourage you from working for a better world. We have come so far, and we will go further.

Happy Juneteenth.

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6/16/25 tornado in Wallfleet, NE

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june 19th just dropped

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Over The Waves by Setsuko Matsushima

art quilt

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I think its valid that my girlfriend prefers to call herself bisexual instead of pansexual because she likes having purple in her flag instead of yellow.

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Watch Full Video : Four Seasons at Mount Koya by VICOMINC

It's so therapeutic.

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Mānawatia a Matariki

Today I attended a lino print workshop as part of events on commemorating Matariki this year. The theme was about the Pōhutukawa star in particular, with its focus on honouring those who have passed.

I was inspired to attend, as at the beginning of May, my second step-dad passed away. One of my forefront memories of him has been from around 10 years ago, when he and my mum came to visit on their honeymoon and meet my son for the first time. Their birthdays are just one day apart, but thanks to the timezones we lived in, it meant celebrating both around the same time, half a world away. Anyway, while we were in Wellington, we visited one of those souvenir shops, and my step-dad picked out a pair of Pōhutukawa fairy babies (they may even have been based on Hutu and Kawa?). He thought they would be fine just in his pocket, but unfortunately somewhere between there and home, he lost them. I had always hoped to find some again someday to surprise him with, but it was not to be.

So, I made these today with him on my mind. I picked having both the Matariki constellation and a pair of Pōhutukawa blossoms (him & my mum, the two lost fairies), and the colouring being red, white, and blue in a sort of nod to both the kiwi and american flags.

I sent a photo of them to my mum and inadvertently made her cry again, but I think she appreciated the gesture.

On a video call with her recently when she was updating me on how she was and wasn't coping, she told me about one breakdown she'd had recently. She'd gone to a lake where they keep their RV in a campsite, and was out in a boat with her neighbours, when they came around a bend and there was this steamboat on the lake. It has a fancy restaurant and she and my step-dad had planned to have their 10th wedding anniversary there later this year. And she just lost it. After she told me, I reinforced what her neighbours told her: it's a sign she should still go. So she's planning to go with one of my cousins and her husband.

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did i ever share this??? i cant remember so ill just do it again

i got this original gon and killua drawing from niuya (animator on the hxh 2011 anime) last year in japan and it’s literally one of my most prized possessions like….. its beautiful!!!!!