I have SO MUCH fabric

The shelves are just stuffed right full! My parents are always asking, "do you really need more fabric?" to which, as every stitcher knows, the answer is always "yeah, duh."
The frustrating thing is, I'm not even just collecting random fabric with no purpose. I mean, I am a little, but at this point I've stared at this fabric stash for so long that tons of this stuff has a plan, at least sort of - I just need the time to get these things made. And it feels like there's never time, or if there it I'm doing mending or something.
But let me take you on a tour of some of these plans. (Masses of pictures ahead!

And as I was putting this list together I kept glancing over and seeing other things that I have plans or tentative plans for. Giant pile of blue poly velvet? Elizabethan gown! Salmon colored cotton flannel? Overdye it red and make a 19th c petticoat! A million potential blouses out of quilting cottons! And that isn't including the leather-for-shoes and the upholstery-scraps-for-purses, and the scraps-for-quilting, which are in the boxes above and below the main fabric stash.
Oh yeah, and the Yarn Bench
And the 1000 mending and UFO projects lying in piles all over everywhere.

If only I had a sudden inheritance, and I could quit work and just do ALL THE PROJECTS. and then I could finally buy some new fabric, ha.

... a sweater!

The color is a little more saturated in real life, a nice pale teal. I just love it!! I'm knitting from the bottom up. It isn't from a pattern, I'm just making it up as I go. Its a sort of wide rib, k4 p1, 140 stitches around, size 8-ish needles. It's got these little vents on the sides.

It'll be mid-hip length. When I get to the top it'll have just ribbed arm openings, no sleeves. I think probably also just a ribbed crew neck, unless I suddenly decide I reeeeeally want a cowl. Cowls are just harder to combine, like I couldn't wear one with a collared shirt, so that's pretty unlikely, I think.

Did you know I have one? I put the link on the home page already but it seems fitting to make an official blog post about it.
The store is HERE.
For starters I'm listing old things that I've made and either never wore or don't wear anymore. Its a massive amount of things, and I'm slowly putting them up a few at a time - not for suspense, it's just easier that way. All the stuff is clothes that's already in my clothing gallery. Some of the listings are linked in the gallery pages but I've been a little slow about putting links in.
I'm only up to about 20 listings right now, but boy will it just increase from there.

(This is basically a rant, I think. It takes me a minute to get to the point but this is my rant style.)

I'm talking about "snaps", or "poppers" for the Brits amongst you, that garment closure with the onomatopoetic name(s). They look approximately like this:

They function because they have got two halves, one that pokes out and one that has a dent. These two components snap (HA) together and are held firmly in place by those funny squiggly springs that you can see inside the dented half.

Now, when you are sewing these things to a garment, you have to be a bit careful about which side you put where. You can see that the dented side is a good bit thicker that the pokey side. This makes a difference when you are sewing them.
The pokey side, with its flat back, attaches very cleanly to the fabric:

Whereas, the dent side tends to pull on the fabric, creating a visible disturbance on the other side:

Of course, the exact details of one's attachment method makes a difference, as does the size of the snap, but this is generally true. Since a snap is (usually) supposed to be an invisible closure, it is (usually) best to attach the two components so that the flat-backed pokey side is against the outer side of the garment, and the rounder dented side is against the body - in fact, this is considered a rule by most costume people, which of course may be broken sometimes but should be considered the default.

Ok, so that made sense, right? It's a logical system, easy to see why it's a good system.

Well, let me tell you how that was explained to me.

"Alright so there's a male side and a female side, and the male one goes on top"

Excuse me?!!!???? This is literally so many shades of yikes??!!!??
And I discovered shortly thereafter, that this Highly Icky terminology is used for lots of other things too.
Plug? Male. Socket? Female.
Pokey part? Male. Denty part? Female.
The WORST was when I heard it applied to Velcro. VELCRO. There's perfectly acceptable non-gross terminology for velcro -  the scratchy side is teeny hooks and the soft side is teeny loops, so call it hook and loop. But nooooooo, the hook has to be "male" and the loop "female".

IS NO ONE ELSE BOTHERED BY THIS? GOOD LORD.

At first, I didn't really know what about it made me uncomfortable, but I have figured it out:
Thing 1: cisnormativity
This terminology basically reduces the concepts of "male" and "female" to "penis" and "vagina" (or "poke" and "hole" if you prefer euphemism). There is SO MUCH more to gender (and to sex) than "penis or vagina", but using this kind of terminology reinforces the extreme old-fashioned binary.
Thing 2: heteronormativity
Snaps (and other such things) only work when the two opposite parts are put together. A denty side will not snap with another denty side. This is NOT TRUE of humans, but the application of human terminology to this system reinforces the idea that only a male and female ("penis" and "vagina") can/will fit together.
Thing 3: EWW
If the snaps are male/"penis" and female/"vagina" that means that every time you snap a snap (or plug in a lamp, or stick together some velcro), you're simulating the act of sex. Does no one else think that's weird? Did it never occur to any of my teachers that, by assigning hardware genders based on similarity to genitalia, they are turning everything into sex, everywhere all the time? Closing a shirt? SEX. Setting up a television? SEX. EEUUEGH its just so icky to think about. And there's no room for consent in there either. What if those little snaps don't want to have sex? TOO BAD, you needed to close up that shirt to go on stage.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but you can't tell me it isn't running in the background of this whole nomenclature system. You can't say "that looks like a penis, lets call it male" and then also say "this has nothing to do with the function of the hardware, it was just a handy term".
I move that we abolish this linguistic shortcut. I am 1000% sure that every piece of hardware that it is applied to can be referred to differently. Some of them already have established words - for Velcro, hook and loop; for electrics, plug and socket.
I've not yet heard a set of terms for the parts of snaps, so I humbly suggest "innie" and "outie". Like bellybuttons! And I think it can be said, that snaps do bear a certain (limited) resemblance to bellybuttons.
Let's abolish cis-het normativity in our work terminology, kids.
There's no good reason to keep it.

-consider getting a male one.
Why? you ask. I'm a lady with boobs and hips and things, and male dress forms don't come with those.
That's true. And if you can get some kind of custom dress form to fit your shape exactly, definitely go for it. But if you need an adjustable dress form, either because you're building garments for corseted shapes or because you expect to work for variously shaped clients - consider a male form.
When I was a wee seamstress my parents bought me a dress form, one of those adjustable ones that gets larger and smaller by the use of these little turning gears. And it's totally fine if i need a basically human shaped clothes horse, but LET ME TELL YOU, it has nooooothing to d with my actual body shape! Chiefly because the boobs are these little hard immobile mounds which are too high and too close together to even approximate my own chest-age - but also because even adjustable dress forms can't be every possible shape.
Like, if the chest is a lot bigger than the waist, the dress form strains and eventually stops adjusting. The "adjustment" has to fall within a certain range of bust-waist-hip ratios or the thing might break. And I have really no idea how those tiny hard immobile boobs relate to the shape of a large busted woman -"yeah, the chest is 40 inches around, and the apexes of the boobs are wierdly far apart and somehow shaped exactly like the cup of a 32 B" - like probably not?
But with a men's form, you can use batting and padded-out undergarments to build up the shape of your own particular body, and get the fluffy parts and the places in between all just right - and sqooshable, because batting with squish under a corset or whathaveyou.

Just a thought.

So I don't drive, but I have places to go and things to do, which means I spend a lot of time on public transportation. I don't listen to music on the bus like normal people, because I get worried that I'll forget my stop or something - but I can't just sit there with my thoughts because then I'll have time to worry about other things. So my solution since about June has been ~*knitting*~! I don't really like to sit with no project in my hands in general, so the knitting also comes with me to church** and the theater, and even just watching TV with my parents (the Great British Baking Show, if you must know. Or Project Runway.). I've got a lot done already.
My knitting project of choice is triangular shawls. They're in garter stitch, and i start with one stitch and do an increase at the beginning of every row. the first one, i did on extra small needles and it came out very tight but too stiff for a shawl, so I unpicked it. But the second one is this beastie!

So huge and nice! There's a funny stripe effect, where I went from one yarn to another. They looked like the same color in the skein but in fact are not. I think it looks pretty weird flat but all right on the body. I think maybe I'll do a button and loop on either end of the front edge, because its big enough I could wrap it around and button behind me (if you see what I mean).
The second shawl is this one:

Its a bit smaller, and it's all funny and variegated. I had two skeins of that so it all matches. The skein's still attached at the corner because I want to give it a decorative border - maybe crochet? - so I bound off with yarn to spare. When it's done, it's going in my Etsy shop.
And right now I'm working on yet another, this time in Navy blue.

This one is going to get a border with some stripes and maybe get big enough that I can use it for 1860s reenacting. I can't quite tell if large knitted shawls were a thing then, or if it was really just large fabric shawls or knitted sontags (which are a bit of a different shape). I found one thing claiming to be a Godey's knitted shawl but it seems a little bogus...

** - I always feel like I have to explain the "going to church" thing, because there's churches and there's CHURCHes. It's a Unitarian Universalist church. So, not on the CHURCH-y end of churches - very light on the Jesus and heavy on the interfaith exchange. Its just a nice community and for the most part people there are concerned about the same social justice problems that I am. And we sing pretty music and hymns and stuff, which I find very pleasant.