r/fiberartscirclejerk

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!

Sometimes you just need a little release in the middle of the week without turning it into a whole production with the chains and the WIPs and the raw-edge applique. Chickenbear provides for those who jerk! Join us here every Wednesday for a little drive-by circlejerking about your fellow fiber artists (derogatory).

Yes, this is a blatant rip-off of the Bitesized BEC thread but for making fun of crafter bullshit instead of whining about pattern prices and rehashing the same complaints about whichever petite knit designer is taking heat this week.

Feel free to post anonymized screenshots of anything you want to mock, satirize, freak out about, scream into the void about, or generally make others see since you had to look at it with your own two eyes here if you'd like. FACJ is back to being an all-ages subreddit, so you can post images (and gifs) in the comments here directly.

Comments do NOT need to be circlejerky on this post -- if you need to go full /uj here, we will support and validate you, no matter how absurd or petty you get (I can't promise we won't also make fun of you too though).

Our other rules still apply here, of course:

• This is a heavily moderated thread, and anything that isn't scrubbed of identifying information (usernames, faces, etc.) will be removed. Block out, crop out, cross out or sticker out identifying information on EVERY screenshot before posting here.
• Please don't use this thread to demand sources for other jerk posts. If people want to post sources, they will. There are plenty of good reasons for someone not to share a source, including "don't wanna." Source/ITL demands will be removed here and on jerk posts.
• Links to other Reddit posts are NOT ALLOWED here. This includes no-follow links. (FACJ links are fine.)
• Links to content off Reddit may be removed at the mods' discretion.
• We are NOT in the business of brigading, and anyone who engages in brigading will be banned from this subreddit.

I’m a brand new spinner and my wheels turns. Sometimes it turns one way, but then, it turns the OTHER way. I must be doing something wrong. Shouldn’t it only go one way? Please help me change physics and simple machines.

Crotchet has tit-tocks but i dont know if there are any for knitting. Knitters are too old for tit tot anyway. Could somebody here just tell me how?

... From our (superior) knitting advice related sub

This is because your project did not contain twisted stitches, which is the only problem people who knit can possibly have

...

You've also been banned, as you're probably a dirty crocheter

Kthx

im 17 years old and AFRAID of its heft and splendour

I’m a little hesitant to share this, but I trust that you all appreciate we all have different things that trigger us and that’s ok….so here goes. I hate hate HATE the word “WHIMSY, WHIMSICAL, WHIMSICALLY,” and its derivatives. There. I said it.

I think what bothers me is that “whimsical” has become shorthand for almost anything imaginative, odd, playful, surreal, slightly absurd, or outside the ordinary, and somehow it makes all of those things sound diminished and saccharine.

A flamingo wearing a crown? Whimsical. A Victorian cabinet full of mysterious objects? Whimsical. A tiny abandoned magic shop? Whimsical. A goose wearing a bonnet? Whimsical. A shell with little shoes? Whimsical. A cat with little boots? Whimsical. A mushroom with sad eyes and a wistful little face? Whimsical. A treehouse full of pixies who are friends to all animals? Whimsical. A coloring book with quirky cats? Whimsical. A fairy door in the garden that leads to a tiny cafe with tiny coffees and tiny pastries? Whimsical. A fairy ring in a forest clearing where the fairies gather to dance their G-rated dance in the dew under the moonlight? Whimsical.

Apparently anything that wanders too far from the ordinary gets sentenced to whimsy.

It also feels weirdly diminishing to me. Something can be funny and strange and beautiful and even ridiculous without being cute. It can have darkness, tension, history, melancholy, menace, or just plain weirdness behind it. Calling it “whimsical” seems to flatten all of that into manufactured charm.

I realize this is an entirely irrational amount of hostility toward an innocent adjective. I accept that. The adjective and I will simply have to live separate lives. I feel better now. Thank you fine folks of Reddit for hearing me out.

I'm too broke to afford new pants so did the next logical thing and hand sewn a piece of an inner tube to a bike for the inner thigh. Tell me about your most logical repair!

logic! (yes, i am a man, why do you ask?)

This subreddit is for fiber artists and crafters of all types! Because we don't all see the same (shitty) posts on our feeds, it may be handy to have a place to revel in all that our fellow fiber lovers share for us to enjoy.

Feel free to post anonymized screenshots of anything you're referencing here if you'd like. FACJ is back to being an all-ages subreddit, so you can post images (and gifs) in the comments here directly.

This is a heavily moderated thread, and anything that isn't scrubbed of identifying information (usernames, faces, etc.) will be removed. Block out, crop out, cross out or sticker out identifying information on EVERY screenshot before posting here.

However, unjerk/uj/genuine/serious comments and discussions are allowed -- even encouraged! -- on In The Loop posts. Irony and sarcasm are fine here too, so consider using tone tags to make sure your comment comes across the way you want (or don't! I really don't care!).

There are a few other rules for In The Loop posts:

• Please don't use this thread to demand sources for jerk posts. If people want to post sources, they will. There are plenty of good reasons for someone not to share a source, including "don't wanna." Source/ITL demands and discussions of where to find sources will be removed here and on jerk posts.
• Links to other Reddit posts are NOT ALLOWED here. This includes no-follow links. (FACJ links are fine.)
• Links to content off Reddit may be removed at the mods' discretion.
• We are NOT in the business of brigading, and anyone who engages in brigading will be banned from this subreddit.

A new thread will go up every Sunday!

i've had it with you people. just stop. don't we have enough already. isn't there enough. you don't even have the requisite taste level to. your business plan is a gofundme. and we have all the stuff. what else could we possibly need. just stop. doing. right. now.

if you make an advent i will come to your house and kill you.

The way yarn hoarding is not only accepted in fiber arts communities, but encouraged, is really fucked up. Hoarding is compulsive behavior, and yarn hoarding is not different. I'm a yarn hoarder in quadruple digits, it's related to my anxiety/fears of resource scarcity, and it's miserable. I wish people would stop encouraging each other to buy more and more yarn when they already have a lot so they don't end up feeling trapped like every other hoarder. At least a stickied mod post acknowledging that yarn hoarding is just hoarding would go a long way for some. Anyway, thanks for listening to me vent.

Edit: I'm not seeking advice regarding my therapy or hoarding. I shared where my hoarding comes from purely so people could understand why I have this perspective, not so someone could try to use my mental health against me in a cheap 'gotcha' comment. It's okay to disagree with me or be snarky, but keep it respectful.

Hiya. I don't really post in this sub but I need to complain. I'm so so so so so sick and tired of seeing posts in crochet subs like "where can I find this pattern?" "What stitch is this?" And the item is knit.
Oh my god!!!! Learn to identify what you are looking at!!! Crochet and knit don't look remotely similar to me, and all these posts of knitted items are clogging up crochet subreddits. I'm so tired. I wish people would just learn to identify what crochet and knit look like. I don't think I can take another post like it.
It's infuriating!!!!