Do you wash your self-made things separately to your RTW stuff? Hand wash them instead? Maybe it’s never even occurred to you to treat them differently?

I’m going to admit that I’m one of those people who is slightly-hippie-inclined when it comes to household chemicals. That’s probably putting it lightly, because I refuse point blank to go down the cleaning-product aisle at the supermarket. Instead, I have a cupboard full of bi-carb, vinegar, Neways and Enjo where most people have a delightful array of (for me, head-ache inducing and nasal-passage-burning) chemical products. I also have one of those hypocritical first-world double standards going on because I totally send my more-fancy self-made stuff off for dry cleaning.

I have a dry cleaner who knows I sew, so he asks for the fibre content of my fabrics instead of searching for the label. He’s lousy at getting things done within the agreed time frame, but he’s great at everything else. So when I took my wedding dress in to get sorted, he asked me to bring in a swatch of the lace so he could test if his solvents would, you know, dissolve my dress into a blob of bubbling mess. Turns out that lace survived neither of his solvents (!!), so he refused to clean my dress, and it has since been unceremoniously flopped over a coat hanger behind my bedroom door, awaiting the day I would attend to the patch where I somehow spilt gravy down my skirt during dinner. He even gave me a stack of acid-free paper to store it in. But it’s now been hanging up for over 8 months behind my bedroom door and I’ve been having a mini-guilt trip every time I see it, wondering if my continuous inactivity on the matter would render that gravy stain permanent, if it wasn’t already.

So what to do? I hadn’t pre washed the fabrics for my wedding dress, of course. But with some time off between Christmas and New Years, it was definitely time to tackle it.

I thought maybe I would draw a grid on some scraps of the taffeta and the organza, wash them and see if they shrunk. But in the end I just washed it and if it shrank, too bad.

The gravy came out straight away with not even a scrap of elbow grease. And the hem is now clean! All that took less than ten minutes…

I still want to get a box of some sort so I can wrap it up in the acid free paper my dry cleaner gave me.

All in all, a pretty happy ending! And, it was really, really nice to see my wedding dress again…. *sigh*

So after my dry cleaner turned me away, and seeing as this whole dry cleaner thing was a massive double standard and all anyway, I went in search of products that were toxin free but still effective. The answer came from within my bathroom/laundry cabinet – The Laundress. I bought some of their cashmere wash a few years ago – I’d previously tried washing my cashmere knits normally by hand (this was pre-chemical-freakout days) then getting them dry cleaned – both which left them worse for wear. So the cashmere shampoo was an absolute revelation because it keeps them in great condition.

Then two long-ago friends that I used to play violin with in an orchestra during our high school days started up an online shop – The Natural Supply Co. I was browsing soon after they launched, as you do, and discovered that The Laundress don’t only make cashmere shampoo, but a whole bunch of other stuff too, all toxin free. So I bought some silk wash, and have been happily pre-washing all my silks since. This is what I used to clean my wedding dress.

Including, some uber pretty silk which is going to be my next make – a wedding guest dress. Here’s hoping I actually get it done during my Christmas break!

If you’re precious or have got a certain habit when it comes to washing… I wanna hear about it ;)

ttrmongolia:

Mongolia, as any other country, also has some ruined, lost-in-time places. Here you have few photos of a former soviet military base in Choir (Gobi-Sumber province)

mubiblog:

Sergio Leone & Ennio Morricone in Primary School

pbzemario has added a photo to the pool:

Filhotes de Coruja-Buraqueira

If you spent any time on social media in 2014, chances are you encountered “clickbait.” What is clickbait? Clickbait are stories, lists, charts, and videos that bring us pleasure while improving our understanding of the world.

Not only is clickbait one of the fastest-growing forms of new media, it is crucial to the economic future of the internet — and the economy.

Think about it: The more clicks you click, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more money you get. The more money you get, the richer you are. It all adds up to a booming economy, and that’s why clickbait mattered in 2014, and why it’s here to stay.

Let’s celebrate the best of what the internet had to offer in 2014. Here are the TOP TEN CLICKBAITS OF 2014:

10. You won’t believe what happens next on this clickbait

9. You’ve gotta see this clickbait

8. Top ten reasons this clickbait is great (#3 had me in tears)

7. Clickbait only vegetarians will understand

6. (TIE) Tell your friends about this clickbait / Watch the first 30 seconds of this clickbait

5. The funniest clickbait I’ve seen all day

4. A father’s special clickbait to his kids will make you cry

3. This clickbait proves life is wonderful

2. New clickbait

1. This. Clickbait. Is. Amazing.

durruti23:

Moses Harris - Scheme of Colours, Color Wheel from Exposition (1782)

http://www.colorsystem.com/?page_id=743&lang=en

Russian marine biologist Alexander Semenov photographs the otherworldly beauty of jellyfish. He is now the leader of a scientist team, set out to travel around the world and explore the mysterious and fragile creature in its natural habitat –the deep sea.

“At 300 feet beneath the surface, the ocean is dark. There are no landmarks around, you are suspended,” writes Semenov. “Look hard enough and they appear: translucent creatures filled with colour. Some are as tiny as the nail on your finger, others are the size of a building. These are gelata – unstudied, mysterious and omnipresent. They are the ocean’s unseen backbone.“

Nearly 80% of all the jellyfish population is still unknown to us. The team of explorers are going to cover 30,000 miles and dive into three oceans to discover new jellyfish species and fill some of those gaps in marine biology.

More info: aquatilis.tv | shilovpope.livejournal | FB | Flickr (h/t: thisisnthappiness)

 

Related posts:

1. Mesmerizing Shadow Photography by Alexey Bednij
2. Mesmerizing Black And White Photos By French Photographer Benoit Courti
3. Aliens On Earth: Macro Photography by Donald Jusa

Mesmerizing Jellyfish Photography By Alexander Semenov originally appeared on DeMilked on December 29, 2014.

Earlier this year, we wrote about New York-based artist Maude White and her beautifully intricate paper cuttings. Now, she is back with even more of her delicate works that are done by hand, using only a craft knife.

“When I cut paper, I feel as if I am peeling back the outer, superficial layer of our vision to reveal the secret space beneath,” explains White in her artist’s statement. “With paper cutting there are so many opportunities to create negative space that tells its own story. Letting the observer become present in the piece allows him or her to look through it.”

More info: bravebirdpaperart.com | Etsy | Facebook (h/t: colossal)

Related posts:

1. Intricate Illustrations Cut Out Of Paper By Maude White
2. Intricate Laser Cut Paper Art by Eric Standley
3. Incredibly Intricate Paper Cut Tapestries by Tomoko Shioyasu

New Stunningly Intricate Paper Art By Maude White originally appeared on DeMilked on December 29, 2014.

So my (beloved!) ex-boyfriend's apartment caught fire this year, which was very sad, but Facebook made it worth it.

Hitchcock Blondes

I’m just gonna go ahead and start responding to any and all pleas for advice with that line. I’m gonna make that a thing.

With its special end-of-year message, Facebook wants to show you, over and over, what your year "looked like"; in Eric Meyer's case, the photo was of his daughter, who died this year: "For those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year." Read the rest

 
Profit margins among clothing retailers don’t vary that much – at the outside, between 5% and 25%. The vast majority are 10%-20%.

I mention this because I’m constantly surprised by consumers’ ideas of how brands are ‘ripping them off’. The fact is, the first 20% of the price you or I pay goes to government (in the UK – VAT), the next 10%-20% goes to the brand as profit, and the remainder is costs. 

There seems to be a strange idea among consumers that brands just charge ‘whatever they can get away with’. That luxury brands in particular charge exorbitant prices and reap huge profits as a result.

Luxury brands certainly have higher margins. One of the reasons the industry is so attractive is that margins of 18%-25% are both achievable and sustainable (the latter being by far the most important, as many new launches have discovered in recent years).   

But 20% isn’t that high. Last week, commenting on a comparison between some £200 boots and a £1000 pair on this site, a friend commented that ‘the latter is probably mostly profit anyway’. No one has 80% profit margins. In fact, given that production costs (including the manufacturer’s profit) are usually in the range of 25%-30%, the £1000 boots could cost £300 just to be made.

The sensible thing to focus on is costs – the bit between the profit and the production. Luxury brands may spend a large chunk of that on advertising and marketing; a chunk more on store design and branding; and another slice on catwalk shows. Paying for that is the only way in which you are being ‘ripped off’.

As we saw in our analysis of Savile Row costs, a lot more is spent on making a bespoke suit than in most clothing production (at least twice as much). But the difference between a tailor and a luxury brand is far more marked in these marketing and advertising costs. A tailor’s may be zero; a brand’s may be more than anything else.

So if you’re shopping in the sales over the next few days, be assured that once you have a 30% discount, the brand is making no money off your purchase (margin plus the reduction in VAT). It’s the catwalk models and full-page ads you’re paying for now.

- 

P.S.

- The brands are of course recovering costs, which is why they have the sales. If they don’t sell the stock (more of a pressure in a seasonal business), they make a bigger loss.

- The profit is more complicated if a brand is not selling through its own retail, but it’s hardly worth getting into that. 

 

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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This may very well be RadioShack's final holiday season. Jon, a former employee, looks back on a strange, craven, five thousand-fingered strip-mall monster from a forgotten age.

A computer lecturer has accused the 2013 movie about WikiLeaks "The Fifth Estate" of piracy after he discovered that his slideshows appear in the movie without his permission.

Michael Steil writes on his Page Table blog that when watching the movie, he recognised one of the phrases as something he would say. Sure enough, it was something he actually said himself during a 2007 talk in Berlin. 

The scene in question takes place when the character of Julian Assange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, gives a lecture in Berlin accompanied by other WikiLeaks employees. On a board behind Assange is a set of cards that he links with string.

It turns out that pretty much all of those cards were lifted without attribution from Steil's 2007 talk. 

Here's a still image of the scene showing Cumberbatch acting next to the cardboard display:

And here's the slideshow which Steil accuses the filmmakers of using for the cards:

You can see that the central card in the movie still reads "Linux is Inevitable," which is the second slide in Steil's slideshow. 

But it's not just a single slide that the filmmakers used. Steil claims that "most slides" shown on the board are "direct copies" of either his 2007 talk, or another lecture that he gave in 2008. 

Steil's name doesn't appear in "The Fifth Estate." Instead, the cards are credited to Denis Schnegg, the movie's supervising art director.

Join the conversation about this story »

Traditional pasta extruders, as mesmerizing as they are , can only handle so much complex geometry. Barilla recently held a competition for 3D-printed pasta shapes, and the winners include unusual shapes like a blooming rose and cratered moon.

Read more...

Prosecutors have a limited ability to use visuals while making their case in a trial, but apparently, some are starting to push it too far with the use of PowerPoint. In a report on the use of slideshows during trials, The Marshall Project points to a number of instances where prosecutors have been reprimanded or convictions have been overturned because of how PowerPoint was used. Basically, PowerPoint seems to be making it far too easy for prosecutors to make ridiculous and inappropriate slideshows — for instance, slathering the word "guilty" in big red letters over a defendant's head — thus improperly affecting the outcome of the trial.

Continue reading…

Tags: Holy Holy

This Cambridge Eatery is One of the ‘Top Blogged About Restaurants’ in the World

Astute observation by Brian Feldman:

The Shitpic aesthetic has arisen from two separate though equally influential factors, both of which necessitate screencapping instead of direct downloading. The first is that Instagram, which has no built-in reposting function, doesn’t let users save images directly. This means that the quickest way to save an image on a phone is to screencap it, technically creating a new image.

St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch told a St. Louis radio station on Friday that he knew some of the witnesses who testified before the Ferguson grand jury were lying.

Read More →

More than 1.5 million prisoners were held in state and federal prisons in 2013, and Global Tel-Link provided phone service to more of them than any other business. And while the prison telecom creates the backdrop for “Serial,” it’s at the center of a very different drama of its own. Prisoners and their families have long complained about the exorbitant rates for phone service. Now, after years of inaction, the federal government is getting serious about reform.

As much as we don’t want the fashion choices of the world’s incredibly influential and important scientists to necessarily overshadow their scientific achievements—seriously, despite what you might think, we promise we don’t—you’ve got to admit that wearing a dress decked out in sequined examples of the very neurons you helped to discover is ridiculously awesome. It’s like May-Britt Moser is a real-life Ms. Frizzle, except she uses her time and talent to help everyone, rather than send a bunch of ungrateful kids on impossible field trips.

I kid, of course: Ms. Frizzle is a saint. But she’s also fictional, so let’s ignore her for now in favor of a real life woman who kicked so much science ass that she won a Nobel for it. Founder of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), May-Britt Moser is a pioneer in researching the spatial reasoning powers of the human brain, particularly related to memory; it’s her work in identifying the grid cells that make up the brain’s positioning system that won her the 2014 prize for Physiology and Medicine, along with her husband Edward Moser and their colleague John O’Keefe.  

Also, they look kind of like this (the neurons, not the Mosers):

It’s these recently discovered neurons that inspired Matthew Hubble, a London designer who specializes in science-inspired clothing for women, to create an outfit for Moser to wear to the award ceremony last week in Oslo. Well, that and he thinks that scientists should be as celebrated as movie stars are, so why shouldn’t they have designers fawning all over them when they attend formal events? Can’t argue with that logic, if you ask me.

Anyway, by turning the above tessellation into a gridlike dress pattern adorned with silver sequins, he manage to take Moser’s amazing work on grid cells and give it the stunning visual interpretation that it deserves—and one that also fit the Nobel Prize’s dress code for women, which requires attendees to wear evening gown.

Here’s Moser modeling the end result:

“The neurons has to be an accurate representation,” Hubble noted on his website, where he outlined the dress-making process that he and his business partner Maria went through. “We used a mixture of sequins and beads for the cyton, and created the beautiful synapses similarly, but the myelin sheath on the axons we just couldn’t make look beautiful and so decided a splash of artistic license is allowed after all.” Just don’t tell your myelin sheaths that, I expect. No sense in making them feel bad.

“A good designer has a lot in common with a good researcher,” he also told the Scientific American blog. “Both hunt for excellence and perfection. And you have to really focus on the details, and you don’t really know what the final result will be before you have it.”

Hubble also has an entire collection of science-themed couture available on his site, including a set of scarves also adorned with the same grid cell pattern on Moser’s dress. They’re a bit expensive, so if you want one without breaking the bank, guess you’ll have to go into a field of important scientific study and win a prestigious award that will inspire someone to make you some clothing. Such a terrible burden, that.

To learn more about May-Bitt Moser’s amazing work, you can read her bio and check out some of  her many published scientific papers at the NTNU website.

(via Startorialist, image via Geir Mogen [photographer] and NTNU)

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