MxRemy

Usually tablet weaving is done with square tablets that have 4 holes, but 6 hole tablet weaving is known from various times and places throughout history. It opens up tons of possibilities for new color patterns and strength. The late great Peter Collingwood's book The Techniques of Tablet Weaving goes into some detail about it, but the patterns are quite daunting! As you can see in the pic, though these are 6 hole tablets, I'm only using 4 of them for now. Working my way up lol. Not even a particularly fancy pattern on this practice piece:

I couldn't find any hexagonal tablets for sale that matched what I wanted, so I 3d printed these ones. The design has changed since:

The pips around the outer holes helps you keep track of which thread you're on. The idea with the center hole is that you can put a star shaped rod through it that holds everything still as needed. I thought I'd be able to use the rod to make turning easier, isolate out individual tablets easier, etc. However, (obvious in retrospect) the threads just get wrapped around it and make it hard to remove after turning. Whoops!

I've since been told that you can use a central hole to give each plied warp of the finished work a core thread/wire for super strong fabric! So that's pretty cool.

Has anyone else experimented with non-square tablets?

I'm a total amateur, but here's what I did:

1. Soak 1.5 lbs beans for 6 hours in water with a little baking soda
2. Change water halfway through
3. Preheat immersion circulator/sous vide chamber to 110 F
4. Pressure steam for 20 minutes
5. Spread into wide flat container
6. Stir old nattō into 1/2 cup water, mix evenly into beans
7. Lay plastic wrap snugly against beans, poke many holes
8. Cover tightly with tin foil, poke a couple holes around edges
9. Poke corded probe thermometer into center from edge
10. Float in immersion circulator chamber for approximately 20 hours

The temperature in the beans generally kept about 2 degrees less than the chamber. I think we want the early fermentation to happen at 108 F and then cool to 100 F, so I tried to keep adjusting it based on that. Anyway, the result was pretty tasty!! The bacteria seem to take well to black-eyed peas. Might have been a little less stringy than "normal", but still delicious!

First, for anybody unfamiliar with it, the basic idea is to create knitted fabric with a crochet hook, thus knit-hooking, or knooking. Anybody familiar with both knitting and crochet will know one of the major differences is that knitting keeps a whole bunch of live stitches open the whole time, while crochet keeps just one. Where crochet stitches are dependent on just the stitches at their sides, knit stitches are also dependent on the stitches above and below them. To achieve knitting via crochet, the basic steps are:
- Use what looks like a basic crochet hook, except at the back end there's a eye-hole, like in a sewing needle.
- Attach a length of yarn/cable/thread/etc to the eye-hole, and knot it at the back.
- Do all your picking up and transferring of stitches with one hook instead of two needles.
- Keep all the live stitches on the length of yarn at the back, which can be reached by the hook since it's flexible.
It's a relatively new invention, and still very niche, as one can tell from the fact that it doesn't even have it's own wiki page. It only gets a brief mention on the wiki pages for crochet hooks and for knitting in general.

Now, the topic for discussion in this post is whether knooking is capable of, and suitable for, making it's very own structures. Is there a way, using what can generally be thought of as "knooking", to make a fabric that is not identical to either knitting or crochet? I've asked this question in the past, and one person took it upon themself to investigate further. They suggested:

...a knitting type stitch (by that I mean it should not close the stitch as in regular crochet but leave a loop on the hook/cord) but with some loop through loop drawing that requires the hooked end to make. What I'm thinking is something like a knit stitch through which you draw a loop (or more than one) like you were making a crochet chain.

Internet sleuthing hasn't turned up many results on this topic, it seems like not many people have really looked into it. If anyone has any thoughts, or has given it a try, or would like to give it a try, let us know!

The USDA's plant database shows something like 50-ish native viola species in Pennsylvania, where I live. As far as I can tell, they're all more or less edible, but what about the flavor? Are there any especially choice species that really stand out? Internet sleuthing doesn't seem to turn up much of anything. So far, I'm getting the vague sense that purple ones generally taste better than yellow or white ones, and that short species might be sweeter than tall species.

This seems like the sort of thing that somebody somewhere must have figured out by now, since violet used to be a pretty popular flavor. The classic liqueur Creme Yvette is very specifically flavored with these obscure Italian Parma violets, which implies that they must taste somehow unique. So what about the rest of them?

I made this mostly as a way to practice as many Tunisian in-the-round stitches as possible. It is a pretty comfy purse though! The yarn is interesting, I found these *enormous* spools of it at Goodwill. It's very fine, maybe lace weight, except it's slightly fuzzy? It's not very strong but once it's worked up into a reasonably dense fabric, it'll hold up. Gives the finished object a soft and fuzzy feel.

There's no pattern, but it's very simple. Just work the body of the purse in-the-round as one big cylinder, switching types of Tunisian every few rows for coolness. Then separately make a thin, lonnnggg band of flat Tunisian simple stitch. Slip-stitch the band to the bottom of the cylinder to close it off at one end, and then continue stitching it up the sides of the cylinder. The excess band at the top becomes the purse strap. Overlap and stitch together the ends of the band to form a nice thick padding for your shoulder.

Tunisian in-the-round hooks are little harder to find than hooks for working flat. I *really* love the set I used to make this purse, but the company discontinued it! I've lost a few of them since then too...

This was delicious when it finished. Just pineapple rinds, sugar and wild yeast, mostly. Sorry there's not really much to see here, I just enjoy watching the bubbles go by, and figured others might too.

Also, fingers crossed this video works right! File hosted on a Pixelfed instance, direct-linked to from a PieFed instance, and posted to a Lemmy instance... That's pretty convoluted lol.

This is a little off the beaten track as far as usual foraging posts go, but I had a question. Has anyone tried spinning Eastern Tent Caterpillar webs into a usable thread/yarn? I'm definitely not one of those people who hates them and wants them gone; they're native here and relatively harmless, despite what naysayers would have you believe. However, they sure do make a ton of webs! I'm sure they could probably stand to part with a little here or there right? Like, after they're done with them?

Not sure if it would work, but if it is spinnable, seems like it might be a convenient local source for an ahimsa silk alternative.

This is a very versatile technique in which you use a special tool (a gripfid) to split the plies of a yarn, and then feed other yarns back through. You can do some pretty amazing colorwork and stitch patterns with it. Everything I've made so far has this very pleasant and unusual "squishiness" to it. Most commonly it's done with 4-ply yarns, splitting them in half each time, but there are tons of other variations. Linda Hendrickson's books on the topic have been a huge help!

!bistitchual@piefed.social
Bistitchual

c/bistitchual is a hobbyist textile community based on the popular subreddit of the same name. All needlecrafts are welcome, but it has a particular focus on:
- Utilizing multiple techniques in the same project (i.e. knitted sweater with tatted trim).
- Techniques too obscure to sustain their own dedicated community (i.e. nalbinding).

A bag made with interlaced sprang weaving, and a braided drawstring. Sprang weaving is amazing!! My brother abused the heck out of this thing for years and it held up really well. It's perfect for bags (and pants), because it's super stretchy width-wise and completely inflexible height-wise.

Hi stitchers! I have a question for you, but I'll provide some examples/context first. So, depending on your crafts of choice, hopefully you'll be familiar with some of these.

First, the structure we most commonly know from (usually accidental) twisted knitting stitches. This same structure can be created through a technique called cross-knit looping, from the larger field of looping in general. And once more, it can also be created through the method of knooking. While the work is in progress, none of these techniques look anything alike, but the resulting structure is exactly the same, as seen here:

Second, the structure we most commonly know from the simplest form of tablet weaving. Each card/tablet holding 4 threads is spun, and in that process those 4 threads are plied into 1 thicker yarn. But at the same time, a weft thread is being fed between these plies, and locking each card's yarn to the next:

Well, this exact same structure can be created in reverse through a form (darning) of ply-spit braiding! Yarns that are already plied have their plies separated by a special tool, and a weft thread is fed through, connecting one to the next:

So finally my question to you: What other examples of this phenomenon have you observed? Textile structures that are generally identical, but created in wildly different ways. I really enjoy these and I'd love to hear about ones you've encountered in your crafting adventures!

As in bi-stitch-ual. I didn't come up with it though, there's a very popular subreddit by that name, and one whose presence I've sorely missed since moving away. While there are already a bunch of needlecraft communities in the fediverse, as far as I could tell, most of them are dedicated to specific popular crafts (knitting/ crochet/ cross-stitch/etc). That leaves a void for folks interested in, say, ply-split braiding. Or combinations of crafts, like knitted garments with tatted trim.

Also, since PieFed isn't exactly a 1-for-1 Lemmy clone, I figured it could use some of it's own versions of communities anyway.