52

(Please excuse the fuzz and pilling, these are OLD)

Ok these are definitely not the most "impressive" cabling project I've done, but they are by far the most special to me so I'm going with them for cables month! A few reasons I love them so:

  • I won this yarn in a knitting group on Google+ (RIP), about a month after I'd started knitting in 2013. It was my first ever fancy yarn and I was so incredibly excited!

  • Because I was such a new knitter, these gloves were my first ever cables, and also my first time using DPNs. Felt like too many extra hands, I still don't like DPNs to this day!

  • And because I like to jump in at the deep end, when one of them went wrong I decided to drop stitches down and figure out how to rebuild the cables as I picked the stitches back up. Worked pretty flawlessly and I was SO proud of myself!

  • Last but not least, they always remind me of a friend who sadly passed away a year or so later. She helped me a lot with my first few projects, shoutout to Bernie ❤

Pattern is Roundabout Fingerless Gloves, and here's a bonus pic of the other side where the left one is looking weirdly baggy but I swear they do actually fit irl 😄

14

Started a shawl in late January, and it needs to be finished by July. Which, for most people I'm sure that's nothing but I am a very slow knitter, really!

The pattern is lacy and complicated and mistakes will be really visible, so it's no good to work on while watching TV or doing anything else and I'd just not been putting time aside to properly concentrate on it.

The solution: A spreadsheet to keep track of how far behind I am, and a graph so I can watch myself (hopefully) catch up.

There are very few problems in life that can't at least be a bit improved with a spreadsheet, and I reckon that applies to knitting just the same 🤓

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 38 points 8 months ago

Andy Serkis and Liv Tyler

41

Ok I missed WIP Wednesday but honestly my week is just an absolute mess of days running into each other so that's no surprise.

Here's my main WIP for this week, as you can see I'm somewhat leaning into the recent pixel-art-style design urge. I'm also leaning into my preference for doing half stitches first and then completing them later, even though it's kind of ugly in the progress photos.

It'll just make the final piece seem prettier by comparison! At least, that's one theory.

(It's going to be a smol garden scene)

94
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

Try it before you dismiss it, that's all I'm saying!

Edit: I have found my people.

12

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/26697284


I've been listening to this year's playlist a lot while out walking, and No Rules! is such a banger when it hits just as you're going up an otherwise miserable hill. Truly it is the wind beneath my wings.

So clearly I had to immortalise it. And clearly I also had to make it into a pattern for the very slim chance someone else wants to stitch it too.

https://ko-fi.com/s/64fafb4849 (free download)

79
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee to c/lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works

Like the stitch says, NO RULES! 🇫🇮

Finished my mysterious little project, as teased last week.

Congrats to @ChexMax@lemmy.world, @exocrinous@lemm.ee and @nulluser@programming.dev for correctly identifying what would soon become a pair of cutoff shorts, but alas the full context was too niche even for Lemmy nerds to get right.

It is, of course, an homage to this year's fabulous Eurovision entry from Finland, which you can watch here if you have three minutes free and want your life to change forever.

I've also made it a free pattern on the off-chance any other cross stitching Finland nerds are about, although I admit that's unlikely 😄

https://ko-fi.com/s/64fafb4849

Now I just need to figure out which of the multiple Eurovision communities is the right one to crosspost this to...

20

It’s somehow been three months since @IoSapsai@lemm.ee and I agreed to take over moderation of this community, and we’ve not really had to do anything other than keep an eye out for reports. It’s not exactly been a taxing job, so firstly thank you stitchers for being so undramatic!

But that all happened while I was still super ill and to be honest most of November and December is like a weird fever dream. So I kind of did not do the one thing I said I’d do at the time: post some prospective community rules.

Basically what I’m thinking is we want to have something written down that we can point to just on the off-chance of misbehaviour, but at the same time we don’t need anything draconian or super specific while we’re so small.

Since I’ve already been through this process with !knitting@lemmy.world and there are even quite a lot of people here who are in there too, I think it makes sense to maybe start off with similar rules to the ones the knitters agreed and then diverge if we need to.

Main concerns over there were:

  • encouraging people to add pattern info to their posts and
  • making sure we have a rule in place to allow removal of ads

On that second point, it was generally agreed that active members of the community should be free to advertise their shops and products in context, but a complete stranger barging in to post a straight-up ad and then leave should be removed. Basically kind of vibe-based, depending on if you look like a spammer or not, which works fine for a small community tbh.

I’d love to hear from community members on this. Are you ok just following the template from /c/knitting for now? Is there something more specific to us you’d also like to see included in the official rules? Or do you maybe disagree with one of those two things above and want us to rethink?

Input very much welcome, thank you!

And for a bit more of a fun thing, we have a random community banner and icon that I guess the original owner just googled on the day and never thought about again. In /c/knitting I made a banner featuring some recent FOs that had been posted by the most active members, and that was pretty popular.

I’d be happy to knock up something similar for here, but also want to throw it open in case anyone else would like to give banner design a go! Maybe we’ll say if nobody else comes up with something by the end of March I’ll go full collage mode with our FOs, that gives time for a few entries if you fancy it?

We'll also need an icon and I did not make the knitting one so am officially looking for ideas of what we could use. Actual images, vague concepts, all assistance welcome!

Thank you for bearing with this wall of text. Now get back to stitching!

570

I've been happily posting away here on two accounts since just before the Great Migration, and have no problem being openly a woman on the internet. Up to and including correcting people who assume I'm a guy, and even occasionally acknowledging the existence of periods.

Which, honestly that was a bad tactic back on Reddit, my inbox was a nightmare. But here it's gone much better, so thank you to anyone who ever received one of my corrections with good grace!

It's also brought quite a few DMs my way from other women who try to stay more anonymous with their posts, a choice I can completely understand.

So today on International Women's Day I just want to wave hello to the other women out there, even if you don't want to break cover and wave back. Anonymous or not, cis or trans, I see you out there and you're killing it.

This may break the community rule on encouraging discussion, if nobody wants to out themselves to say hello back. So I guess I should also ask a question.

Um...anyone else using it as an excuse to treat themselves today? I've given myself the day (mostly) off work and am doing some fun gamedev all afternoon instead, then we're planning a takeaway tonight. Easily pleased, perhaps, but sounds good to me 😄

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 54 points 8 months ago

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 42 points 9 months ago

I've done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.

I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.

The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.

Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it's free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.

If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.

44

I was on such a sock knitting THING last year and have really lost my mojo lately.

This second sock, I posted it two weeks ago maybe and since then all that's happened is I made a mess of the gusset. Not enough to bother frogging it but definitely enough to be grumpy about it.

Anyway hopefully showing off my woeful level of progress will humiliate me into getting a wriggle on, because I really do love this yarn and it deserves to be a cool pair of socks!

23

I'm going with no. No you can't.

But it's going to be a very quick stitch so watch this space for my next stupid niche FO 😅

13

If there's one design feature that is quintessentially knitting, it's got to be cables! Chonky ones, intricate ones, symmetrical ones or weird ones, almost every knitter has tried them and found out the biggest secret of our craft: cables are a lot easier than they look 🤫

For once, I know exactly which project to post for this one. Just have to actually take proper photos, approximately eleven years after finishing the knitting part.

Cables are so squishy and fun, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has to show!


Anyway. Normally I announce a winner of the previous month but "winner" might not apply this time around!

Congratulations @kurobita@feddit.cl on the dubious honour of having the most highly upvoted knitting fail 😂

Very much appreciate everyone who shared, and it just goes to show crafting doesn't always go to plan.


Ok, off with you. Go find your cable-est thing to show us!

(I need to come up with some new themes before next month so if anyone wants to make a suggestion, do feel free)

62

This meme brought to you by my spiralling anxiety and some slight bickering when I packed a sock project into the car last night despite it being dark already 😅

(I will update the monthly theme tomorrow I promise, it's been a busy few days!)

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 47 points 9 months ago

As much as I love Lemmy, it's just honestly not ready for another big influx yet. The 0.19 update broke so much, it really brought home how precarious this whole thing still is. Those of us who are here either a) kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure b) were morally outraged enough to make a stand against Reddit or c) both.

I have a very small amount of influence in the niche community of fibre crafts and especially cross stitch. Would I be able to explain Lemmy to my audience in a way that made sense and that they might even want to try out? Absolutely. Would I actually do that until it's a bit more stable? Absolutely not, apart from a couple of specific individuals that I'm already working on.

Trying to force people to join platform B when platform A is already serving their needs makes no sense. You need to find the people who are dissatisfied, the people that would actually benefit from trying something new, and then make sure they're aware of the option.

Don't get me wrong through, I do encourage people to learn about and dip their toes into the Fediverse in general. Just last week I convinced a wave of fibre crafters (often older ladies who have barely ever ventured outside of Facebook) to try out Mastodon and Pixelfed and some of them have really taken to it! Alt text and content warnings and everything! One or two fellow YouTubers are even setting up PeerTube channels to bring over more crafting content.

Why did I tell them to join Mastodon over Lemmy? I'm literally moderator of !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works so surely it's in my best interests to bring them over here?

No. I know the demographic, I know what they're annoyed about with big social media, and I thought Mastodon / Pixelfed were the best replacements for them.

As much as we would all love to see Lemmy become huge, you have to meet people where they're at. If Lemmy is genuinely the best choice for everyone who is currently in /r/adelaide or whatever, then brilliant, your strategy makes sense. But if it's not actually in their best interests, if they're just going to be annoyed by things breaking and not see enough value to make it worthwhile, then there's no point doing it just because you wish Lemmy was bigger.

Maybe the moral of this story is that the real strategy you want to be looking at is getting tiny niche influencers on side! 😄

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 91 points 10 months ago

Curse seasonal colour analysis and all of its surprising accuracy! I don't want to be a bright spring, I want to be goth!

You live your best life in that blue dress kid and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 55 points 1 year ago

I get that you saw a perceived problem and you're trying to fix it. I get that what you've built is cool on a technical level and it probably feels really terrible to have people be so negative about it. So first of all, none of this is personal at all. But I feel this comment illustrates exactly where the problem lies.

You want to "help people migrate away from Reddit". But I'm not sure what makes you think people need "help" at all, I mean if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform. I was a heavy Reddit user and was in plenty of tiny niche subreddits, but so what? I wanted to leave so I left.

So maybe the real problem is that so many people don't want to leave Reddit, and that disappoints you, and you want to try and convince them that they do? This I could definitely understand, but trying to convince someone you know what they want better than they do themselves is not generally a great tactic.

Most people will just stick with whatever the "best" platform is in terms of showing them content they want to see, and are slow to move to the next thing once the one they're on starts sucking. So if you really want to put your dev skills to use it would make more sense to get stuck in with Lemmy itself and help increase the pace of improvements. A lot of us are happy here, but a lot of people also bounced off due to the jank. And the more we can reduce that bounce rate, the more we can keep people around, the more we're in a position to capitalise whenever the next big wave of newbies hits.

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 50 points 1 year ago

The person who runs this whole thing was in here recently with a new "recommended alternatives to subreddits" tool. Conveniently failing to mention that the recommended communities they'd seeded it with were full of bots. So clearly given they weren't up front at all in that post they're aware it's not an appealing prospect to most people but are attempting to trick us into joining and talking into a bot-void anyway.

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 50 points 1 year ago

I don't know what I'm looking at but it's making me feel unwell.

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 90 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don't personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don't sub to any of those places you linked.

Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn't really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I've made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get.

I also mod !knitting@lemmy.world which as you might expect is largely although by no means entirely women. Any questionable comments over there are dealt with swiftly, I am absolutely not having it.

I don't necessarily see it as a "problem" that Lemmy is seemingly male-dominated (I say Lemmy because my Mastodon is very much female-and-NB-dominated). It's more just a fact of early adopters tending to the techy interests that skew male. But if someone does see it as a problem and wants it to change, there are basically two things to do:

  1. Make sure you're helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
  2. Invite your non-male friends

All that said, other women may disagree but I don't particularly feel like a minority on here and never really think about it until coming across something gross (which is a LOT less often than on Reddit, thankfully). There may be few enough women that I recognise their names often when they post, but let's be honest Lemmy is a small world and that goes for most regular posters in general.

(And it helps that I'm middle-aged so if any little boy thinks they can upset me with comments about my gender or appearance or whatever, lol, the self-confidence of age is a wonderful thing 😉)

Edit: Just wanted to add, if you're not a man and you're reading this thinking "wow she's lucky, I've had such a bad experience here" then first, I'm sorry you've had that experience, people suck sometimes. But also, drop me a DM let's see if we've got any interests in common and I can maybe signpost you to some more friendly communities and people. Between my two accounts I spend WAY too much time on Lemmy!

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 44 points 1 year ago

Think of it more as an intervention

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 41 points 1 year ago

I'm sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:

  • First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn't work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren't needed. We'd be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.

But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:

  • Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get "few" replies, so make sure you're getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don't need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.

  • Recruit your friends. You're a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.

  • Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don't like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they'll click. Obviously I'm not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it's bound to come up in conversation.

  • Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.

Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!

  • Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.

  • Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that's actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).

  • Ask your existing users what they'd like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!

That's everything off the top of my head and it's already a wall of text so I'll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn't need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 112 points 1 year ago

If I see one more article about knitting where the photos are clearly crochet, or vice versa, I swear to god...

view more: next ›

thegiddystitcher

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF