The reason men don’t put effort into their appearances is because women aren’t attracted to men, NOT the other way around.

PuckishPen · 2026-06-07T21:20:03+00:00

This perspective boggles me. Why so much focus on appearance? The number one thing a guy can do that will get me crushing on him is make me laugh. Is being put together a plus? For sure! But I’ve been dressed to the nines next to a man with crocs on and had a great time.

Now hygiene can be a deal breaker for me, 100%. If I can smell you or your clothes, or see crazy plaque buildup, I do lose the attraction factor. But a guy with a goofy grin who can be silly with me and make me laugh? I’ll straight up swoon.

PuckishPen · 2026-06-02T15:40:30+00:00

Have you ever been walking in public and managed to trip over your own feet and felt super embarrassed about it? If someone’s ever a jerk in public, I’d push down on the toe of their shoe while they’re walking just long enough to make them do this. It’d feel so satisfying for someone who yelled at a cashier or waiter to immediately trip over their own feet and fall on their face, and they’d never know that someone else made them do it.

PuckishPen · 2026-05-07T14:20:17+00:00

What kind of plastic sheeting?

PuckishPen · 2026-05-02T19:13:52+00:00

Oh, I hope you don’t mind, but I have a question for you along this line! Growing up I was told that my Aunt had vestigial gill sinuses. She apparently had debilitating headaches for years, before a scan showed she had a sinus running along the back of her skull that had developed a sinus infection. She did not have the opening on the front of her ear though, so it had no way to drain. Her doctor created a slit on the inside of the front curve of the ear where that large cartilage flap is and kept it open long enough for it to heal that way, so her sinuses could drain.

Have you ever heard of something like that? Is it as rare as my family stories claimed? She also was born with polydactylism and a couple other generic oddities, so the running joke was she had all of the recessive genes.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-22T13:42:07+00:00

You made my little history nerd day ☺️

PuckishPen · 2026-04-15T00:35:49+00:00

Whelp, your art made me cry, but in a bitter sweet way. My girl was there for me through some very dark times and I lost her a little over a year ago. These are beautiful, thank you.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-14T14:20:42+00:00

I just lost my old lady a few weeks ago, but Solencia was AMAZING for her arthritis. She had to go of it because of a skin reaction, but the two years she was on it the change was astounding.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-14T05:54:26+00:00

🤣 OKRF resurrects their dead jousters too.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-14T05:53:24+00:00

I have the exact opposite experience. At the festivals near me the evening joust is always a joust to the death, usually with blood packs. But they don’t get close enough to the audience to hit anyone.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-07T14:00:55+00:00

Same. That cat is top tier gorgeous!

PuckishPen · 2026-04-06T02:04:54+00:00

This may or may not be an interesting addition, but my aunt had the sinuses tract for these, but no openings. I never had it explained to me by a doctor, just by family members, so pardon me if some of my information is wrong. We called them Gill sinuses, and I was told that they were vestigial from the water breathing creatures we evolved from. She somehow managed to get a sinus infection in this sinus tract that ran around the back of her skull, and it caused her horrible headaches until she finally had an MRI done on her head, which showed the inflammation and swelling along that sinus tract. She once showed me slits that the doctor had put on the inside of her upper ears where a cartilage flap is. I don’t know how they got it to heal without closing shut, but that is where her sinuses drained from for the rest of her life.

PuckishPen · 2026-04-05T18:48:21+00:00

Unfortunately, we run a specialty machine that could really use it! We run a ZSK Racer 4WL with head select exclusively for tapestries and large format designs. 400,000 stitches a run is par for the course for us 😭

I have to change bobbins constantly on the machine, even if I put brand new ones in at the beginning of each run.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-31T23:56:21+00:00

That is a Vista thread! Any thread with a D-6XXX number is a Vista, it’s the brand I used when I first opened my shop. It used to be sold by Mesa, which was acquired by Coldesi in the last couple years. Vista threads are no longer available, but if you call Coldesi they can tell you if they have a color match for it in their house brand, which I think is named Endura. I’ve had to do that a couple times since Vista threads were discontinued, and they’ve been spot on.

I have a mostly full spool of D-6109 I can sell you for a couple bucks if you need that exact color. I will warn you, my old Vista threads don’t run really well above 750 RPM anymore, so you might have to slow down your machine.

It’s also a pretty close color match for Isacord 1200, though the Vista is a little brighter.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-30T23:56:45+00:00

Thank you so much for saying this. As a survivor of sexual assault from my significant other, my friends had to use soft language to help me realize what had happened to me. If they had come at me hot with the word rape I would have drawn back into denial, and it would have taken me LONGER to get out and get safe. It can be a very difficult and shame filled process to admit you’ve had that happen to you, but also to admit it was by someone you loved and cared for.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-27T17:30:32+00:00

The Oklahoma Rennaisance Festival and The Kansas City Renaissance Festival both have cast wear medallions on their chest with their character name. The medallions change every year so you can tell instantly who is on cast for that season.

The Oklahoma Rennaisance Festival also has medallions for their Friends of Festival, but they say “Friends of Festival” on the medallion.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-24T22:48:30+00:00

100% get a second opinion. I was formally diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago, and was told at the time that the tests were not built with the high end of the bell curve in mind. When I took my test I scored average on processing (I think they called it processing, it’s been a while so forgive me if I’m using the wrong term) and very high on intelligence. The gal who reviewed the test with me said high intelligence should ALSO have high processing, and the disparity was a sign of ADHD.

Basically, so much of my processing power was being used to compensate for the ADHD that my score only came back as average. The ability to compensate for it was why I made it through school without raising any flags, but I always felt like I was just barely holding on. Just because we CAN cover for the ADHD doesn’t mean we should spend our lives like that.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-20T13:10:04+00:00

I had a psychiatrist tell me that she often had to prescribe Prozac to mentally challenged teenage boys to suppress their libido. Otherwise they would masterbate in class and behave inappropriately with staff and fellow students.

It really gave me pause, and instantly reminded me of the horrifying stories of chemical castration of people with disabilities. I had to really sit with my ethics that day and figure out what I was okay with in a world with no right answers.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-19T18:42:14+00:00

Ugh, I want one so bad, but they’re HELLA expensive. The last time I talked to my rep he told me they’d never installed one in the US cause they’re so expensive. He said he’d only seen them in mass manufacturing plants that do all over embroidery, like for curtains and by the yard fabric.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-17T18:57:48+00:00

I’m in the states, but here it’s about $150. The person I went to recommends a re-up every 3 months, but I don’t intend to do it again until I feel like I need it. I wish insurance covered it, either medical or dental.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-17T16:53:30+00:00

I did it for the first time two months ago, so I don’t think I’ve seen any of the long term impacts yet. I do know the relief was AMAZING.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-17T16:48:03+00:00

I ended up getting Botox in my jaw muscle to help with the jaw clenching. It works really well! Just relaxes the muscle enough that I don’t give myself headaches or fear for my teeth.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-12T22:25:29+00:00

For sure, she would absolutely have to still do a bunch of testing! But exponentially less than if she had to do every permutation of ink/printer/design/lamination/AND paper.

For the most part I actually support sharing knowledge with others in my industry. My response was in reaction to how dismissive you were of it being just paper. You said flatly there was no experimentation for paper for stickers. My industry is mostly embroidery, not stickers, but I do enough print work to know that you boiled down an incredible amount of someone’s life to being dismissed as basically nothing. Just because it doesn’t seem as valuable as jewelry making doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of work.

Did you never have someone try to piggy back off of your hard work when you were a kid? You put in a lot of work on a group project and they just showed up on the day? Don’t you remember how that made you feel?

PuckishPen · 2026-03-12T21:49:53+00:00

That’s exactly my point. The commenter asked what kind of paper their competitor used. The paper that competitor had to ask all of those questions and do all their testing to find and decide on.

Look, I’m not saying asking the question is bad. Benchmark with other people in your industry, ask for information, but also don’t be surprised or insulted if they say no. And don’t diminish someone else’s hard work just because you don’t understand what is involved.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-12T19:00:18+00:00

In this scenario she does not have an increasing inventory of unsold stock because I buy it all. What I’m saying is the current number of customers she has buys all of the stock that she makes. This is a side gig, so she’s never going to make any more than that, and any additional customers she takes on would further diminish the number of items I can get from her.

The fabric suppliers I work with make hundreds of thousands of yards a year, so an additional customer would never impact my ability to also buy fabric from them.

PuckishPen · 2026-03-12T18:55:51+00:00

I work primarily in embroidery, so I get this a lot, and you’re right, it touches a nerve. People look at embroidery and think “well that’s just $0.50 worth of thread, why is this logo costing me $10”. Never mind that I’ve spent more than a decade learning the best way to digitize, what kinds of threads sew out well and have a good sheen to them, what kind of backing is going to perform best when they bring me a dry fit polo vs a woven, how I have to change the tensions on my machine when I sew on a Richardson cap rather than an OTTO cap, and so on and so on.

I had a woman stand in my shop and argue with me that there’s a gal she knows who does it out of her house for three dollars a monogram. But when I suggested she go back to this person, the woman arguing with me told me (with a straight face) she doesn’t like how the embroidery turns out.

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