discountalien-pancake

[discountalien-pancake]

I tried to map the possible way this would go and if the siblings from the first gen married into different houses you would end up with incest even faster.

Unfortunately we are not discussing the targs, just the accidental result of some convoluted worldbuilding in the bird people book

[discountalien-pancake]

Has anyone talked about how the Raven & the Dove’s central conceit re: marriage trials is that all the royal heirs of the different houses are selecting from each other? Meaning. You’re gonna end up with a looooot of cousins?

[discountalien-pancake]

[discountalien-pancake]

I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice

[discountalien-pancake]

The result from yesterday’s dyeing! As you can see dry fabric is *much* lighter than wet. I think it needs more yellow so tonight I’ll add a touch of ‘bronze’ to the dye stock and give it another dunk. Rit dye is certainly faster and easier but I feel like the procion dyes give me a more nuanced color.

Round 1.5 of dyeing for the masquerade outfits: the fabric for Zag’s slip and the organza corset that will provide structure for the gown. This was done using a mix of roughly equal parts ‘pagoda red’ and ‘burgundy’ procion MX dyes from Dharma Trading. The dye bath looks like a deep garnet but the dry fabric will be closer to ruby. I may need to do another round with more of the pagoda red to make things a little more warm-toned.

[discountalien-pancake]

Hey you brilliant person, I need help. You're dying tutorial was fantastic, and I am wanting to dye a cardigan. Hooooowever, it's 62% Rayon, 33% Nylon, 5% Spandex. I'm assuming I probably can't use a dye meant for natural fibers due to the nylon and spandex content, right??

Soooooo if you’re aiming for a really even, saturated color, you have a few options. You can:

Dye it twice using Procion dyes, the first time using the normal soda ash method to bind to the rayon, and the second time using a vinegar or citric acid method which will bind to the nylon. You may still get some mottling but the colors will be very wash-fast.

You can use RIT all-purpose and do two rounds of dye, once with salt, second time with vinegar. It is effectively the same idea but you may be able to get away with using the same dye bath both times.

Thankfully rayon and nylon both take dye extremely well, so there’s a chance that even after one dye bath the color might already be good enough. That’s why I suggest doing the soda ash dye bath first, because your cardigan is 2/3 rayon. If you want a pastel or medium color you probably won’t need to do a second round.

Also for procion dyes, rather than trying ro get the dye bath super dark the first time, it’s more effective to do two rounds of moderately saturated dye to open up more dye sites in the fabric and get more thorough coverage.

[discountalien-pancake]

This is the dream, tho?

[discountalien-pancake]

Procion Tub-Dyeing for Noobs, from one noob to another:

If you’re not a masochist, use rayon. If you’re not fazed by a slight challenge, use cotton. If you’re a masochistic fool like me, you can try to dye linen. Generally speaking, that is the order of vibrancy and darkness of color you can achieve with the same dye bath recipes with the 3 most common cellulose-based fibers.

Before we begin, some safety precautions! Gloves are the minimum necessity. A dust mask is recommended, as are safety goggles. Dyeing is as much a chem-lab project as it is an art form, and the precautions you need to take are similar, even if procion dyes are on the hobbyist-friendly end of the safety spectrum. The gloves are especially important once you start handling the soda ash. Prior to that, they’re mostly for keeping the dye off hour hands. You want long gloves that will allow you to submerge your hands in the dye bath without dye spilling into them. As for tools, nothing that will ever be used for food prep! These chemicals and dyes are relatively safe to handle but you don’t want to be eating them.

Prewash your fabric. Just do it. Even if you don’t care about shrinking and you never plan to wash this fabric ever again, just do the damn prewash to make sure there’s no residues left on your fabric. Most modern fabrics are factory finished with all sorts of crap, and even a basic starched finish can interfere with an even dye job. You don’t need to dry the fabric as long as you have thoroughly rinsed out all the soap (though if your goal is to also preshrink you should dry it however you plan to dry the future project).

You will need a bucket. Or a tub. A large pot will also do. You can use a plastic storage bin. I used a plastic drawer I commandeered from my bedroom. Make sure it’s deep enough that you can fill it only two-thirds of the way and still have enough liquid to swish your fabric around. More water is easier but is not….as necessary as most dyeing instructions say. It’s just more work to get an even saturation if you use less water. The goal is to have enough room to move the fabric and untangle it as it soaks up the dye.

The problem with more water is more salt. You need at least 1 cup of regular table salt for every gallon of water. Less if you use powdered salt, more if you use kosher or large crystals. Err on the generous side.

Here’s a simplified chemistry explanation. Water is a solvent. When you add dye to the water bath, it will want to remain bonded to the water, rather than sticking to your fabric. Salt will aid the dye out of solution, into the fabric (or wood, or yarn, etc). No salt? The dye will just sit happily in the water and you will end up wasting a ton of it.

You will also need soda ash. Soda ash is what chemically bonds the dye to the fiber. I go for about a quarter cup per 2 gallons of dye bath. Note that you have to pre-dissolve this so you will be adding water to the dye bath at the end. This is why the tub needs to be big enough so that you can add more water without overflowing.

Order of operations:

Presoak your dry fabric to make sure it absorbs the color evenly. Don’t skip this step. Set the wet fabric aside while you continue prep. You don’t want it sopping, but it needs to be soaked all the way through. Think of a wrung-out towel or laundry right after the spin cycle.

Dissolve your dye. If you have a medium-sized glass beaker and a mason jar, that would be ideal. Start with the beaker, a tablespoon of dye, and a teaspoon of warm water. Get as much dissolved as you can. Add half a cup of room temp water gradually until the dye seems runny and then pour this off into a jar. Add water to about halfway full, seal, shake. Add a little water to the leftover gunk in the beaker. Be amazed at how much dye you still had left. Pour off into the jar. Add a little water to the beaker. Repeat as much as you can until your jar and beaker are full.

In your large bucket or tub, you’ll probably want about 2-3 gallons of water. I put my bin in my bathtub to catch splashes and make cleanup easier. Dissolve your salt into the water however you want. If using powdered salt, this step is easy and you can just stir with a long stick for a few minutes. Or with gloved hands if your bucket is more wide than deep.

Add the prepped dye to the bucket. You may find some dye particles still have not dissolved. Rinse your beaker and jar out with plain water and just add that to the dye bath. Give all this a good stir.

Get your wet fabric! Into the dye it goes. Swish around for like, 20 minutes to 1 hour. You want the fabric to be many shades darker than the final color you’re going for. Wet fabric always looks darker than the final result, and procion dyes will not fully “exhaust.” That means a lot of it won’t stick and will rinse out. The stuff that does stick will be very permanent though.

While you let the fabric soak, swishing it around occasionally, prep the soda ash. You can do this in the clean jar or beaker, but note that the dissolving process may make the water heat up. You therefore don’t want to use too much soda ash in too little water, since higher concentration will also mean it’s more caustic aka dangerous. At low concentrations it’s simply an irritant. I used about 1.5 cups of water for a quarter cup of soda ash. A 3-gallon bath needs more slightly more soda ash than that. A third or a half cup should be sufficient.

Has it been 20 minutes yet? Cool! Move the fabric over to one side of the bath and add a third of the dissolved soda ash. Stir into the dye and swish the fabric around. Repeat twice more.

Soak and stir the fabric for an hour. Yes, this is really time-consuming. Yes, you really do need to do it, especially if your dyeing environment is a bit chilly. You need to give the soda ash enough time to work, or all your prep work will go to waste and the dye will just wash right out. If your dye bath is cold it may take much longer (think a day or two) for the colors to really set. If it’s fairly hot (but not boiling), it will only take an hour or two.

It has been an hour! Congrats, you can now dump the dye bath. It won’t work on anything else now that the soda ash has done its job. You might manage to stain something but the color will wash out or bleed onto other things (like your skin).

Rinsing time. Rinse the fabric in a bucket of clean water a few times and then let it sit in clean water overnight. Dump the water in the morning and wring out as much as you can. You might want to wear gloves for this step as well. Soak it again for a few more hours minimum, wring, toss in the washing machine to finish the job.

Dry the bastard. If linen, iron while damp.

That’s it! You may want to wash with like colors for the next couple rounds of washing, but afterwards the color will be very permanent. What’s nice about procion dye is you don’t need a stove! Warm water is recommended for all of the dissolving steps to make life easier, but you just need a warm tap for that.

[discountalien-pancake]

So I posted these two images that I made in a post together just shy of a year ago, and the post got 10,000+ notes. Today I saw a meme with a text convo of someone sending one of them to a military recruiter (which is extremely funny) and I thought “oh I should find that post again”

but when I went to find it, it had completely vanished. not just the original post, but even reblogs of it. I couldn’t even find screenshots anyone had taken of the original post. it wasn’t brought to my attention as a reported post, tumblr never even contacted me about deleting it, it just… disappeared

really gets the noggin joggin

[discountalien-pancake]

Fellas, fellas

Why on earth are you BUYING PHYSICAL BOOKBOUND COPIES OF FANFICTION????

ACTUALLY WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOOKBINDING FANFICTION TO SELL?!?!?!

IF ANY OF YOU DO EITHER OF THESE THINGS, GET OUT!! I AM NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU AGAIN.

In all seriousness though, authors on AO3 have begun to pull their works off of the site to avoid getting sued by people stealing their works to make a pretty bound book for profit. Entire accounts could be shut down as well.

Listen, I’m all for saving favorite works by printing them out and putting them in a binder, or learning how to make a bookbound copy yourself and/or assembling one with a pre-made and purchased fancy binding for a fanfic FOR YOURSELF or AS A GIFT to someone, but making bindings with and putting fanfiction in it TO SELL is where I draw the line.

Literally the entire point of AO3 is that you can read it FOR FREE.

It is DISRESPECTFUL for people to make money off of hardbound copies because guess what, the original creators of these fics get nothing. We are literally only writing fanfiction for our own pleasure.

Buying and selling book-bound fanfiction is also ILLEGAL YOU DUMB SHITS. People who are selling content while claiming to be a book binder is a misconception of their services. Book binders make the covers and all that, not the actual content of the book. Selling fanfiction is also an immediate violation of copyright law / Creative Commons licenses. The original fan work will get erased from the internet.

Fanfiction is already a legal grey zone since they are works being written about are protected by copyright. Copyright holders can in fact go after writers as well as the person who sold the fanfiction.

This also goes for people who steal fanart and, claim it as theirs, and put a price on it.

Don’t make it worse.

rest assured, we can still write our fanfics and make our art.

Buying a binding for you to assemble onto your own fanfiction or fanfiction you printed for PERSONAL USE is fine.

HOWEVER,

Bookbinding fanfiction for profit is literally ruining things for everyone. DON’T.

If I see any of them on Etsy, I swear to god-

[discountalien-pancake]

Thank you for posting all your sewing projects. You're such an inspiration and you motivate me to sew more, especially by hand. I always forget how relaxing it is until I start doing it.

I’m glad my projects have been inspiring for you!! Honestly the online costuming community is such a wonderful space. There are so many people doing cool things and explaining their techniques, and I definitely would not be here without them! And I have so much more I want to make, so there’s plenty more to come 🥰

#pancake answers #this is really so sweet

[discountalien-pancake]

Round 1.5 of dyeing for the masquerade outfits: the fabric for Zag’s slip and the organza corset that will provide structure for the gown. This was done using a mix of roughly equal parts ‘pagoda red’ and ‘burgundy’ procion MX dyes from Dharma Trading. The dye bath looks like a deep garnet but the dry fabric will be closer to ruby. I may need to do another round with more of the pagoda red to make things a little more warm-toned.

#i actually had tried to dye the charmeuse red with Rit initially but it just would not get dark enough #dyeing adventures

[discountalien-pancake]

[discountalien-pancake]

WIBTA if I left a bad review on a book I haven’t purchased?

(📚📖 to find later)

I’m an audiobook narrator professionally. I do most of my work via independent contracting with a production company. NOTE: they are NOT a publishing house. They do not provide editors/betas/etc for the text, they focus on turning (usually self published) books into audiobooks and marketing those audiobooks.

Most of the books I record with them are great, and I have a lot of fun reading good books! But…some of the books I’ve read for them have been. REALLY. REALLY. bad. Like I personally would have stopped reading within the first few pages bad if it wasn’t literally my job to read the words out loud.

I’m currently reading a book for them that makes me want to tear my hair out. The writing is boring, badly paced, and repetitive. None of the characters are likeable, and the relationships are shallow, the combat is boring, there are no stakes, etc etc. To give you an idea, the main character is the type of kid who on the playground would insist he had a mega super invincibility shield so you couldn’t touch him, but he also had a mega super invincibility shield breaking sword if you decided you wanted a shield too. And the narrative REWARDS HIM for acting that way.

I’ve never left a review on any of the books I’ve narrated before, but this one…i am seriously considering writing a review to try and warn people away from this book.

A few things to consider, though:

1: i am not being paid royalty share from the book, i get a flat rate based on the number of hours in the final audiobook. But as far as I know, the author only starts making money from producing this audiobook once the production company makes back the money they paid me for making it.

2: i would review anonymously/under a fake name and only on the book product page, not the product page for the audiobook version.

3: if an audiobook does not sell, then it is most likely I will not be obligated to continue recording the rest of the series (and it IS a series. At least three books are out as of now. I am currently slated to record them all, provided the audiobook sells decently)

4: the book currently has ~250 reviews already, and a 4.7/5 rating (how???? get some fucking standards), so it’s not like I’m leaving a 1 star review on something that only has 6 reviews.

I don’t think that one bad review would tank the whole series, but I do feel like leaving bad reviews on a product I didn’t even buy might be a dick move, especially if the author’s pay for this book relies on it selling well. But on the other hand, his book sucks and people should know that.

I wouldn’t be leaving a “0 stars: this sucks” review, I’d want to make it comprehensive and detailed. But I’d also feel bad about that because I’m sure the author reads his reviews, and even though his book sucks shit, i don’t want to like…make someone lose their passion to write? But ALSO if you’re making people pay $16 for the book and/or $40 for the audiobook, maybe the book should be fucking good? Idk.

So, tumblr, WIBTA?

[discountalien-pancake]

[discountalien-pancake]

note from blogrunner: yes, we've definitely had a poll like this before, but enough time has passed and there's a lot more people following this blog now

#gestures at my url #assigned pancake by friends

[discountalien-pancake]

alright guys im curious. who were the worst mutuals youve ever had

#the crypto-fash lotr stan’s crypto-fash star wars stan