Rug Experiments, Recs and Recipe

[donutsweeper]

So rug experiment was mostly a failure, although third time was a charm in getting an actual rug out of the deal... (babble and pictures under cut)

Basically, I have a ton of old, undonateable sheets (stained or ripped) and have been making rugs out of them and decided to try combining a white and red one and doing a rectangle row rug instead of my typical oval, thinking the stains of the white wouldn't be as obvious if it was sandwiched between rows of red with a border of black I had left over so it wouldn't show dirt as much. Take one switched white/red/white/red one row per and the result was the red got swallowed by the white and wasn't noticeable so after only a few rows I pulled it out and switched to a 2-2 pattern instead... except it didn't come out even at all and even though the stitch count was the same it kept getting wider and wider and was really, really annoying as a result. I assume the issue was that even though I'd purposely tried to account for the slightly difference thickness in the white vs red sheet by cutting the red strips longer it wasn't enough.



So I pulled it all out and tried again with just the white but after a few rows it was obvious the staining was going to be an issue but I figured- no problem! I still have some blue dye leftover from my earlier experiment with dying a sheet before turning it into a rug (last August) so I thought I'd try dying after it was a rug to see how that worked. It also occurred to me that without the red the rug was going to be a lot smaller than originally planned so if I was dying it anyway I could supplement it by using the white-with-some-flowers sheet as the runner (which only slightly peeks through the knots and would mostly white anyway). The plan seemed sound! When finished you could only vaguely see that the runner was a different material (and you had to look really closely to notice).



But then I dyed it.



Ooof. Not good. Not only did the sheets take the dye differently (something I probably should have thought of) the edges were all lose and weird because I was trying to keep the runner from bunching up when there was a new row, something that isn't an issue the way I usually do row rugs where you switch the runner and knotter each row.

So... take three. I undid the 3/4ths of the rug with the floral runner and redid the whole thing with just the solid color. (I put aside the dyed floral strips, I'll see about adding them to the finished dyed floral rug in a few days.)

And it worked! Mostly. It's a slightly mottled color result due to the dye not being quite as evenly distributed since the knots don't match exactly to where they were the first time but oh well.

So I've learned that different fabric not only affects the size a lot more than I thought but also take dye differently and that I'm not the hugest fan of row rugs but they will keep their shape better when the runner is switched each row. And now I have yet another rug. Not sure where I'll wind up putting it, it's fairly small (19x22, more of a square than the runner rug I had envisioned but oh well.) The fact combining sheets might not always work well is actually kind of annoying since I mostly have a lot of single, random sheets. *sigh* Maybe they'll combine better in the oval pattern?

Have two week's of MDZS/Untamed recs from recthething:

Be Gay, Do Crime by merelydovely (10k)
Summary: Lan Wangji is pretty sure he's in love with a wanted criminal. (He's only half right.) (really fun mistaken identity modern AU)

Story-Shaped by lingering_song (14k)
Summary Snippet: Nie Huaisang knows that things in this world are rarely story-shaped. That they're more akin to ink spilled on parchment - Messy and unpredictable and rather tragic. But out of all the threads he's woven throughout damn near a decade, he had not expected the most straightforward of his ploys to go this awry. (excellent post-canon NHS and how he takes in WWX and helps opinions about him change)

At Your Side, Clear Space For Me by ChloeBYoung (20k)
Summary: Wei Wuxian's main duties at the Lan complex were as follows: 1. Minor repairs and maintenance. 2. Clean common spaces. (He'd done the floor in 56 seconds last time, and didn't miss any of it.) (Except maybe a couple corners.) 3. Deliver mail. (And food, because even Lans couldn't resist the siren song of Dominos.) 4. Ignore any weirdness. Like, cat stuff. (great modern shifter fic AU)

"It's Heating Up in the Cold Springs of Gusu Lan! You Won't Believe This Artwork Really Exists!" by Admiranda (5k)
Summary: There are many side effects of immortality. One of them is about the things you thought were lost to the past till they're dug up again. As resident most known immortal and good child, Lan Sizhui resigns himself to scouting out the exhibit of erotic art recently donated from the Lan sect to see if it's actually what they think it is. (Hilarious! Poor Sizhui)

Sect Leader Wen Qionglin by maya_brainstormed (mayachain) (2k)
Summary: Wen Ning has lived as a sentient fierce corpse for about four hundred years. Going back in time could have been an accident, but isn't. (Unusual and interesting time travel fix-it from Wen Ning's POV)

Love Song In Reverse by Author: timetoboldlygo (237k)
Summary: Wei Wuxian gasps back into life without a single memory left. His friends, his siblings, his home — all lost to the fog in his head, nothing more than a mystery slipping through his fingers. What else was there to do but carry himself around in bits and parts, trying to become whole, a letter waiting to be written? He is – he is Mo Xuanyu, isn’t he? In this body, with these people. This family. He has to be Mo Xuanyu, he didn’t know anything else, even if the name sounded wrong. That was all he had. Well, that and Hanguang-jun. Lan Wangji, for his part, has had his taste of love and lost it. In all his grieving and searching, he didn’t expect to find another.

Wei Wuxian gets resurrected, loses his memories, and falls in love. (I've been following this amazing amnesia AU fic for close to 2 years and it's finally complete so I can finally rec it! Yes, it's ridiculously long, but it's so very very good. It's canon divergent due to the summoning ritual resulting in WWX not remembering anything prior to that evening and since the Lans assume it's a result of the chaos of that night they bring him back to Cloud Recesses. "Mo Xuanyu" and LWJ find themselves attracted to one another but there's LWJ's previous lost love (WWX) looming over them and the whole mystery of the cursed dismembered body pieces and the fact MXY seems to have been a demonic cultivator... Anyway, a long, but absolutely excellent read.)

hot for teacher by attackofthezee (noxlunate) (8k)
Summary Snippet: In which Wei Ying is a young single father whose son is possibly scheming to set him up with his history teacher. (very cute modern AU)

Like a River Flows by brooklinegirl (55k)
Summary: Wei Ying has been Lan Zhan's partner for two months, three days, and seven hours. Plus or minus a handful of minutes, if you're counting. Which Wei Ying is. (Great modern cultivation casefic AU that I was actually going to rec next week but someone posted it this week so I'll just put it here to keep track of)

Made some shortbread today using this recipe. Worked well, I'll definitely make it again.