#I haven't been on here a while because I've been sewing/reading/knitting a lot and I'm not watching any dramas but all is well!!

[iamacolor]

i'm turning 27 today so I've officially left the "young people group" - bye bye youth prices, my fellow europeans will understand - and I think it's the first time that a new birthday makes me feel really adult (despite not feeling that different from last year) and getting my adhd diagnosis is definitely a reason for that. it's given me such a different outlook and approach to myself (with less shame and sense of inevitability for the things I can't do and more gentleness with myself) and it's giving me more hope for different things in the future. I'm not where I thought I'd be when I was a teenager and 27 seemed so grown-up, neither when it comes to work, money, travelling or where I live or even romantic relationships since there's still nothing on that front lol. While that could be sad I also feel very at peace and also excited to try to things.

I started medication and I'm very happy to feel that it has an effect on me (I had a weird fear that it wouldn't do anything and that it'd prove that I didn't actually have adhd and was just not doing enough even if I knew that wasn't true but it's not that easy to let go of the feeling that it's just a question of effort and will but thankfully that's been proved wrong lol) and that so far there have been no secondary issue except for a slight loss of appetite - it's only been 3 weeks and I'm still in the testing phase where I started with the lowest dose and then I increase it everyweek to see how it goes but I feel much lighter in my brain and more in control even if it doesn't last all day. I shocked myself on one of my days off where I sat down to scroll on my phone and thought oh I should actually start cleaning my room and then I just stood up and did it more thoroughly than I've ever done since I moved in lol. I've even initiated tidying up and reorganising our workshop and cleaning up the machines at work, my manager says I'm in my organising and tidying up era.

I never would've read up about adhd symptoms the different forms of adhd and how it shows up in adults if I hadn't seen a random reblog on this website, back in September I believe, about executive dysfunction that lit up something in my brain because wow there was a word for the thing I was struggling with!! So I guess this is a very long way to say that holding on to this blog for so long was worth it and thank you to everyone here for sharing so many random stuffs, it's cool to think we're all having impact on each other 💜 and this is also to say please educate yourself about the various forms of neurodivergence because I genuinely thought I knew enough about adhd to never even consider it for myself and that what I was struggling with was just a "me problem" so you or someone you know or will know might be neurodivergent in some ways and you can make your life or their lives easier by knowing how to handle it and not to stigmatise either yourself or the people around you 💜

[facingthenorthwind]

So while reading Halo Effect, I naturally became obsessed with the one (1) Jewish character who turns up twice, one as a brief mention and one to write a single letter. Because I am extremely normal, I am writing a fic about him. Technically I've only written the first half (the second half is Peter and Thomas meeting up with him), but it's self-contained. It's been written for literal years, so I figure I should at least post it on tumblr. I hope you enjoy it, @alex51324!! (Also I haven't Yiddishised the Hebrew yet because I only know the standard pronunciation but I'm going to get someone to do it before I post it on AO3.) Hopefully this is comprehensible to non-Jews?? Please let me know if not.

Is it breaking a mitzvah if I say mourner's kaddish for someone who might not be mourned otherwise without a minyan? At most, there's a Green who has a J on his identity disc on one of the wards, but he's currently on so much morphine I don't think he'd remember the words, Issac wrote to his father once he finally got back to his unit. Honestly, he didn't much care what his father wrote back — if God didn't like him saying kaddish for Fitz, God could come down here and tell him what alternative he had. He asked his father to send a candle so he could light it for Fitz, but crossed it out and asked him for ten candles. Fitz may have been the first, but he sure as hell wouldn't be the last.

The news of Fitz’s death had preceded Issac’s return, but nobody had touched Fitz’s belongings yet. Cruelly, the most essential things, the things that meant most to him, had gone down with him, but Rouse eventually laid out everything that was in Fitz’s rucksack so they could decide what they should send back to his family — well, his brother. Fitz had said he didn’t have any other family left. 

They decided they’d split his cigarettes between them — Scogs tried to crack a joke about how Fitz had always been so free with his cigarettes it was almost like he wasn’t gone, but he trailed off, and no one laughed. His large collection of letters went in his rucksack, of course (he seemed to get them constantly, all from different people; sometimes he had even acted as some kind of go-between, passing on information from one letter-writer to another, as if they couldn’t just write to each other themselves). The scarf he’d worn every day from Christmas until mid-April, when even he couldn’t deny it was too hot, went in as well — Issac had always thought privately that it was fairly ugly, but then again, if he tried to knit a scarf it would probably turn out much the same. 

Dawson got Fitz’s copy of Prester John out of his own pack and removed his bookmark before handing it over to Rouse. “He’s made some little notes in it,” he said. “Nothing all that interesting yet as I can see, but it doesn’t feel right to keep it.”

Rouse packed it and Scogs didn’t mention that he had been next in line to read it. One of them could write home to get another copy, probably. Issac was sure he could — he had already received several yellowbacks which he’d left in the break room once everyone had read them so they could find a new home. Fitz’s sewing kit, playing cards and the various other things he’d been sent went on top and by the time they were done there was an all-too-noticeable hole where Fitz had once slept. 

It was only then that Issac noticed Rouse had gained corporal’s stripes. It made sense — Fitz needed replacing and Rouse was an obvious choice, being the smartest of the lot of them. He congratulated him, but Rouse wasn’t offended that he didn’t quite hit the right tone and his smile didn’t reach his eyes. Rouse’s didn’t, either.

When he arrived at the wards for his next shift, Captain Russell clapped him on the shoulder and gave him an extra ration of brandy. And then they just had to get on with it.

------

Fitz’s brother never replied to the letter he sent, so Issac kept saying kaddish for him past the thirty days that were traditional. He knew there were lots of reasons he might not have written — maybe it got lost, or he didn’t want to hear from Issac, or any number of perfectly innocent explanations, but as Issac watched men die day after day he couldn’t stop thinking about how if Fitz’s brother was dead, there was no one to remember Fitz as family. 

He said it for eleven months, as he would for a brother — four months longer than he’d known him. About six months in, Rouse wrote to him saying that he’d been stationed with Fitz’s brother at a CCS. He was a corporal, apparently, and Rouse said he reminded him of Fitz — that they said some of the same things, though in temperament they were pretty different. The war dragged on.

He kept a list of people in his units who died as he transferred from place to place, but it quickly became clear that he couldn't light a candle for each of them. The list just kept going, a litany of names followed by the date of their death in the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars. Jerry Scoggins, 30 September 1915/22 Tishrei 5676. Billy Dawson, 2 October 1915/25 Tishrei 5676. Fred Keighery, 4 February 1916/30 Shevat 5676... It felt like keeping track of their yahrzeits was more of a motivation to note the Hebrew date than keeping the holidays, since it wasn’t like he could, not really. Even as he tried to pray every day for whatever service he had free, the words of the festival services just made him homesick, and he didn’t have any of the things you should have: matzah or his mother’s blintzes or a lulav. 

He wrote to Moishe about studying the RAMC periodicals at Shavuot instead of Torah; it felt... oddly fitting. He knew, logically, that this war was man's fault and God didn't have anything to do with it, but that didn't provide any comfort when he was on death watch, sitting beside a man who gasped as he drowned on dry land. If the only control he had in this hell was giving two fingers to God, then he was going to take it. 

His father sent him a machzor so he could pray Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but he got to Unetaneh Tokef and didn't even have the energy to be embarrassed when someone found him crying ten minutes later. Reciting the ways people would die in the coming year — who by water, who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast — felt absurd when he could list just as many from who was on the wards. Who by phosgene, who by sepsis, who by bullets? And for the machzor to claim that repentance, prayer and righteousness averted the severity of the decree — that sure hadn’t fucking worked for the soldiers getting killed. It hadn’t worked for Fitz or Scoggins or Keighery or— 

By the end of 1917 he could no longer go over the top, having lost his hearing in his left ear from a shell exploding too close. The letters he received detailing how his nephew he’d never met could talk in whole sentences now and how Mr Rabinowitz had fallen and broken his leg felt like missives from a world he would never return to again; how could he, when all he knew was the war?

The Armistice meant the supply of wounded slowed, but he didn’t go home — he was stationed at a general hospital, so there were still plenty of cases coming through. Even when they offered to send him home because he wasn’t regular army and they were well aware that the other corps had mostly got the wartime recruits out… he knew it was cowardly, but he accepted the offer to stay on until the RAMC left France. He couldn’t picture how he was going to fit back into the Leylands, and perhaps if he put it off long enough he’d finally work it out.

He did not.

When he finally got off the train at Leeds, it felt a little like a fairytale — he kept being shocked that he could recognise the buildings as the train came in, and it sounded the same as it had before the war. The back of his throat began to ache, though he wasn’t sure why, but before he could focus on that his mother was calling his name and hugging him. Had she been there the whole time? She gave him a kiss on the cheek and led him to everyone else — there was Shoshie, who grinned at him and then prompted the child hiding behind her legs to greet his Feter Itzik. While the nephew he’d never met hid his face in her skirt, his father embraced him with a decidedly gruff, “Son.”

And at last there was Moishe, his smile twisted by the scarring on his face. He looked like he understood the slight bewilderment that must have shown on his face. “Glad they let you go eventually,” he said, slapping him on the back. He spoke into his right ear, probably noticing that Issac had turned so he could hear the people in front of him more clearly with it. 

“Yeah,” Issac said, not trusting himself to say anything else lest he start crying. 

“See, he’s not scary, Dovid,” Shoshie said, having coaxed his nephew out in front of her. “Say hello.”

“Hello Feter,” he said at last. “Why don’t you have a face like Feter Moishe?”

“Dovid!” Shoshie said.

Moishe shot Issac a grin. For the first time in too long, Issac laughed.

[starsbegantofall]

diy handmade wardrobe

You may remember, or not, it was a while ago, that I mentioned I don't really wear a lot of the clothes I've sewed for myself. Excepting the cosplay garments which are not everyday wearable pieces unless they were closet cosplay pieces with no or minor alterations, I really only wear my pajama pants and altered t-shirts multiple times.

I have worn a few handmade lolita dresses once or twice after the first time I wore them, but definitely not frequently like pajama pants and t-shirts. Firstly, I don't really wear dresses or skirts on an every day basis in my entire adult life, not even much as a kid. While I do commute to the office once in a while and could wear lolita there since I have a desk job, I mostly wear business casual with jeans/slacks and the occasional j-fashion blouse or cardigan (skirts have to be midi-length or longer and those are not very convenient for a short person to wear). I rarely go out on the weekends due to pandemic and lazy, so I would just run errands and dresses are not conducive to errands. So even if I did sew the cutest, most comfortable casual j-fashion dress, I would wear it maybe a few times in my entire lifetime. In the end, it's not worth the time and money invested into making it.

Read more about my plans here

The next obvious pivot would be to recreate the pieces that I do wear often, buuuuuutttt those are impossible for a home sewist to recreate. How do I sew jeans on my Hello Kitty sewing machine? I can't, the machine is much too small and weak to handle denim or even regular bottom-weight fabric. I don't have a serger so sewing knits like tops or casual athleisure would be a pain and look sloppy and would fall apart in the wash.

Okay, so the next obvious pivot after that is buy an industrial strength machine to sew denim and pants and a serger to work with knits. That would cost about... $2000 for medium quality machines. Maybe more with inflation. So I would have to make $2000 worth of clothes, or 100 hours of sewing (generously) just to break even. I'd have to sew every weekend for 6 months. Not counting the cost of fabric.

Which is the next issue. You can't really buy comfortable cottons or semi-natural fashion fabrics at the craft store chains anymore, it's mostly quilting cottons and synthetics and canvas. I am lucky to live near a big city with a fashion district so I could go there if I really want to for a variety of wearable fabrics that my skin would not reject the feeling of. That would not be cheap (well, idk, I haven't been to the fashion district in decades but judging from online prices, the stuff on clearance is on clearance for a reason) and I doubt I'll get the exact prints or colors I want even at full price. Thrifting bed sheets (aka the most comfortable cotton you can get cheaply) is.... probably not what I want to sell to others...

With all of these barriers, I have not been able to accomplish my goal in 2022/2023 of sewing handmade j-fashion inspired pieces for both myself or my etsy shop which was named "atelier" but doesn't sell clothes, and used to only have jewelry. My day-job also prevents me working on stuff lol, but as one of my goals was to retire early, I kinda want a head start on my atelier just in case I need to. I hopefully will have saved enough money to retire that I don't need to desperately work on a side hustle, but I like having back up plans. And also, I feel guilty not having any clothes in an "atelier" lol.

Because I'm lazy and don't want to do real business which is the downfall of society, my ideal plan would be to sew a few big/medium pieces, then a handful of coordinating or thematic small pieces, including doll clothes, and also some artwork or whatever, then release 2 or 3 times a year like how actual fashion companies do for the seasons. But with the resources I have, I just can't think of anything I can sew that would be good/sturdy enough to sell for price that equals the amount of time I put into sewing, and that anyone else would buy when they can get it cheaper elsewhere.

So my final idea is to either create very trendy items that I am fairly taobao companies will not make very well, or that American patrons would prefer to buy from a small artist in their country instead, or make fandom inspired items but fashionable like Super Groupies style. I think this is the way to go for me, tbh, that way I know I have made something unique and that I will enjoy making even if it never sells, so I would wear it myself lol. I did make jewelry in this style 2 years ago and jotted several notes of what to sew/craft for my shop in the meantime, but as mentioned before, the few items I made was not to the level of quality to be sellable (even though I personally love them and they're sturdy enough for my use of course) and I doubt I could do much better. But I have to work on leveling up my skills now or I will be too arthritic and blind later, so I have no choice but figure out something asap.

If anyone else has ideas other than buying new machines which probably I need to do anyway, let me know! Again, I'm not interested in making a profit, I'm not a capitalist nor scum of the earth, I am already a doctor, but I do want to be compensated fairly as an artist yet make good quality value-priced items attainable for everyone in these tough economic times. That's not easy, but I still want to try this year.

Anyway... back to more pajama pants for me.