art challenge design fiber art ideas inspiration writing

Fiber Artists of the Apocalypse

The inspiration for this post comes from Liz Haywood, a clothing designer in Australia who has been focusing on creating zero-waste patterns. She shares her fashion adventures on The Craft of Clothes [https://lizhaywood.com.au] blog. In her November 1, 2021, post, she wrote about “Fashion in a dystopian world,” inspired by her children’s recent interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. She shared photos she found online showing the current concept of dystopian clothing, which includes a lot of…

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design ideas observations

A Tiny But Significant Change in Fitted Sheets

Have you ever struggled to figure out which way to put a fitted sheet onto a mattress, particularly a queen-size mattress? Queen mattresses and their fitted sheets are fairly close to square, so inevitably I end up putting the sheet on incorrectly the first time around. While not an earth-shattering problem, it was annoying. And then someone had a brilliant idea and made a tiny but significant change to fitted bed sheets. Some fitted bed…

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history ideas pragmatic historian thought fodder

Now & Then: A Useful History Podcast

One of the most important uses of history is to use it to work ourselves out of predicaments we are facing RIGHT NOW. It’s easy to assume that because history is about what happened in the past, we can set it aside. That it has nothing to say to us now because conditions were different in the past. Except that humanity seems to cycle through the same sorts of challenges even when presented with what…

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