#stitching tips

[physalian]

10 More Character Types the World Needs More of

Part 1 was specifically character dynamics, but I’m considering this a sequel anyway.

1. Fiercely independent character’s lesson isn’t to “trust people”

I’m not projecting. You’re projecting. There is a divide wide enough to fit the Grand Canyon between “trusting that someone isn’t lying” and “trusting someone to follow through on a promise”. Most dumpster fire attempts at these characters (almost exclusively women) rely solely on mocking them for the former because “not all men” or something.

Being consistently let down in life makes you hesitant to a) gain friends, b) pursue romantic interests, c) maintain familial relationships, d) get excited about any event that demands participation from someone who isn’t you. None of this is simply a bad attitude—it’s a trauma response. There is no lesson to be learned, and not even exposure therapy can help because it’s a real, legitimate, and common stunt people pull, whether they mean it or not.

So write one of these characters and legitimize their fears, give them someone who proves the exception to the rule, but do not let the lesson be “well they just haven’t found the right person yet”. Even the “right person” can let them down. It's about not becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy by sabotaging a good thing to prove it will inevitably go bad.

2. Conventionally attractive men who aren’t horndogs

I’m going to find every way I can to tell you to write more aces. This is to fight the stigma that attractive people must be attracted to people. Give me gorgeous aces and demi’s, men, women, enbys and everyone in between, who put a crap ton of effort into looking their best, and yet happen to not have a very loud libido. They look good for themselves, and not to impress anyone else.

Give me someone who could have anyone they wanted, gender regardless, and just simply has no interest. Or, they do actually have a significant other, but sex, how hot their partner is, or how horny they are, isn’t their internal monologue. I don’t even care if it’s unrealistic, it’s annoying to read.

And, you know, giving men male characters who aren’t thinking about sex all the time can be good, right? Right?

3. Manly warrior men who also write poetry

A.K.A Aragorn, Son of Arathorn. Just give me more Aragorns, period. This dude is either covered in filth, blood, guts, and the last 30 miles of rugged terrain, or singing in Elvish at his own coronation while pink flower petals fall. A man can be both, and still be straight.

A man can also drink Respect Women juice, you know? He ticks off all the boxes—he’s gentle when he needs to be, not afraid to hide his emotions, kind to those who are vulnerable and afraid and need a strong figure to look up to, resolute in his beliefs, skilled and knowledgeable in his abilities without being arrogant or smug, and the first boots on the battlefield, leading from the front.

4. Characters who are characters when no one is watching

This is less a specific type and more a scene that doesn’t get written enough. This whole point comes from Pixar’s Cars. I. Love. This. Movie. It’s not Pixar’s best, for sure, but this is my comfort movie. The best scene, one that’s so unique, is when Doc (aged living legend) thinks he’s alone when he rolls out onto the dirt race track and comes alive tearing around the oval.

This character’s unbridled, unabashed glee and euphoria at proving to himself that he’s still got it, when he’s completely unaware of his audience, is perfection. Not enough credence is given to characters to just… enjoy being themselves. He’s not doing it to prepare for the climactic race, he’s not doing it for the plot, he’s doing it just to do it, not even to prove Lightning wrong—just for himself.

Give your characters a “Doc Racing” scene. Whatever their skill is. Maybe they’re a dancer, a skater, a swimmer, a painter, sprinter. Just let your character love being alive.

5. Characters whose neurodivergence isn't “cute”

A.K.A. Lilo Pelekai from Lilo and Stitch. Really, her relationship with Nani is peak sibling writing. But Lilo herself is just so realistic with how she interacts with the world, how she interprets her relationships with her so-called friends, how she organizes her thoughts and rationalizes what she can’t quite understand, and how friggen smart she is for an… 11-year-old?

But she’s not “cute”. As in, she wasn’t written by generic Suits who were trying to cash in on the ND crowd by writing what they think will sell, but also making her juuust neurotypical enough to still be palatable by the rest of the audience. Lilo’s earnestness is what endears her to everybody. But also, she doesn’t get a free pass for her behavior, either. Her “friends” aren’t forced to accommodate her and Nani isn’t written as the cold-hearted villain for trying to discipline her.

6. Straight male characters with female friends

Am I double-dipping a bit here? Yes. While I completely understand how tempting it can be, this type of character is in dire need of exposure and representation to prove it’s possible. No weird tense moments, no double-glances when she isn’t looking, no contemplations about cheating on his girlfriend (and no insecure jealous girlfriend either). Just two characters who enjoy each other’s company and are able to coexist in a space and be in each other’s spaces without hormones getting in the way. Peak example? Po and Tigress from Kung Fu Panda.

Let these two rely on each other for emotional strength in times of need, let them share inside jokes, let them have a night alone together at a bar, at home, cooking dinner, getting takeout, talking on the patio in a porch swing… with zero “will they/won’t they.”

7. The likable bigot

I’m actually on the fence with this one but it’s something I also don’t see done often enough and I’m adding it for one reason: Bigots aren’t always obvious mustache-twirling villains and the little things they do might seem inconsequential to them, but are still hurtful. So showing these characters is like plopping a mirror down in front of these people and, I don’t know, maybe something will click. They don’t have to be MAGAs to be dangerous, and only writing the extremes convinces the moderates that they aren’t also the problem.

Example: I have a “friend” who recently said something along the lines of “I have lots of gay friends” followed up shortly by “I don’t think this country should keep gay marriage because it’s a slippery slope to legalizing pedophilia.” You know. The quiet part being that she *actually* thinks being gay is as morally abhorrent as being a pedo. But she totally has lots of gay friends. Including one who was driving her during that conversation. (It’s me. Hi. I’m apparently the problem, it’s me.)

She’s absolutely homophobic, but the second she stops announcing it, she’s a very bubbly person. She’s a ~likable~ bigot and thus thinks she can distance herself from the more violent ones.

8. The motherly single father

I say “motherly” merely as shorthand for the vibe I’m going for here. “Motherly” as in dads who aren’t scandalized by the growing pains of their daughters, and who don’t just parent their sons by saying “man up boys don’t cry”. Dads who play Barbie with their kids of either gender. Dads who go to the PTA meetings with all the other Karens and know as much if not more than they do about the school and their kids’ education.

Dads who comfort their crying kids, especially their sons. Dads that take interest in “feminine” activities like learning how to braid their daughter’s hair, learning different makeup brands, going on nail salon trips together. Dads who do not pull out the rifle on their daughter’s new boyfriend and treat her like property. Dads who have guy friends that don’t mock him and call him gay. Dad who does all this stuff anyway and is *actually* gay, too, but the emphasis is on overly sensitive straight men’s masculinity here.

Wholesome dads: a shocking amount of single-parents to female anime protagonists.

9. The parent isn’t dead, they’re just gone

Treasure Planet is an awesome movie in its own right, but what’s even better? This is a Disney movie where the parent isn’t dead, he’s just a deadbeat who abandoned his son and isn’t at all relevant to the plot beyond the hole he left behind for Jim to fill. The only deadbeat dads Disney allows are villains and those guys are very vigorously chasing an aspiration, that aspiration just doesn’t include quality fatherhood. Or motherhood. Disney has yet to write a deadbeat mom, I’m almost certain.

I just wrote a post about the necessity of the “dead parent” cliche, but what is perhaps more relatable because it’s more common, and what earns even more sympathy and underdog points for the protagonist? The hero with the parent who left. Then there’s a whole extra layer of angst and trauma available when your hero can now plague themselves with the question of if the parent leaving is their fault. Death is usually an accident. Choosing to abandon your kid is on purpose.

10. Victim who isn’t victim-blamed or told by their friends (and the narrative) to forgive their abuser

Izuku Midoriya lost so much support from me the moment he told his friend, bearing the consequences of domestic violence across half his face, that Midoriya thinks he’ll be ready soon to forgive his abomination of a father. I am firmly in the “Endeavor is a despicable human and hero” camp and no I’m not taking criticism. I audibly gasped when I heard this line and realized Deku was serious. Todoroki needs friends like the Gaang to remind him that he's allowed to hate the man who's actions caused the burn scar across his f*cking face.

I understand that the mangaka apparently didn’t anticipate the vitriolic backlash toward Endeavor during his debut and reveal of his parenting tactics but the tone-deafness of telling a fifteen year old with crippling emotional management issues and a horrible home life that his abusive dad in any way deserves and is entitled to forgiveness on the grounds of being related is disgusting.

Take it back further to a more famous Tumblr dad: John Winchester. Another despicable human who got retroactively forgiven by his sons after his death in a “he wasn’t so bad, he really did try” campaign. It’s one thing if the character believes it, it’s a whole different matter if the narrative is also pushing this message.

Katara is a perfect example: She lets go of her grudge for her own peace of mind and stops blaming Zuko for something he had no hand in, stops blaming him simply because he’s a firebender and he’s around to be her punching bag. She doesn’t forgive the man who killed her mother, because that man doesn’t deserve her forgiveness. Katara heals in spite of him, not because of him, and had she let him off the hook, she would have gotten an apology for getting caught, not for what he did (which is exactly what happened).

[larrylimericks]

12Jul24

Three hundred and fifty-six days Since last we saw Harry on stage, But tonight a duet! For Ms. Nicks’ Hyde Park set, And a Songbird who’s now flown away.

[handweavers]

don't have pics because it's nearly 4 am but i just finished fully handsewing a chocolate brown linen button up long sleeve shirt that i'm certain is going to be one of my go-to shirts from now on

[20dollarlolita]

To everyone getting a new sewing machine, as well as everyone who is working on last-minute holiday presents:

If the decorative stitches on your sewing machine are coming out ugly, there's a few things to try.

Your decorative stitches are basically embroidery, so give the project the same support you'd give a machine hoop embroidery project.

Bobbin: embroidery bobbin thread is much thinner than standard sewing thread. This really cuts down on the bulkiness of the stitch. If you want your decorative stitching to lie flat, you want to reduce bulk. You're having problems in a satin stitch, where the thread piles up on itself, makes a knot, and stops feeding? Embroidery bobbin thread will help prevent that, because it takes a lot more embroidery bobbin to make a knot big enough to stop the feed teeth. It's also thinner, so you can fit more on a bobbin and need to change your bobbin less. Embroidery bobbin is usually only available in two colors, but it's made so that your top thread will wrap onto the back and look prettier.

Stabilizer: For any hoop embroidery project, you need stabilizer. You can also put it behind your fabric in a decorative stitch. This will keep the fabric lying flat, and support your stitches. Some decorative stitch patterns will have the stitches very close together, and many woven fabrics can't support that many stitches. Stabilizer is meant to provide that support. There's versions that tear away (my current favorite is tear-and-wash), or that stay in the fabric permanently. If the back of your project isn't visible, keeping the stabilizer in there will show off your stitches and make it more attractive. You can buy a single promo pack of tear-away stabilizer for like $5, and if you're only using small strips of it to reinforce decorative stitching, it'll last you a really long time.

Thread: If you're doing a project with decorative stitching, you might as well use a decorative thread. Embroidery thread, must like my dear cat Teensy Buttons, is very pretty, but not very strong. While you don't want to use most machine embroidery threads for construction stitching, it does decorative stitching really well. If you're doing satin stitching, the shininess of the thread will really emphasize the stitching. For decorative stitching that's composed of single lines of stitching, switching to a 40wt embroidery thread will make the design stand out more.

Source:

Very pretty. Nothing going on in her head. We love T-Butt.

Anyway, when people call my store and are having decorative stitch problems, that's exactly what I tell them: Switch to embroidery bobbin, add some tear-away stabilizer, get some embroidery thread, look at how cute my cat is.

[wwaddless]

cross stitch!

so i finally finished my first ever cross stitch!! not totally sure how long it took me, i lost count after 10 hours haha.

if anyone has any tips on how to keep the back neat, i would love to hear them! also any tips in general would be amazing!!

[dramatic-dolphin]

one time i was at a folk museum and got talking with an older lady folk artist (like late 60s/70s) who was doing bead weaving, and she told me that she's been working here for a while, but only started bead weaving recently, because they asked her "hey, do you know bead weaving? if yes, can you demonstrate it for the visitors?" and she was just like "yeah, of course i know how! no problem :)" and then went home and typed "bead weaving tutorial for beginners" into youtube.

i left that conversation with a lot of bead weaving tips, but the real lesson i learned was "lie to your employers, the skill can't be THAT hard to master." ❤️

[rathenarts]

Further to a conversation with a friend, just posting this tip: if you're using an embroidery hoop, put your work into it so that the front is contained in the depth of the hoop and the back is the exposed side, not the other way around. It looks counterintuitive, I know, but it's so much easier to fasten off your ends on the back when the sides of the hoop can't get in the way of your needle or fingers.

[quichecupcake]

Pro Tip ☝️

[ninja-kitty-more-like-no]

WINGS MK 3

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

Lace knitting hack: Swatch all the charts in a bigger, sturdier yarn, rather than making 1000 mistakes with your expensive delicate laceweight.

This is cotton, fingering weight, and I'm going to take it apart eventually, but you could also make something small & useful. Dishcloth, doily, kerchief? It also doesn't have to be quite this big, I just happen to enjoy this sort of work.

It's not going to behave (or block) like wool, and of course you'll still need to do a gauge swatch in your real yarn, but I've found this really helpful for getting my mind around tricky charts, learning what it should look like, so I can spot errors, and seeing how everything will fit together in the final product.

[lpanne]

My Cross Stitch Journey

I think i've been cross-stitching for over 25 years at this point and i just wanted to chart my journey and make a couple of notes about the latest step i've taken (no longer caring about the back being perfectly neat). I'm not saying everyone's journey needs to be like mine, but i just want to share somethings that i've only discovered in the last year as i'm wondering if i just missed it being commonly available knowledge or if my sharing what i've learned will be helpful to others.

So the rest of this post below the read more will be about ways to make stitches look neater, but will lead to a messier back.

Again i want to preface this with you can have beautiful cross stitch pieces without doing any of the things i'm about to discuss. This is meant more as an explanation of why stitches get wonky sometimes even when you have figured out getting your threads to lay flat and stitching all in the same direction.

First, I learned that once you finish a stitch, the next place you bring your needle up through can have a huge impact on neatness and the ability to stitches to fill in areas next to previously stitched sections.

So in the above picture i have drawn a completed cross stitch where the top arm started on the upper left and went back down into the cloth on the lower right. So if i'm going to start a new stitch i want to start in one of the green holes or if i had to yellow. Not red. If you bring your needle up through one of the red holes it will make this completed stitch's top arm elongate and lead to messiness. It is especially bad in you go for the bottom far right hole. Also if you are going to stitch around this second with a second color getting your needle through a hole with an elongated arm can sometime be an issue.

Also, i only highlighted the closets holes, but if you are going to start a stitch further away think about what direction you are pulling your thread and will it be passing under the cloth near the red or green holes.

Second, I realized that making sure your top stitch all are stitched in the same way is very important. I don't mean having all your stitches having the top arm being upper left to lower right verse upper right to lower left (that is important too, but i feel like that information was one of the first things i was told). I mean that in a section try to maintain for the top arm upper left to lower right and don't mix in lower right to upper left. This can pull the stitches in a weird way and can make them look messy (if you are looking super closely). See below for an illustration. The numbers are the order of steps the needle took in and out of the cloth.

In this illustration i only drew one of the arms as it was easier to see, but caring this much is only super important for the top arm. Also to call back to my earlier point in the bottom half going from step 2 to step 3 would be having the needle going into one of the red holes i outlined in the first diagram which again can lead to some elongation of stitches.

Sometimes i don't follow these suggestions but i am more aware of these issues, and i am watching for times when i ignore them and i try to mitigate the issues like the example below.

So what do i do in patterns that have an outer line of stitches like my kyubey pattern? i really like the danish method of stitching (stitching a row of arms in one direction and then going back to the start of the row with the crossing arms); however, this leaves you at the beginning of where you were stitching. So i came up with this method to be able to still kinda danish stitch but end your thread at the other end of the row. (The colored lines are the thread on the back side of the cloth.) This is a very niche solution but it is helpful in some instances like the above example.

you will see that i'm doing something i said not to do above. I am mitigating the issues though by having the top arm being the one that is following the suggestions i wrote above. Not following the first suggestion on the bottom arm can make stitching around that area a little harder but it won't look as weird as having the top arm being elongated.

[tweedlebat]

A Treatise of Embroidery, crochet, and knitting with illustrations

By George C. Perkins, Anna Grayson Ford, and M. Heminway & Sons Silk co circa 1899.

Part 1 of this series! Enjoy,

~Tweedle

.👒 .🦇💜

[cicadaknight]

making a bojagi style curtain using linen scraps

[rusty-gloinks]

she now watches me in my sleep

[gettiregretti]

Quietly releasing the last of my multipacks from Megacon here! Three prints and a sticker of the Best Boys. You can follow the link or search for FunfettiGetti Shopify 💜💛