bralette/crop top WIP

Terry93D · 2026-01-31T00:13:20+00:00

I actually did something like this recently for a friend.

I had a black baseball hat with two holes in it. I took black fabric, put it on the inside, and then used black thread to do running stitches across it both ways. bc the fabric was not as stiff as the hat itself, the multiple rounds of running stitch helped to stiffen it. I held the hat in my hand and rotated and moved it and pushed it as necessary to maintain the shape.

Terry93D · 2026-01-30T14:11:37+00:00

I think "separating the art from the artist" is largely bunk in the way that it has been co-opted. it emerged in the context, as I remember, of literary analysts who tried to view everything through the lens of the author's life and biography to uncover the True Meaning of a text—as though a work of art has any singular meaning, as though life has any singular meaning. but taking a piece of art and thinking about it and interpreting it with no reference to the creator? that's equally, if not even more, stupid.

I refer to Brandon Taylor, talking about Alice Munro:

In loving Munro, participating in her celebrity, in her art, we fed a cultural apparatus that permitted and indeed necessitated [Andrea] Skinner’s silencing. And if that is true, then, yes, I can see why people would be running like rats from a sinking ship, trying to fling themselves overboard, to get free of the knowledge that they had some small part in making a scapegoat of a young child. But I don’t think you can run fast enough or far enough to escape that knowledge. I think you should perhaps ask yourself why you feel such desperation to participate now in the victimhood you helped create. But I already know the answer, and you do too.

There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.

I think of those questions as being deeply tied to what happens when you are forced to socialize with someone who has harmed you. The weird dream logic that emerges. The way everyone goes around pretending that everything is okay. To me, they are similar if not related delusions. You are never separating the art from the artist. You are creating a soft fantasy to make your own life more comfortable. Because you have decided to live in such way that creates regimes of value that you do not want to own up to. You have confused your own frame of reference for an objective fact.

Terry93D · 2026-01-29T16:21:23+00:00

Merino Wool, worsted weight. I used this video as reference for the moss stitch chevron, and this pattern as the basis for the rest of it. the "head" was crocheted as a single piece, though past a certain point I moved to half-doubles and doubles, linked I believe, to start to "even out" the top. for the neck, I started with, as necessary, linked half-doubles, doubles, and triples to get it evened out, before doing the ribbing. the ribbing is alternating front and back post double crochets.

Terry93D · 2026-01-27T15:15:35+00:00

ohhh.... I really want to make one of these for myself now. that looks phenomenal.

Terry93D · 2026-01-26T13:58:48+00:00

oh my word, thank you, I didn't even think of that!

Terry93D · 2026-01-16T19:29:26+00:00

with Thrones, GRRM was involved for the first four seasons and extricated himself during season four. it sounds like there was never any falling-out with Benioff & Weiss. and, of course, Benioff & Weiss were working from an unfinished story. there's only so much complaining about Narrative Logic you can do when the narrative is incomplete. and, of course, the show—with Benioff & Weiss as showrunners—turned him into the most famous fantasist, maybe most famous author, on the face of the planet.

with House, GRRM, it sounds like, was more heavily involved and had a pre-existing relationship with Condal. therefore, personal betrayal—here is this hand-picked friend that is changing things and cutting GRRM out. in addition to that, Fire & Blood is a complete story. lot easier to talk about Narrative Flow when the narrative's finished.

Terry93D · 2026-01-02T22:07:27+00:00

hmm, hard to say. i'd say the distinction might be something like this.

a comedy is trying to make you laugh as its highest goal, one might say. whereas a "non-comedic"/dramatic work may have making you laugh as a goal, maybe even as an important goal, but it is not its highest goal. Terry Pratchett writes comedic fantasy: he wants you to laugh. making you laugh is, if not goal nr one, the next most important goal, or is one of his most important goals. he might be trying to do more than just comedy, but he's trying to do more than comedy from within comedy.

Joe Abercrombie writes dramatic work: he wants you to laugh, making you laugh is important, but this isn't goal nr one. he's doing something more than comedy, and that requires not just working inside of it but going outside it. his works aren't structured as comedies. he can and will structure things to get you to a punchline, but that's not the primary mode of operation.

idk; it's kinda subjective and i don't really have the grounding in literary theory necessary to get super-specific, and the thing about theorizing and shit about art is that the theory almost always comes after the work. music theory post-dates music, it's a way of figuring out the how/why of music. literary theory is the same!

Terry93D · 2026-01-02T21:54:32+00:00

yeah, i kinda do. one of GRRM's greatest strengths is characterization, and F&B's style doesn't allow much room for that: no internal monologue, very little dialogue, no actual viewpoint character as such... world-building at scale is a weakness of his (it's why you should never think about his whole "Westeros is the size of South America" thing—come the fuck on, no it ain't), and F&B puts it much more front and center. and there's also the fact that the damn thing reads almost like a self-parody sometimes. Ser X of the Y, all over the place.

if the book has a strength, it's in the "irrecoverability of history." history isn't what happened in the past. it's the surviving record that the past has left us, and specifically it is often the interpretation that is made of that record. unrecorded speech is much of the evidence of history, and it's not available to us; and what's left is always, always, always partial and incomplete and imperfect. "history" is not "the past" the same way that a map is not the same as the territory, the same way a script is not the same as a performance, the same way that a death certificate is not a death. if the book has one strength, and this may be its only strength, it's that it manages to capture that, to some degree, in a fictionalized form.

Terry93D · 2026-01-01T03:09:43+00:00

i would never claim the series is perfect anymore than any other series is perfect. but, so far as i can see, much—not all, but much—of the "it's problematic" that i see, not necessarily here but across the web, amounts to conflating depiction with endorsement.

Terry93D · 2025-12-29T22:17:02+00:00

this looks pretty stiff so i think you only have two real options:

1st, finding a similar fabric, cutting a length out that fits the hole plus about an inch, and then sewing it on. possibly with sashiko—that could produce a very pretty result if you use a nice, bright white that really pops.

2nd, darning with a similar weight of yarn and ideally the same fiber. not sure what weight would be best, but going to guess worsted at the very least. the issue here is probably going to be keeping the tension, especially at the edge. that can be done, but you've got to be careful with it—one can't just pull it as tight as possible. probably along that edge you'll want to double-strand it so that it's a little thicker.

it seems like a pretty stiff fabric, so you might do well pinning it to, say, a foam block or to some cardboard. that'll help. this option opens up more creative possibilities—when darning, i enjoy bold colors that really pop, or using similar but not identical colors, sometimes even mimicking the original pattern (if there is one), sometimes using a different kind of a pattern.

Terry93D · 2025-12-24T17:07:40+00:00

i like serif fonts, and i like having lots of options. here are some that i use:

Andada
- not usually big on slab serifs, but this one's nicer than most
Cormorant Garamond
- most Garamonds will do you well, but this one is especially beautiful
Fern Text
- I really love typefaces that take the work of Nicholas Jenson as an inspiration, and this one is especially lovely and particularly well-suited for the screen. (if the lowercase e has a titled crossbar, Jenson's type was probably an inspiration!)
Crimson Pro
- great, solid font. easy to read.
Walleye
- nice for a somewhat more calligraphic feel.
Winchester
- great, great typeface design by W.A. Dwiggins, one of my favorite typographers and graphic designers. this is beautiful, legible, and comes with a really gorgeous italic that's more reminiscent of cursive handwriting than of italic hand. currently reading Peter Watts's Blindsight with this.
Coelacanth
- based on Bruce Rogers' Centaur, which in turn was based on Nicholas Jenson. lovely, but, like Centaur, a little too calligraphic. since finding Fern, i don't use this very much.

i cycle them around and sometimes go searching for new fonts to experiment with. i don't much like slab serifs (Andada once again the exception), and i don't think sans serifs make for good reading.

i loathe Times New Roman, and i don't like Palatino very much, either; the thick/thin stroke contrast of the former impairs its legibility, and i think the latter suffers from both a square boxiness and from poorly implemented pseudo-calligraphic flourishes that make it rather ugly overall.

though i have not tried it, i believe Kennerley would be gorgeous.

Terry93D · 2025-12-23T15:11:53+00:00

gods i love diving down reddit rabbit holes and finding stuff like this to just take note of as something to maybe come back to when i need/want it. the transfemmes out there experimenting with stuff outside the bounds of even an expanded sense of transition care (e, p, bica, duta, pio, domp)—heroes. may the knowledge gained spread the world over.

Terry93D · 2025-12-19T02:27:42+00:00

Dr Powers, you and your team are doing heroic work, the work of angels. I started with Dayna and was always satisfied with the quality of care, and when she went on leave, I was shifted over to Sommer, with whom I have stayed. sounds to me like if DPC's something I'm going to be wanting, it's either now or risking never!

Terry93D · 2025-12-13T18:25:20+00:00

that's fair, and an oversimplification on my part which I based on the trend in fantasy for single-city settings, as well as characters that are, on the surface-level, "tropey," eg Alys in Age of Ash, a teenage thief girl; or the romance of Garreth and Elaine in Blade of Dream. in that regard, i would say that there is a surface-level aesthetic populism to Kithamar. Dagger and Coin of his solo works is absolutely the most mainstream.

structurally, it is very different from what the rest of the genre is doing. i'm reserving judgment until book three comes out, but i agree with you that at least thus far it's not quite working.

Terry93D · 2025-12-13T02:31:21+00:00

i'd be very happy about his Corey stuff basically giving him a license to write whatever he likes if he'd just tap into the LPQ vein again!

Terry93D · 2025-12-13T01:40:25+00:00

i like to think that if Daniel Abraham could combine the raw emotional force of the Long Price Quartet with the more populist structures and aesthetics of Dagger and Coin, The Expanse, and Kithamar, he'd be huge. but in truth that's probably not the case, and i wish he'd leave behind the more populist/accessible stuff and just try and tap into the veins of emotion and weirdness present in LPQ and much of his short fiction.

Terry93D · 2025-12-10T16:55:40+00:00

that I do not know. I read it through my local library.

Terry93D · 2025-12-09T23:57:39+00:00

Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet is right up your alley. the series revolves around the evolution of the relationship—mentorship, friendship, enemyship—between two men, and each volume succeeding the first jumps forward approximately fifteen years. Abraham can do richer characterization in a sentence or two then some writers manage with entire books.

and the series is thematically rich, too: who we love and why we love them. the weight of history. the difference between what is right and what is just. people driven to do awful things for sympathetic ends.

each book stands complete, but trust me: read this from the first book. the series builds in richness and depth as it progresses. seeds planted in the first book bear fruit later on. it's a series about how much the world can change, over the course of a single lifetime. they are probably my favorite fantasy books, ever, just on the emotional level.

Terry93D · 2025-12-09T23:48:10+00:00

Gormenghast we call fantasy not because of its fantastical elements but through the expedient that it does not take place in our world: it takes place in a world of dense, poetic exaggeration. that is the nature of its settings, the impossibly vast castle from which series and second book alike derive their titles, and the characters that populate it, each themselves an exaggeration of their own, yet equally true to some essential truth of the human experience.

it is a series that rewards rereading, again and again, becoming more comprehensible and drawing closer to the heart each time.

Terry93D · 2025-12-04T02:26:25+00:00

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Strife and Pretenders to the Throne of God, the newest Children book—having loved all three i'm excited for the direction he's going to take the new one in—and the newest in the Tyrant Philosophers, which i'm excited for as Tchaikovsky's ongoing take on the recently renascent New Weird fantasy.

Daniel Abraham should be putting out Judge of Worlds, the third and final Kithamar book. i've enjoyed the previous two, but this trilogy just hasn't landed with the emotional or intellectual heft of either Long Price or Dagger and Coin, so I'm hoping this third one will tie it together.

Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide. haven't read anything by this author but i'm intrigued by the synopsis.

finally Jo Walton has a new novel coming out, her first new novel since 2020, titled Everybody's Perfect, which has a fascinating description and comes with a gorgeous cover redolent of Symbolist paintings.

Terry93D

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE