To give you an example of what I mean, here's my totally irrational craft pet peeve:

I absolutely loathe those little knots that come in my yarn skeins! I worry soooo much that they'll come undone! And then sometimes they're knots between two totally different parts of the color change if it's a color-changing yarn! It's so annoying that yarn manufacturers haven't invented infinity yarn yet!

K, now: GO!

It's so unfair that it's just, like, okay -- even expected! -- for designers to bait-and-switch their fellow handcrafters by saying their patterns are free and then sending them to a website chock full of ads.

It's not a FREE pattern if I have to:

• See ads
• Scroll past ads
• Click to close ads
• Read anything that isn't a pattern before getting to the pattern

And don't you dare suggest that I use:

• Ad blocker extensions or browsers
• Reading mode
• My computer's copy/paste function in conjunction with a text/notepad app
• Print to PDF/screenshots

The only truly free pattern is the one where I get just the clean, well-formatted pattern PDF with no ads for $0 and no email signups and no prompts to buy the paid PDF and no effort of any kind on my part.

I think creators deserve to be paid for their work or whatever, but I wish they remembered that we don’t have to be either the consumer or the product -- there is a third way that capitalism wants us to forget where people just genuinely share things with me for free, to everyone’s benefit.

The CYC has initiated a campaign to end the longstanding, far-reaching debate over what to call yarn that may or may not be quite enough for its own sizable project and that may or may not have been partially used in a previous project or projects.

We acknowledge this is a serious and complex conflict among fiber artists specializing in yarn craft with multiple valid points of view. To those who call these yarn portions "scraps", we hear you and we see you. To those who believe there is a bright, worsted-weight line between "leftover" and "scrap" yarn, we also recognize your perspective. Those using "bits" and "crumbs" to refer to the bits and crumbs of yarn that only serve to add to the dust bunnies in the corners, we salute you. We even appreciate those trying to make "remnant" a thing for yarn even if "remnant" will never be a thing for yarn.

The point of fiber arts isn't to split hairs over what length of yarn is a scrap versus a leftover versus a remnant. The point of fiber arts is to come together to complain about what Andrea Mowry is doing and what Stephen West isn't doing. So, in keeping with that mission and to end this debate that has kept us all preoccupied for too many hours today, here's the new guidance:

The words "scrap," "leftover," "remnant," "crumbs," and "bits" and their derivatives and portmanteaus are hereby outlawed. You must now discuss all yarn portions using standard imperial measurements. Length measurements are preferred, but we will accept weight measurements, as long as they are in American and not metric (here's a link to a grams-to-ounces conversion app).

To ensure no fiber artists feel left out during their 18 hours of knitfluencer content consumption per day, "scrapbusting projects" will now be called "projects that may use 0 to 1,000,000 inches of yarn." "Using leftover yarn from another project" will now be referred to as "using yarn." "Bits" and "crumbs" of yarn will now simply be "yarn."

We appreciate your cooperation.

Addenda
Addendum 1: "Ball" will continue to be an accepted term for discussing units of yarn and the CYC has no plans to attempt to standardize this term as it ensures experienced fiber artists have something to lord over their newbie counterparts. We know balls when we see them.
Addendum 2: Complete/unused mini-skeins are have occupied a confounding gray area in this conversation because literally WHAT is that amount of yarn even GOOD FOR, but that ends here and now. The CYC is officially banning the production, dyeing, and sale of mini-skeins. Fiber artists currently in possession of mini-skeins are encouraged to dispose of their mini-skeins at the earliest opportunity via burning or shredding. Use of mini-skeins is not subject to prosecution at this stage, but we reserve the right to haul you in front of a judge for sentencing if we deem your mini-skein usage to be problematic.

I was on the train, happily minding my own business with my audiobook and my hook, when two older women sitting near me (definitely 65+, traveling on senior discount tickets, I could tell by how haggard and used up they looked) clocked the yarn. They smiled, pointed with long, gnarled fingers, and made that universal "Oh, crochet!" face. I'm still an innocent, fresh-faced youth at nearly 29 and genuinely crave finding fellow crafters in real life, even if they're old biddies, so I paused my book, pulled my earbuds out, and leaned in for what I thought would be a sweet, intergenerational spark of crafting community.

They asked what I was making, and I held it up.

I explained the construction: a blanket yarn bee with gargantuan boobs barely contained by a bright blue bikini top (the kind That Happened Crochet designs). I openly mentioned, with a light laugh, that I was still mastering the boob technique on the go because it's a tricky learning curve.

The wrinkly, low-collagen smiles evaporated on the spot.

Flanking me as if to pin me in place, the boomers looked at the piece, exchanged a heavy look, and one of them scoffed with a threatening undertone: "Well. Aren't you brave, daring to do all that out in public."

Before I could even process the tone, the other boomer leaned forward with a tight, patronizing grimace. With stale coffee breath and through yellowed, crooked teeth, she glowered, "Look, why don't you just make a scarf? You're doing everything in the round. If you just worked back and forth from left to right, you could actually turn your work. Keep going long enough, and at least you'd end up with something you can actually wrap around your neck and get some real use out of."

From there, the conversation spiraled into pure, sour gatekeeping. They didn't drop it; they surrounded me with their bony, crepey arms and started talking excitedly across me about how crochet has become "such a trendy hype nowadays," rolling their eyes wildly while claiming they had already done all of this decades ago. Their chatter slowly morphed into wailing chants up to the sky demanding to know why everyone today is just making "all kinds of weird, unnecessary things" instead of sticking to the basics.

I was so uncomfortable and realized they had kicked my bag and its pepper spray under the seats out of my reach, but I refused to immediately shove my earbuds back in and give them the satisfaction of watching me retreat. So I just sat through the awkward tension and the ethereal moans emanating from the boomers' maws, keeping my ears open and quietly nodding with a flat face, counting my complex post stitches while they performed incantations bearing eerie similarities to the pattern for a basic granny square.

I know not how much time passed before I startled awake as the train grunted to a stop at my station. The bog-witches had disappeared, leaving in their wake only a hazy half-memory of frantically frogging my beloved boob-bee as they fed on its entrails before they melted into a watery haze and dribbled out the window. All that remained of the encounter was a reddening outline of an arthritic hand where it had apparently gripped me tight around the wrist, along with a bloom of radiant pain into my knuckles and fingers. I realized with horror that moved as slow as honey that I would never be able to hold a crochet hook again.

It’s just so frustrating because finding other makers outside of large, organized meetups is rare enough as it is. Most people on transit are staring at their phones—which I completely understand, because God knows I spend plenty of commutes binging shows to decompress. But when you finally look up hoping for a genuine connection with fellow makers in the wild, even makers with one foot in the grave, having it instantly turned into unsolicited witchcraft and back-in-my-day snobbery just stings.

I still want to find my community out there, but moments like this really make you question how many friendly glances are actually just setups for an old-lady lecture!

I realized today, thanks to a custom report on a recent jerk post, that we've been doing this wrong since November 2022. I'm so grateful to that anonymous tipster for pulling the wool, such as it is, from my eyes: We spend WAY too much time plumbing our personal vendettas for circlejerk inspiration.

NEW RULE*: If you personally witness or experience something in a different craft-adjacent subreddit such as /knitting that annoys you, frustrates you, makes you laugh out loud at the utterly absurd, unmitigated gall of some people, or will someday serve as a chapter in your villain origin story, you cannot post parodies, mockery, shitposts, bad Photoshops, or satire about it here on FACJ under an alt account so you don't leave breadcrumbs for brigaders.

Your personal vendetta is none of our business -- you need to handle it your-goddamn-self. What are you, some sort of coward who's afraid of a little iNtErNeT cOnFrOnTaTion? A little baby crafter who doesn't think she has the time to correct everything wrong with a post and every last one of its comments on /crochethelp and just wants to let off a little steam? A knitting enthusiast whose posts have been removed for no apparent reason from the most populous knitting subreddit despite following the rules as written and whose appeals to that group's moderator resulted in some genuinely hilarious/sad material to work with?

I didn't think so. I think we both know you can do better.

I didn't build r/fiberartscirclejerk with my own blood, sweat, tears, half-chewed safety eyes retrieved from the mouths of babes, and undercooked extra parts so that all of you internet weirdos could just... come here and make fun of other people on other subreddits and their terrible ideas, awful moderation actions, shitty attitudes, dumbfuck questions, and horrifying taste.

I truly wish I knew where you all got the idea that FACJ was for making fun of other people.

^(*I AM KIDDING JESUS)

I like to rent out space in my home to tenants. I like to look at pics of other people's rooms for rent. I like how kind and supportive the online landlady community tends to be, at least in my experience. I like simple tenant agreements. I like complicated tenant agreements. I like wonky tenant agreements. I like ugly tenant agreements. I like all of them!

But I need to clarify...

A "border" is the fabric frame you add around the outside of your patchwork or blabket. A boarder, which is the thing that really gets me going, is a person who rents one room of someone's house, often getting meals with the deal.

I get it, English is not everyone's first language, and even those who are native speakers are not always great at homophones. It's just a spelling mistake and it doesn't make anyone bad or stupid or anything. It just annoys me SO MUCH!

What common property ownership-related spelling/grammar mistake drives you up a wall? (No pun intended.)

I logged onto IG first thing this morning to see what my favorite crafting accounts got up to since four hours ago when I fell asleep to the warm glow of Sewing Content on my phone (no, I did not drop my phone on my face because I bought a floor-mounted stand to hold my phone while I scroll IG/FB in bed because I chipped a tooth last month) and what did the assholes in charge of IG shovel into my carefully curated feed that is typically cleansed of all Meta-related content?

None other than a notification about a sewist I follow who apparently "shared a story created with Ray Ban Meta Glasses." Can you believe this? I have told IG over and over and fucking OVER again that I hate Meta and want absolutely nothing having to do with that horrible, creepy corporation on my Instagram feed.

Obviously, I promptly blocked the sewist's account, right after I tapped on the notification and watched the story several times because I simply could not believe what was happening on my IG! I also shared the link with my sewing friends so they could see both how awful it was that IG promoted this content to me, of all people, and that a FELLOW CRAFTER! used META hardware! to create INSTAGRAM content! I also needed to share it here with all 35,000 of my favorite internet strangers -- heaven forbid you be left out of this juicy drama I mean important development in the greater crafting community.

And also, can I just say? Try hard much, Meta? It's so transparent that Meta is desperately trying to get people to like their pro-surveillance state bullshit product. No thank you. And it's, shall we say, interesting they are promoting a video made by a woman when close to 90% of Meta glasses users are men. They must be trying to expand their market or something? Something seems off about it in any case.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Rant (it's like a TED Talk, see, but I'm just ranting into the void! lmao!). If you need me, I'll be scrolling mindlessly on Facebook for the next 20 hours! (I need a break from IG after this mess 🫠)

AGAIN

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT