ANYWAY you cannot convince me that the air nomads didn’t have any sort of trade good based on the flying bison and aang just didn’t have the time or safety to make and sell any of these while trying to stop ozai. they probably did so much spinning just because drop spindles are super transportable, it’s something to do while flying long distances, there’s always a weaver somewhere willing to buy yarn, and there’s always, always large amounts of shed fur just. around. look at how much came off of appa that one episode. so much fur
so three things happen the summer after ozai is defeated and appa starts shedding in earnest again
aang starts spinning and selling yarn because that’s What You Do and he’s clinging REAL HARD to every possible air nomad tradition because, well, who else will remember these things?
toph hears about this and scruffs him before he can sell too much because she’s a merchants daughter and holy shit aang do you understand what you’re selling?? yarn from the last known sky bison! the avatar’s own spirit guide!! spun by the avatars own hand!!!! what are you doing aang!!!!!! she has to drag katara in at this point because aang is real unhappy with the idea that his normal flying bison yarn of, uh, questionable quality is being sold to exclusive high class weavers so they can make shawls for filthy rich nobles for baaaaaank just on the basis of his name. this isn’t how the monks did it :/ and he doesn’t WANT a lot of money anyway! he’s a monk!! he only asks for what he needs to survive!! anyway katara manages to talk toph around to donating most of the money to reconstruction efforts, charities, and orphanages and convinces aang that having an emergency fund is a good thing and he should keep something.aang accidentally ends up with a reasonably full bank account and is really confused about how that happened, why it’s there, and what he’s supposed to do with it
there is a real weird period of time where it’s In Fashion for high noble ladies to have shawls and scarves dyed the same color as aangs clothes (because that’s how you know it’s made with special avatar yarn!) or have images of appa woven into them (can you imagine a shawl that’s just a full length body shot of appa?? amazing) and all the earth kingdom nobility are just rocking green and orange like nbd. weaving decorative shawls with slubby yarn becomes really in fashion, too, because aang is not great at spinning. he’s 13 and it’s boring, ok?
BONUS sokka is just. so mad. you could have been making bank with appa the whole time we were scrambling around the planet aang? do you realize how much more food we could have had? how many more hot baths?? how could you betray me like this
(probably the air nomads also did a lot of weaving but it was mostly the pregnant nuns and the really old nomads so it’s a little off aangs radar. and does aang eat cheese? it never comes up in series but I would also believe that the nomads made a lot of air bison cheese and bison butter tea)
headcanon accepted re: sky bison products
you said SPINNING on a DROP SPINDLE and i instantly went YES. OH GOD YES.
i bet sky bison yarn is really strong but probably not super soft - we see in the show that the fibers are really long, which lends itself well to strong yarns that can stand up to a lot of wear and tear (silk yarn is INCREDIBLE when it comes to being hard-wearing, and that’s mostly because silk is basically an INFINITELY LONG FIBER). But becauseit’s so long and comes from such a large animal, it’s probably really coarse and thick.
I’m imagining most of those high-class ladies would be wearing at least one layer underneath their shawls, because bison yarn is probably pretty itchy if you’re used to high quality wool, silk, or fine linen. Especially bison yarn spun by a 13yo who doesn’t really like spinning.
unless of course the air nomads bred their bison specifically for soft fur, but generally when you’re breeding for stuff like that, you need different breeds for different purposes. appa’s pretty clearly a long-distance riding bison, which would probably have been a different breed than whichever ones would have been bred for soft fur. most species of domesticated animal that are dual+ purpose (i.e. meat/milk/wool/transportation) have breeds that can only do one or two of those well, and the others not as great.
the air nomads obviously would not have been breeding for meat, because vegetarians. For long distance travel and a nomadic lifestyle I bet they would have wanted a travel/milk dual purpose breed, but because they can regulate their body temperature with airbending, soft warm yarn might not have been a high priority for that breed.
which is a lot of words to say “appa-fur yarn is ITCHY”
My impression is that the sky bisons aren’t actually domesticated, so much as semi-sentient and choosing to partner with the air nomads, so I don’t think they’d be bred for anything, much less soft hair.
I actually headcanon spinning as something air nomad kids would be taught to do from a young age to burn off energy and stress and make it easier for them to learn to meditate, so I think Aang would probably be decent at making yarn that’s evenly spun, but probably wouldn’t have the experience to make super fine thread.
I would assume that appa has a double layer coat like most high altitude herd animals, so even without selective breeding the insulating inner layer would probably be suuuper soft. just look up qiviut for an idea of how soft and expensive muskox fur can get, and the skeins of bison fur yarn I have aren’t noticeably different from something like alpaca. assuming that appa sheds a proportionate amount of undercoat to muskox or bison (up to seven pounds a year) there is going to be a LOT of snuggly undercoat to turn into snuggly Soft Things
and I’ve seen a couple people say that aang would probably have learned spinning pretty young and be fairly competent at it, and I agree! I def meant the questionable yarn quality to be a statement on his attention span and post-war schedule, not skill (I don’t really know how to spin so idk if constantly starting and stopping and not paying any attention anyway would effect the consistency any? it just Felt Right)
I’ve never spun anything like qiviut - the most exotic thing I’ve spun is alpaca, unless folks think silk is more exotic - so I didn’t think about the double coat! Don’t they usually need special treatment to separate the topcoat from the undercoat, tho? I wouldn’t be surprised if Aang either didn’t know or wasn’t very good at separating from them.
I *do* spin on a drop spindle, tho, and the biggest problem with stopping and starting often is keeping the single the same width, but you have the same problem stopping and starting ANY kind of spinning project. In some ways, a drop spindle makes it easier to control that than a regular spinning wheel - you have a lot more control over the fiber and the yarn you’re spinning, so you can be more precise. My drop spindle yarns tend to be very regular and compact, while my spinning wheel yarns are more varied and lofty.
However, now I’m picturing the moment when you spin your single a little too thin, and the drop spindle lives up to its name - from hundreds or even thousands of feet in the air! Plummetting off the side of the air bison, with the older nomads scrambling to catch it…
I can totally imagine that the air nomads hat special spindles with gliders (like his stick where he glides with) to spin with airbending as a practice for beginner benders, or in a similar stile as the hand spinning wheels from India, but for air nomads!
And wouldn’t the process from start to finish be a good lesson in great fullness? Like how long it takes from baby bison to clothes
Maby even a live milestone. From first bison who chosen you to your first own robe/Stola??
It could even be that the Air Nomad’s robes were MADE out of sky bison fur, if the under coat was a) incredibly soft (I bet they’d wear the over coat too just because they didn’t really care about worldly possessions and comfortability) and b) their only farm animal was the sky bison. That’s what the Air Nomad’s wear, is Sky bison wool clothes.
Also, to the person who said Sky Bisons would only shed about seven pounds a year, I would like to counter that idea with the fact that Appa is GARGANTUAN. He has enough room on his saddle to carry literally six or seven children and their equipment on his back without much complaint, of which these children are not too much smaller than adults. An ox or an Alpaca or a normal Bison are tiny compared to Appa.
Appa’d have a metric butt ton of under fur on his body. I’d say about twenty to thirty pounds of under fur, with more on top, at the very least.
ok so I didn’t know that supported spindles existed and YES, very much yes to those. I love that.
I was actually trying to say that if muskox shed seven pounds we could use that to extrapolate how much appa shed if he shed proportionate to his size, not that appa would only shed seven pounds
ok, adhd rabbit hole time because I just looked up the average size of muskoxen and the approximate size of appa and, uh. apparently muskoxen are 900lbs full grown and appa is ten tons. over TWENTY TIMES THE SIZE OF A MUSKOX. obvs that’s doesn’t actually tell us anything about appas actual height and length but that’s the only solid number the show gives us and thirty pounds of underfur is starting to seem pretty conservative. it might be closer to 120lbs???
which is a weird way to say that I bet the air nomads had lots of crazy air powered spinning contraptions (and I’m still assuming that anything they had that wasn’t easily transportable was dealt with by pregnant nuns and aang wasn’t really introduced to it yet) and they just churned out textiles. literally everything fabric the nomads used was probably bison fur in some way because there was just. so. much. fur.
Textiles Tumblr coming in clutch to build the air nomad trade empire
Just a quick reminder that today Friday the 11th and this weekend Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th of December the workshop/showroom will be open from 10:30 to 19:00.
Alternatively you can see the new collection of handwoven cushion covers ‘Chromatin Loops’ and shop online here: https://www.juliastreou.com/shop-11
Saint Barbara’s Street(next to St Barbara’s church)
My beautiful Grayson stitch is finally done! I worked so hard on his pattern to make him as pretty as he deserved and I am so happy with how he came out.
Thank you to @witcherscrane for the lovely portrait of Grayson. I used it as the reference for this stitch and I wanted to make him as pretty as that picture.
Also, thank you to everyone at the @continentcakeshop who helped me tweak his pattern over the last months, giving me suggestions and feedback to help make him look as good as possible. Thank you for listening to me obsess over his nose for far too long, then his eyes, then his hair. This was a labor of love though and I thank everyone who helped.
His armor was inspired by the Bear Witcher mentor Gwent card:
i’ve been sewing for nineteen years. “but blue you’re only twenty-five!” yes exactly. i have been sewing for nineteen years, which is most of my life. i am literally going the “just make your own clothes” route personally because of inability to buy things that fit me properly in stores. and i will be the last person to ever recommend that anyone else does this.
you know why? because most people who are having issues buying clothes that fit have notbeen sewing for nineteen years. most people being told to “just make your own clothes” have never sewn, or have done only basic, beginner-level sewing. they don’t have the foundations, they would need to learn an entire specialized skill set from the ground up to accomplish this task. learning to sew well enough to make daily-use, regular-wear clothing that is durable enough and well-fitted enough to last you long enough to be worth the effort of making it, and to even understand which fabrics and construction methods to use for what garments in the first place, and allof that, it takes years to learn for the vast majority of people, especially for people who have to make significant alterations to the shape of a pattern in order for the garment to fit them.
not to mention that unless you are very knowledgeable about materials already in order to avoid getting price-gouged, andvery lucky to have been slowly collecting fabric and other supplies at hugely discounted prices over years and years, andyou’ve been incredibly fortunate enough to inherit a working sewing machine or find one inexpensively, getting into sewing your own wardrobe and starting from the beginning of your sewing journey all at once willcost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. it will cost way more than settling for something that fits “close enough” from wal-mart. and the people who are expressing these grievances are often poor people who can’t find clothes that fit because specialty stores are so expensive. if they had that much money, they could have already bought clothes from those specialty stores!!
i do wholeheartedly encourage people to learn to sew. but i recommend starting with learning how to sew basic things like pillows and pillowcases, and learning how to replace lost buttons and close a small hole in a seam and make other small repairs, then work your way up to basic garment alterations like hemming pants and taking in/letting out seam allowances.
the majority of people will not be able to jump right into sewing proper garments from nothing. telling your average random person on the internet who says “it sucks that i can’t find any clothes in stores that fit me properly” to “just make their own” is patently unreasonable.
for anyone interested in mending, i recommend the speedweve (or other darning loom brand) for patching up holes in clothes!!
it’s easy to use and fun, you can make cool patterns with it :D and extending the lifespan of your clothes is good for saving money and the environment too
it looks like this and you can get different sizes (usually 12 pin, 14 pin or 28 pin) and i found 12 is perfect for darning socks. it’s about $10 on amazon, but if you’re like me and try to avoid using amazon there are other sites too, like this one (where i got the image from), but they can be a bit more expensive… it’s worth looking around to get one for a good price
i’ve only done socks so far but here are some pics of what i’ve done (the patch in the first pic’s not great but it was one of my first attempts!!):
you can find tutorials like this on youtube and patterns on blogs like this
The Lacemaker Artist: Bernhard Keil (Danish, 1624–1687) Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 28 ¼ x 38 ¼ in. (71.8 x 97.2 cm) Classification: Paintings Credit Line: Bequest of Edward Fowles, 1971 Accession Number: 1971.115.2 Metropolitan Museum of Art
Embroidering a 青铜器 (qingtongqi; ancient bronze artifact) vessel in the 苏绣/suxiu traditional style of Chinese embroidery.
苏绣 Suzhou embroidery, Su embroidery or Su xiu is the embroidery created around the city of Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. It is one of the oldest embroidery techniques in the world and is the most representative type of art in Chinese embroidery.
It already has a history more than 2,000 years and is an important form of handicraft in the history of Chinese art and folk custom, representative of Chinese traditional folk arts. It is famous for its variety of stitches, beautiful patterns, elegant colors, and consummate craftsmanship.
In October 1986, Suzhou city set up the Chinese embroidery art museum. Displaying more than 200 embroidery products from The Han dynasty to the present.
On May 20, 2006, Su Xiu was designated an intangible cultural heritage of China. On May 24, 2018, Su Xiu was selected as one of the first batch of China national traditional craft revitalization and protection objects.
