🤝 Community Knitwits in the Fiber Arts Hobby - Drama in the fiber arts

I tried to do an irl textile thing and I immediately regretted it, thought I'd tell you all
Try harder faggot. You can do it I believe in you, go big or go home etc. What was the project?
 
the project wasn't the issue the issue was the other people but thank you for believing in me
Yeah fiber people can be either the coolest in the world or the worst. My local shop is alright but the one the next town over is crazy folk
 
I go to a knitting meetup monthly and last time there was a woman there who had ALR ankles with the ankle dragging on the ground
 
Yeah fiber people can be either the coolest in the world or the worst. My local shop is alright but the one the next town over is crazy folk
When I got started in this hobby it was mainly quirky older ladies who were more than happy to teach any young person who expressed interest in it. The term ‘spinster’ comes from fiber spinners after all! They were some of the most lovely women I’ve ever met took me under their wing and I’m indebted to them for helping further my passion for it. The old guard is still around but they’re dying off. I’ve since been partaking in a women’s fiber group made up of Eastern European women and ofc you will not find identity politics there.

Every artistic hobby has been infected in some way, you just gotta be willing to be a persistant sperg and find your people.
 
I'd been attending a community knitting circle for the past two months because I wanted to learn how to make simple stuff for newborns. Three weeks ago a foreign troon appeared. This caused... a stir, to say the least. Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
 
I'd been attending a community knitting circle for the past two months because I wanted to learn how to make simple stuff for newborns. Three weeks ago a foreign troon appeared. This caused... a stir, to say the least. Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
I'm always curious about the details of this kind of thing. Was there any one thing that set off the alarm for everyone, or a bunch of little things? Like, what's bad behaviour at a knitting group?
 
Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
You gotta find where they're holding the new group chat knit without the troon. They might assume that you're cool with it because you're younger.
 
Hobbii admitted to using AI on LinkedIn (archive)

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Between this and them recently laying off most (or all) of their social media department, some are calling for boycotts

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Redditors are particularly panicking over alternatives to Hobbii’s cotton offerings, as others are rejecting other popular brands like Ice Yarns and Scheepjes over AI use or pattern theft

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Drops has been accused of pattern theft as well
 
I'm always curious about the details of this kind of thing. Was there any one thing that set off the alarm for everyone, or a bunch of little things? Like, what's bad behaviour at a knitting group?

Well, there are trans people who radiate awkward energy in female spaces, right? Which is uncomfortable in its own way. And then there are those that invade that space with overly masculine energy. This was the second kind. Interjecting into conversations with barely related commentary, over-sharing personal information, stuff spread out excessively. Personally, I think the over-sharing was the main turn-off. People in Japan don't care what you do... As long as they don't know about it.

The second turn-off was probably the fact that they exclusively made stuff for their anime dolls. So typical weeb shit definitely plays a part here.
 
Derailing but has anyone ever hoard/archived older patterns from really dated websites or blog pages like wordpress and stuff?
I've been planning on dedicating a month or two to rewrite them for easy printing for personal use since I don't know if it would be alright to reupload them somewhere.
 
Derailing but has anyone ever hoard/archived older patterns from really dated websites or blog pages like wordpress and stuff?
I've been planning on dedicating a month or two to rewrite them for easy printing for personal use since I don't know if it would be alright to reupload them somewhere.

I do. A couple of years ago, I started a project to locate free patterns offered by yarn companies that are no longer in business. Since most of the websites were gone, I would try to find the original link to the pattern in Ravelry and then find it on the Wayback Machine. I save a copy of the webpage and also create a printable PDF. So far, I have just been storing them on my computer with a mirrored backup.

It's not just closed companies that have lost patterns. When Yarnspirations bought Red Heart, Patons, Caron and others, a lot of those old patterns are now gone. That is a much bigger project that I don’t have the heart to tackle. Especially since there are going to be like 75 different patterns for basically the same granny square.

As far as where to upload them, I don’t know. You could try the Internet Archive, but I have heard of stuff getting taken down. The most recent example is someone posted a copy of a knitting magazine from the 1970’s that is long out of business. It got taken down in a few days. I really hate how most Internet knitters are really smug about copyright and say things like, “it doesn’t matter if the pattern is discontinued, the owner still has rights to the pattern!” Instead of being cool and saying, “That pattern? I have a copy, here you go.”

It really saddens me that a large part of the early knitting Internet is gone. Those patterns from blogs should be preserved. It doesn’t help that Ravelry now marks a lot of patterns that were published on blogs as discontinued. Even if the page is still up. Even if the person still regularly updates their blog.
 
I do agree that AI patterns and AI photos of “finished” patterns that are impossible in reality are real problems. I would be uncomfortable with swatch photos for colorways too, because how does the AI know what a skein will look like knitted up?

Using AI to polish your marketing verbiage? Very benign, and can get some really great copy that phrases things in ways even a good writer won’t think of.

Enhancing photos? That could mean anything from using Lightroom to tweak settings, all the way to creating photos out of thin air. If you go by technical terms, AI is just an algorithm written by humans. Using the “auto” function in Lightroom to correct light balance or other tweaks is also an algorithm. Yet no one bats an eye at auto adjustments, even though it’s a much simpler version of the same thing!

Not all “AI” is the same thing. Not all AI is harmful to the planet (says the same people who consoooooom to SABLE levels of stash and use shipping from around the world because it’s convenient, drive big cars, fills their house with “landfillcore” trash decor, etc).

I still love hobbii.
 
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