Metal Fabrication Quotes

One day when no one else was around, I went into the craft room at the back of the ground floor. I touched Gran's collection of fabrics, the shiny bright buttons, the coloured threads. My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...

To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.

Perhaps it’s only the vehicle that won’t start, but it feels like it’s my life that won’t start. Yes, this Yugo with the passenger-side seat metal coming through the torn seat fabric, scratching against the back of my thigh, this Cold War relic that won’t respond to Nick’s turn of the ignition key is like the fucking metaphor for my sorry-ass life: STALLED.

In the state of abandonment the only rule is the duty of the present moment. In this the soul is light as a feather, liquid as water, simple as a child, active as a ball in receiving and following all the inspirations of grace. Such souls have no more consistence and rigidity than molten metal. As this takes any form according to the mould into which it is poured, so these souls are pliant and easily receptive of any form that God chooses to give them. In a word, their disposition resembles the atmosphere, which is affected by every breeze; or water, which flows into any shaped vessel exactly filling every crevice. They are before God like a perfectly woven fabric with a clear surface; and neither think, nor seek to know what God will be pleased to trace thereon, because they have confidence in Him, they abandon themselves to Him, and, entirely absorbed by their duty, they think not of themselves, nor of what may be necessary for them, nor of how to obtain it.

In fabricating equipment—e.g., an ax—stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work's world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.

So I got to witness firsthand how those metal links got broken. The muscles in his upper arms pumped to the size of grapefruits, and the fabric of the T-shirt tightened around them almost to tearing… Then the metal gave way with a musical twang, and the chain snaked noisily from the grate, falling to the rain-softened earth with a clunk. “By all means,” John said, brushing his hands together in a self-satisfied way, “let’s call Mr. Smith.” I ducked my head, hiding my blushing cheeks by pretending to be busy putting my cell phone back in my bag. Encouraging his occasional lapses into less than civilized behavior seemed like a bad idea, so I didn’t let on how extremely attractive I’d found what he’d just done. “You know,” I remarked coolly, “I’m already your girlfriend. You don’t have to show off your superhuman strength for me.” John looked as if he didn’t for one minute believe my disinterest. He opened the grate for me with a gentlemanly bow. “Let’s go find your cousin,” he said. “I’d like to be home in time for supper. Where’s the coffin?” “It’s at my mom’s house,” I said. “What?” That deflated his self-satisfaction like a pin through a balloon. He stood stock-still outside the door to his crypt, the word HAYDEN carved in bold capital letters above his head. “What’s it doing there?” “Seth Rector and his girlfriend and their friends asked me if they could build it in my mom’s garage,” I said. “They said it was the last place anyone would look.” John shook his head slowly. “Rector,” he said, grinding out the word. “I should have known.” I threw him a wide-eyed glance. “You know Seth Rector?” “Not Seth,” he said, darkly.

Off they went down the highway, the taillights fading, the song dying, the black metal of the car melting into the fabric of night, and then there was only the whispery sound of good tires on wet cement and finally not even that. Just the blowing sound of the wind and the rain.

Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors, gas blackened ceilings, discolored fabrics, corroded metal, and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence, and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph.

they had not yet been destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest garments imposed on them by the French Catholic laws; but in the evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, made jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they polished to look like gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a foreign country, an African coast after dark, in which not even the coldest overseer would want to wander.

They all watched as Genya checked his pulse, his breathing. She shook her head. “Zoya,” said Sturmhond. His voice had the ring of command. Zoya sighed and pushed up her sleeves. “Unbutton his shirt.” “What are you doing?” Kaz asked as Genya undid Kuwei’s remaining buttons. His chest was narrow, his ribs visible, all of it spattered with the pig’s blood they’d encased in the wax bladder. “I’m either going to wake up his heart or cook him from the inside out,” said Zoya. “Stand back.” They did their best to obey in the cramped space. “What exactly does she mean by that?” Kaz asked Nina. “I’m not sure,” Nina admitted. Zoya had her hands out and her eyes closed. The air felt suddenly cool and moist. Inej inhaled deeply. “It smells like a storm.” Zoya opened her eyes and brought her hands together as if in prayer, rubbing her palms against each other briskly. Nina felt the pressure drop, tasted metal on her tongue. “I think … I think she’s summoning lightning.” “Is that safe?” asked Inej. “Not remotely,” said Sturmhond. “Has she at least done it before?” said Kaz. “For this purpose?” asked Sturmhond. “I’ve seen her do it twice. It worked splendidly. Once.” His voice was oddly familiar, and Nina had the sense they’d met before. “Ready?” Zoya asked. Genya shoved a thickly folded piece of fabric between Kuwei’s teeth and stepped back. With a shudder, Nina realized it was to keep him from biting his tongue. “I really hope she gets this right,” murmured Nina. “Not as much as Kuwei does,” said Kaz. “It’s tricky,” said Sturmhond. “Lightning doesn’t like a master. Zoya’s putting her own life at risk too.” “She didn’t strike me as the type,” Kaz said. “You’d be surprised,” Nina and Sturmhond replied in unison. Again, Nina had the eerie sensation that she knew him. She saw that Rotty had squeezed his eyes shut, unable to watch. Inej’s lips were moving in what Nina knew must be a prayer. A faint blue glow crackled between Zoya’s palms. She took a deep breath and slapped them down on Kuwei’s chest.

for as long as I have known it, the plant has been empty and silent, a vast labyrinth of corridors and abandoned rooms, some open to the sky, others with glass or metal roofing and, above each kiln—we call them kilns, but there's no real evidence to say what they were used for—a giant chimney rises up into the clouds, a wide brick chimney that, in the wet months, fills with great cascading falls of rain, just as the glass roofs and the sheets of corrugated metal on the storerooms will break into a music that sounds repetitious when you first hear it, but soon begins to reveal itself as an infinitely complex fabric of faint overtones and distant harmonics that is never quite the same from one moment to the next.

The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus.

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics.

Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down: hateyouhateyouhateyou. The soft growl of the fabrics as I sliced it apart, and that perfect last moment, when your thumb is getting sore and your shoulders hurt from hunching and cut, cut, cut... free, the fabric now swaying in two pieces in your hands, a curtain parted. And then what? That's how I felt now, like I'd been sawing away at something and come to the end and here I was by myself again, in my small house with no job, no family, and I was holding two ends of fabric and didn't know what to do next.

Misery,” he sighs, and his breath warms the skin of my belly through the fabric of the dress, and I’m still alone, still different, still mostly on my own, but maybe a little less than usual. His fingers close softly around my ankle, the metal of his wedding band hot against skin and bones, and for the first time in more than I can remember, I feel held. I’m here, I say, only in my head. With you.

smart call. To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak’s awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs’s role. He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron Wayne to design a case. “I assumed they had no money, so I did one that didn’t require any tooling and could be fabricated in a standard metal shop,” he said. His design called for a Plexiglas cover attached by metal straps and

It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind, …Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath. There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting.

The shape and size of the mark varied tremendously throughout history, but the message was always the same: ‘I, the Great King So-And-So, give you my personal word that this metal disc contains exactly 0.2 ounces of gold. If anyone dares counterfeit this coin, it means he is fabricating my own signature, which would be a blot on my reputation. I will punish such a crime with the utmost severity.’ That’s why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception. Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it’s a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death. As long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king, they trusted his coins. Total strangers could easily agree on the worth of a Roman denarius coin, because they trusted the power and integrity of the Roman emperor, whose name and picture adorned it.

She was halfway to deep sleep when the door creaked, a noise loud enough to rouse her, yet soft enough to doubt her having heard anything. She lay motionless, listening but hearing only the wind outside, the clock, the sounds of an ancient building. Normal sounds, but still her skin prickled. Pressure built in her head. Her pulse beat in her ears. The feeling of pressure thickened, stealing over her, a sense of envelopment, a shift in perception. Not her pulse, but footsteps. Someone pacing. Ten steps toward the fireplace. Ten back to the foot of her bed. The susurration of fabric against fabric. Metal sliding along metal, a low ringing sound, and mixed with that a murmuring. She peered into the darkness but saw nothing. No moving shadows, no figure approaching her bed, just the inert shapes of furniture and the resulting shadows. The resonance in her head grew, half convincing her she heard footsteps and the low, regular sound of breathing. The murmuring began again, a breath, then a whisper. My love. Steps paced near, and she swore she could feel the air thicken. Pain lanced along her temple. My heart. Unendurable pressure. She tried to move, but couldn't. Her limbs were frozen, trapped in her nightmare. More footsteps. A breath on her cheek. Cold air wafted through the room. My own. A face flashed before her eyes. She tried to breathe and couldn't get air into her lungs. She screwed her eyes shut, but the face didn't go away. The features blurred, looming, threatening, laughing. She knew that face, but the recollection refused to come. Terror like she'd known only once before in her life consumed her. Her lungs refused to expand. Or couldn't. She was going to die. She knew it. A scream bubbled in her throat.

You look beautiful, ma'am," Ernestine said, delighted with the results of her work. She had drawn Phoebe's hair up into a coil of neatly pinned rolls and curls, winding a velvet ribbon around the base. A few loose curls had been allowed to dangle down the back of her head, which felt a bit strange: she wasn't accustomed to leaving any loose pieces in her usual hairstyles. Ernestine had finished the arrangement by pinning a small, fresh pink rose on the right side of the coil. The new coiffure was very flattering, but the formal gown had turned out to be far less inconspicuous than Phoebe had expected. It was the pale beige of unbleached linen or natural wool, but the silk had been infused with exceptionally fine metallic threads of gold and silver, giving the fabric a pearly luster. A garland of peonies, roses, and delicate green silk leaves trimmed the deeply scooped neckline, while another flower garland caught up the gossamer-thin silk and tulle layers of the skirts at one side.

How to describe the woman? Silky hair, velvety lips. No, it won’t do, I’m using fabrics, constructing a doll. How about coppery hair, or golden locks of hair, or platinum blonde? No, now I’m doing some kind of industrial metallurgy with precious metals; in addition to everything else, the woman sounds like a commodity. And what’s “locks of hair” supposed to mean? Lock, some kind of bondage? No, strike it out. Ruby lips, pearly white teeth, brilliant smile. No, now I’m making the woman out of precious stones, and out of clichés. Almond-shaped eyes, hazel-colored eyes, pear-shaped waist, apple-red cheeks, lips like the bud of a moist flower, peachy fuzz on her upper lip. Now I’m making up a woman out of fruits, plants. She strode like a gazelle. Her snaky waist coiled and uncoiled. Now I’m demeaning the woman, making her into an animal. On the other hand, you can call a woman a goddess. Aphrodite, Venus, or at least a demi-god, angelic beauty. But these terms were all invariably overused, clichés. In addition, if you call a woman Aphrodite, it might seem like an oblique way of saying that the woman is overweight.

For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot. In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days. Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus. A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot. Without snot, most cold viruses could survive on folding money for no more than a few hours.

His words trailed off as Fitz poured the elixir into Sophie’s mouth, and she shook her head, wondering if the sour flavor could make the glands near her ears explode. “Here,” Keefe said, pulling a fresh box of Prattles from his cape pocket. “Wash it down with this.” “We’re good,” Fitz told him, giving Sophie another piece of the snickerdoodle candy. “Wow,” Ro said, elbowing Keefe. “Nothing you want to say about that, Hunkyhair?” “Nope!” But his smile faded when he noticed Sophie’s chain-mail-covered hand. “Don’t worry, Krakie’s safe with me,” Sophie promised. “So are all his friends.” She scooped up the tiny metal animals she’d piled in her lap. “Be glad you weren’t around when Elwin cut through the fabric.” “I’m pretty sure I’m going to have nightmares about the ooze,” Fitz added. Keefe reeled toward Elwin. “You did something oozy without me?” “And me?” Ro added. Elwin laughed. “Don’t worry, there’ll be lots more ooze tomorrow.” “There will?” Sophie whined as Ro stalked forward, poking Elwin in the chest. “You’d better wait until I’m here,” she told him. “Yeah, what time should we arrive to catch the Great Fitzphie Ooze Fest?” Keefe asked. “We’re not calling it that,” Sophie told him. “Oh, I think we are. And don’t worry, Foster,” Keefe added, patting her on the head. “I’ll still love you when you’re oozy. Maybe I should get you a tunic that says Oozemaster.” “Please don’t,” she begged.

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

Christ had made bishops and a Pope - but never a cardinal. Even the name held more than a hint of illusion - cardo, a hinge - as if they were the hinges on which he gates of Heaven were hung. Hinges they might be, but the hinges were useless metal, unless anchored firmly into the living fabric of the Church, whose stones were the poor, the humble, the ignorant, the sinning and the loving, the forgotten of the princes, but never the forgotten f God.

Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942… The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. “Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?” “What heart attack?” “Your heart is scarred all over.” I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2… We did up to twelve flights a night. (...) You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground. And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.

The fabric was smooth and silky and a dark, rich violet—a strangely familiar shade I couldn’t place. The front fell into a deep V, the top structured enough to define the curve of my breasts. It was held up by black metal chain straps, and that same glistening ebony metal encircled the bodice, adorning my ribcage in a manner reminiscent of armor. The back was low and open, the long chains crossing over my back. The skirt pooled lightly around my feet, which donned delicate silver sandals.

Cardan steps in front of me, pulling his cloak up. The metal needles glance off the fabric, falling to the floor. For a moment, we stare at each other, wide-eyed. He looks as surprised as I am that he protected me.

Sewing is an enjoyable hobby that allows you to be creative and make a variety of items for yourself and others. At Clothingus.com, we offer a range of resources to help you learn how to sew, including easy projects and information about different sewing tools and their uses. Here are some interesting facts about sewing and related materials that may inspire you to try this useful craft: Cotton fabric can last for up to 100 years with proper care. In fact, cotton fabric has been found in many archaeological sites, indicating its longevity. Women's buttons are typically sewn onto the left side of a garment due to historical reasons. In the past, buttons were expensive, and only wealthy women with domestic help could afford them. To make it easier for the help to button up the garments, they were placed on the left side. Zippers were invented in 1893 and were initially used only on shoes and boots to make them easier to put on. Over time, they gained popularity and were used on other garments as well. The term "calico" refers to a type of cotton print that originated in the city of Calcutta, India. These hand-woven printed fabrics were made in the late 18th century and were named after the city. Buttons on sleeves were introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte. He wanted to prevent his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves, so he ordered buttons to be sewn onto the ends of the sleeves. Sewing is believed to be one of the first skills that Homo sapiens learned. Archaeologists have found evidence of people sewing together fur, hide, skin, and bark for clothing dating back to 25,000 years ago. Early sewing needles were made of bone and ivory, with metal needles being developed later in human history. By the 20th century, more than 4000 different types of sewing machines had been invented. However, only those that made sewing simple, fun, and easy survived over time. If you're interested in learning more about sewing, visit Clothingus.com for lessons and projects that can help you build a solid foundation in this skill. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, we have something for you. Visit Clothingus.com now.

I see that you’re planning on having a metal part fabricated to hold that mechanism together, but if you switch to glass-filled plastic for the enclosure you might get the stiffness and tolerances you’re looking for without the need for a separate metal piece, and you’ll save a bundle.

Then something cold touches my skin. I jump and his hand lands back on my thigh, holding me down. "I wouldn't move if I were you," he warns. My head arches up and I see a flash of silver. A pocket knife. My heart starts pounding faster, harder, echoing in my ears. My breath shudders out as my chest expands. Dean's fingers hook into one side of my thong and he cuts it away before doing the same to the other and then he takes the bottom of my dress and glances up, those dark eyes of his meeting mine as he begins to slice upward. The back of the metal blade presses against my skin, making my heartbeat leap as he cuts a perfect path up past the swell of my breasts until the fabric is laying open, revealing everything that my bra doesn't cover.

He kissed with a practiced ease that threatened to completely unmake me, one broad palm finding the small of my back as he tugged me closer. I went willingly, unthinkingly, my arms wrapping around his neck when he tilted his head and traced the seam of my lips with the tip of his tongue. It wasn't supposed to be like this. My body was not supposed to react to his proximity, his touch, his kiss. This wasn't real. But for my body, this kiss was real as it got. My breath quickened as the seconds slipped past, as Reggie briefly dipped his tongue into my mouth before withdrawing again. His taste was peculiar, like metal and salt, like that time I'd accidentally bitten my tongue while eating too fast and blood pooled in my mouth. It did nothing to dispel the moment, or to distract me from the very real sensations coursing through me. I clutched at the ends of his shirt collar, thinking of only bringing him closer, not even realizing I was doing it until he returned the favor by bunching up the fabric at the front of my dress in his fist. "Amelia," he whispered against my lips. And then, it was over. Reggie pulled back by degrees, giving me a sheepish grin. I was warm and flushed all over. I had no doubt that my face was as red as the strawberries I'd eaten for dessert. When I looked into his eyes, the blacks of his pupils had nearly swallowed up the brilliant blue irises, but he seemed otherwise unaffected by what we'd just done.

Rava approached Steldor and removed a dagger from a sheath at her hip. With her left hand, she smoothed the collar of his white shirt, then yanked the fabric away from his chest, slicing through it in a single motion. Spying the silver wolf’s head talisman that he always wore, she seized it, ripping it free of his neck. “Whether for good luck or good fortune, you’ll have no need of this,” she sneered, dropping the pendant into a pouch that hung from her belt. “I’m sorry it’s not strong enough to cover your stench,” he icily replied, for the mixture inside the talisman was the source of his rich, masculine scent. Rava stared at Steldor, then stalked around him to tear the remnants of his shirt from his back, trying without success to strip him of his pride. She perused his muscular torso, and when she faced him once more, her eyes came to rest on the scar beneath his rib cage--the one that marked the life-threatening wound given to him by a Cokyrian blade--and placed the tip of the dagger she still held against it. “Only slightly marred.” She traced the knife’s point along the jagged white line, leaving a trail of red. “I’ll see what I can do to change that.” She tucked the weapon back into its sheath and gave a nod to the soldiers who had brought Steldor out of the Bastion. As they tied his wrists with rope, she went to the woman who had brought the box and lifted its lid. With a satisfied chuckle, she removed a whip more fearsome than any I had ever seen, cradling it like a mother would an infant, and the gathered throng fell silent. It was indeed rawhide, but uncoiled it reached four feet in length before meeting a silver ring, on the other end of which another two feet of metal-studded leather waited to strike. I looked to Narian and Cannan, and knew by both of their expressions that this was not what they had expected. Indeed, Rava purposefully made eye contact with Narian, her demeanor haughty, before returning her attention to her prey. “On your knees,” Rava growled, dangling the whip in front of Steldor. He obeyed, his eyes never leaving her face, continuing to radiate strength and insolence. “How can a flag be of consequence in a dead kingdom?” she taunted. “It is cloth. It is meaningless. And it can be burned.” She ticked a finger for one of the many soldiers around us to come forward, and I recognized Saadi. He extended our rolled Hytanican flag, and Rava took it, letting it unfurl until the end touched the ground. She held out her other hand and Saadi passed her a lit torch, which she touched to the banner of my homeland, letting flames consume it. The courtyard’s white stone walkway would now and forever be scorched. Steldor’s upper lip lifted away from his teeth, but aside from this snarl, he showed no reaction. “Tell me, does it seem worth it to you to suffer this punishment for a rag?” “Without question,” Steldor forcefully answered, and cheers rolled like thunder through the Hytanicans who had gathered to watch, sending chills down my spine.

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Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Language, the poets' medium, should not be privileged over the protean materials of other artists, who work in pigments, stone, metals and fibers. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft...every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning,which defines us as a species

When you go into the psych ward, you can’t have anything with you except colored pencils. You can’t have any electronics. If you have a drawstring on your pants, a belt, shoelaces, a hood, or extra-long fabric, your very clothes are ripped off your back. They search you with a metal detector like you’re a criminal, doing everything short of putting their hand up your butt. Before you go through those cold, automatic, barred doors, you know your life is not your own. This is especially true during the first week, while you stare at florescent lighting and wait impatiently for your meds to kick in. I wish I had remembered the psych ward prison cell a week ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be wearing this hospital gown that they gave me until I can get more compliant clothes.

golf, oddly, gave Updike a spiritual thrill; from the very beginning, he was acutely sensitive to what he called “the eerie religious latency” of the game; when he wrote about it, he invariably invoked the supernatural. “Intercession” set the pattern, ending with a curse and turning on a seeming miracle. On his second time around, long after his progress across the course has become “a jumbled rout,” Paul yearns for divine intervention: All he wanted was that his drive be perfect; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It dismayed him to realize that the angle of a metal surface striking a rubber sphere counted for more with God than the keenest human hope.

... the cylinder itself has only just begun its revolutions ... as it gathers speed the objects grouped around its fulcrum assume, collectively ... no ... as it gathers speed the whole intricate system of cords, weights, metal spikes and rods, brass plates engraved with labyrinthine patterns, bricks, scraps of fabric, paper, canvas, unmarked sheets ... the entire elaborate network of components begins to shudder into wild spasmodic motion, rattling almost farcically within the framework of the machine.

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But the innovation that would most transform the subcontinent—and its economic relationship to the rest of the world—did not involve separating the seeds from their fibers; every society that domesticated cotton for textile use ultimately developed some kind of mechanical gin. What made Indian cotton unique was not the threads themselves, but rather their color. Making cotton fiber receptive to vibrant dyes like madder, henna, or turmeric was less a matter of inventing mechanical contraptions as it was dreaming up chemistry experiments. The waxy cellulose of the cotton fiber naturally repels vegetable dyes. (Only the deep blue of indigo—which itself takes its name from the Indus Valley where it was first employed as a dye—affixes itself to cotton without additional catalysts.) The process of transforming cotton into a fabric that can be dyed with shades other than indigo is known as “animalizing” the fiber, presumably because so much of it involves excretions from ordinary farm animals. First, dyers would bleach the fiber with sour milk; then they attacked it with a range of protein-heavy substances: goat urine, camel dung, blood. Metallic salts were then combined with the dyes to create a mordant that permeated the core of the fiber. The result was a fabric that could both display brilliant patterns of color and retain that color after multiple washings.

I want to share with you the thought that chemistry provides the infrastructure of the modern world. There is hardly an item of everyday life that is not furnished by it or based on the materials it has created. Take away chemistry and its functional arm the chemical industry and you take away the metals and other materials of construction, the semiconductors of computation and communication, the fuels of heating, power generation, and transport, the fabrics of clothing and furnishings, and the artificial pigments of our blazingly colourful world. Take away its contributions to agriculture and you let people die, for the industry provides the fertilizers and pesticides that enable dwindling lands to support rising populations. Take away its pharmaceutical wing and you allow pain through the elimination of anaesthetics and deny people the prospect of recovery by the elimination of medicines. Imagine a world where there are no products of chemistry (including pure water): you are back before the Bronze Age, into the Stone Age: no metals, no fuels except wood, no fabrics except pelts, no medicines except herbs, no methods of computation except with your fingers, and very little food.

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Does my brother, Connor Holstrom, remain in the Bone Quarter, or has his soul passed through the Dead Gate?” The Astronomer whispered, “Luna above.” He fiddled with one of the faintly glowing rings atop his hand. “This question requires a … riskier method of contact than usual. One that borders on the illegal. It will cost you.” Bryce said, “How much?” Scam-artist bullshit. “Another hundred gold marks.” Bryce started, but Ithan said, “Done.” She turned to warn him not to spend one more coin of the considerable inheritance his parents had left him, but the Astronomer hobbled toward a metal cabinet beneath the dials and opened its small doors. He pulled out a bundle wrapped in canvas. Bryce stiffened at the moldy, rotten earth scent that crept from the bundle as he unfolded the fabric to reveal a handful of rust-colored salt. “What the fuck is that?” Ithan asked. “Bloodsalt,” Bryce breathed. Tharion looked to her in question, but she didn’t bother to explain more. Blood for life, blood for death—it was summoning salt infused with the blood from a laboring mother’s sex and blood from a dying male’s throat. The two great transitions of a soul in and out of this world. But to use it here … “You can’t mean to add that to their water,” Bryce said to the Astronomer. The old male hobbled back down the ramp. “Their tanks already contain white salts. The bloodsalt will merely pinpoint their search.

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Separated by distance and time, their letters are sometimes romantic, sometimes regretful, sometimes confessional, and sometimes scolding. Through their discrepancies and similarities, the past and present of the broken couple intertwine with the passing seasons like brocaded embroidery on woven fabric.

No, you’re not,” Petra replied with a moment of her former intensity. “You’re master of the blood and star metal, brother to the binding metal, and protector of the innocent. You’re woven into the fabric of the world on a level deeper than most can even conceive of and you haven’t even come into your strength yet.

Numerous members of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade had engaged in similar displays before. They’d stand on top of the building, wave a flag, shout slogans through megaphones, and scatter flyers at the attackers below. Every time, the courageous man or woman had been able to retreat safely from the hailstorm of bullets and earn glory for their valor. The new girl clearly thought she’d be just as lucky. She waved the battle banner as though brandishing her burning youth, trusting that the enemy would be burnt to ashes in the revolutionary flames, imagining that an ideal world would be born tomorrow from the ardor and zeal coursing through her blood.… She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest. Her fifteen-year-old body was so soft that the bullet hardly slowed down as it passed through it and whistled in the air behind her. The young Red Guard tumbled down along with her flag, her light form descending even more slowly than the piece of red fabric, like a little bird unwilling to leave the sky. The Red Union warriors shouted in joy. A few rushed to the foot of the building, tore away the battle banner of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade, and seized the slender, lifeless body. They raised their trophy overhead and flaunted it for a while before tossing it toward the top of the metal gate of the compound. Most of the gate’s metal bars, capped with sharp tips, had been pulled down at the beginning of the factional civil wars to be used as spears, but two still remained. As their sharp tips caught the girl, life seemed to return momentarily to her body. The Red Guards backed up some distance and began to use the impaled body for target practice. For her, the dense storm of bullets was now no different from a gentle rain, as she could no longer feel anything. From time to time, her vinelike arms jerked across her body softly, as though she were flicking off drops of rain.

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leaned over the railing, gripping the metal, and heard a muffled cry and the flapping of fabric retreating downward at terminal velocity. He

It was black (of course), but it was different shades of black. The fabric was charcoal black and the trim was metallic black and the lining was obsidian black and the buttons were tiny silver raven skulls with even tinier twinkling black eyes. The sleeves were swooping and edged with black lace, but because Pins knew how Witches were, the lace could be tied back out of the way and there were very practical tight black sleeves underneath.

Es una tecnología de soldadura creada en la NASA y ahora conocida en inglés como EBF3 (Electron Beam Free Form Fabrication). Fue desarrollada para poder imprimir en 3D con metales y aleaciones como titanio, tungsteno, aceros, níquel y otros.