- City of Glompton
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e: somehow this ate the start of my post where I said nice things about the other entries too. they were really great!
Hello and thank you for your time.
I play guitar like millions of other young white men across this great globe of ours.
Occasionally, my friends I made over xbox live when I was 14 will share something funny with me and I'll make a song out of it and record it on my laptop microphone for us to laugh at.
The first one I made was based on a craigslist post on the Miami, FL site. It provided the lyrics. It's called Swamp Buggy Baby Here it is:
Here's another one I made for my friend Lee when he wanted me to cover a christmas song but make it about lovecraft.
I love acoustic guitar
Hello there my name's HotSoapyBeard nice to meet you.
So my talent isn't the most exciting or wholesome but I think it's pretty chill so here goes.
I drive a tour boat for work, here's a few pics for context
And here's a little vid of a very quiet trip
https://youtu.be/FWgmps4sULQ
Thanks for watching and good luck everybody
what can I say but wow, that is soothing
oh hi so. i'm bad at participation and just noticed this so participation is definitely not my talent hahah!
my talent is DOIN STUFF TO MAKE YOUR CLOTHES. literally. i make you clothes, what up my dudes. i know that's weird so i'll illustrate with some pictures that i found on the internet (all are mine, except the sheep chart is not obv.) LET'S GO.
WHOA poo poo IT'S SOME SHEEP HOLY gently caress LOOK AT THEM
this is a fleece off of a sheep! in fact it's a fleece off of a bersugget colored shetland/jacob cross ewe lamb named abby. abby was a dirty sheep and is being sorted right now. she lives in a nice place and i got to go shear her myself, with manual scissor style shears. it takes me about 4 minutes to shear a sheep with electric shears and 5 to ten depending on the size and how hard they kick me with manual shears. it's completely painless to the sheep (and it helps keep them from getting sick!)
here is a nice shaela shetland fleece, turned upside down for inspection and sorting. after the shearing, i have to skirt (remove the poop/really dirty bits), sort (by lock size/color/quality), wash (special wool wash, no agitation, it's an all day process for one fleece), dry (again, no agitation--drying racks outside in the sun) and re-sort all of the locks. you have to be super careful not to felt the wool via agitation, heat or the wrong kind of detergent. sheep have lanolin and are super gross so there's often two to three washes and sometimes four rinses to get the wool clean enough to process. i saved you from seeing sheep poop, y'all.
these are four pitch english combs. four pitches means they have four rows of tines and the tines vary from 6" to 9" long. they weigh about 10 pounds each and have a mounting pad. after all that washing and sorting--we're now on day 3 or 4 depending on drying times, btw--i "lash on" the locks of wool to the comb, butt (cut end, closer to skin) to tip on the comb. you don't want to overfill the comb--fiber is light--so for an average 4 pound fleece, you may fill that comb 600 times. it takes four to six passes to get quality combed wool "top" for true worsted spun yarn. oh yes. this isn't the entire process, this is just for a worsted spun yarn in a fingering weight. i won't go into carding and the processes of spinning true woolen yarns.
and by the magic of television--i combed all of this in about 8 hours. that's a large flat rate box of tiny bundles of fiber, and it took 8 hours of solid combing one day to get it. phew. it's a hell of a workout for upper body strength (and hypervigilance--don't drop those combs on your feet). now: this can go a couple of other ways, it can be DYED or it can be SPUN then DYED. i actually usually dye in the wool (before combing) so this isn't a big deal to me!!!
then after that it's time to oil up a spinning wheel. oh gently caress, here we go.
this is my favorite wheel. she's an ashford elizabeth 30" anniversary edition (one of the nicer newer ones too!!!!) dt, and her name is lizzie borden. she hates everyone but me. she'll throw her flywheel off in the floor if anyone else spins on her. 
  
and that's all yarn i've made in the last few years. i have more, too. oh wait there's more. we're just now on what, a week off the sheep? i have yarn and thread. what do you have a week after you peel a sheep?
well, i generally PULL A WARP for my loom. then i have to get the warp on the loom. warp threads are those cool vertical threads in a piece of woven fabric; weft are the cross threads. here. i'll make this make more sense with a picture.
so this is a louet jane 40cm wide loom with a scarf warp on it from one of my students. it's my table loom; i use it for travel/teaching/class stuff because they're super easy to teach on but also easy to warp, so i have my warp tied onto the back beam there, with it sorted into the raddle to wind on and make a scarf. this is probably day 9 because yarn making breaks can be taken.
and now here's me weaving on my louet spring 90 cm loom at the yarn store (rip my lys, you were my favorite job). that's a scarf in yarn i made. for real. i am pretty pleased with that scarf now that it's fulled out and finished; unfortunately i don't have a picture because it got stolen by mike and taken to work as a chill-chaser because his office is -5C on a good day.
so yep. that's my talent. i can make your clothes. that's all i got.
omg  make me clothes ok?
Hi BYOB! I am not a talented poster, which pains me, but luckily I have this other thing I do that I'm p okay at and which I will humbly share with you, since we're having a pageant and all.
So, may talent is that I like to make art out of paper cut-outs. Like, really elaborate cut-paper things, with layers and stuff. Sometimes I can't find the right colour of paper, so I have to paint my own which is fine, but it takes forever to dry and I am impatient!! I had lots of pictures and I didn't want y'all to be bored, so I made some collages instead:
Here is a collage of my fave thing I've made so far, which is an octopus in the shape of a human heart (I sent it to my best friend because I love her). I thought you might like to see the difference between the drawing and the finished product, and also I wanted to show some of the layers, and a close up of the octopus skin texture, which I did with watercolour paint and I was pretty proud of myself for! (In case anyone is wondering, the final image is flipped because I usually trace the layers, and I wanted the finished image to be mirrored so that it was anatomically correct [insofar as that is possible when you are a heart made from an octopus])
Here's some other small things I made for fun. The jellyfish is the first paper art I ever made! It has some glue ~issues~ because I hadn't figured out that part yet when I made it. The portrait is Freddie Lounds from Hannibal, because I really liked her hair and wanted to see how it would look, and the bear is a bear.
Finally, here's a card I made for one of my other friends for Galentine's Day, and also a drawing of a work-in-progress that I've been meaning to finish for like a year but I've been busy with funeral school and also I don't want to start it because all those flowers are gonna be real difficult and I'm lazy.
Thanks for looking I hope you liked my stuff!
Edit: IDK If was supposed to sign up beforehand somehow?? I just got real excited to post, so here we are, sorry if I'm doing things wrong cda!!
fanky malloons you are very talented!
Hi there BYOB 
I know you're all expecting me to set myself on fire again. I'm sorry to disappoint, but well I'm out of isopropanol and anyway duckie told me not to do it again EVEN THOUGH I'm pretty good at it, so I decided instead to take this opportunity to play around with something musical that I've wanted to for a while.
I like to play music, and I really really like to sing. I've always wanted to do more harmonizing with my voice, because when I do get to I friggin love it.
I also bought a field recorder a while ago that musicians like to use for recording jams, because it's cheap and has a decent mic. So I decided I'd record over myself multiple times and have some fun recording a song.
Man this was a lot of fun. Since it's an external recording device, I could listen to the mix so far on headphones while playing/singing into the mic, but the tracks were not inherently synced. So syncing the tracks was a little challenging.
Also I'm getting over a cold AND I'm a little rusty at guitar so it might not be the best but hey this is my first try and I really had fun so I hope you enjoy it!!
So without further adieu, here is me having a lot of fun covering the song Wildewoman by Lucius, a band I really like a lot.
I've really liked the other entries so far! I'm glad everyone is having fun with this and al lthe contestants are really great. I don't mind if you think mine's the best or not because there are lots of great choices, I just hope you enjoy it and have fun okay thanks everyone! 
e: pretend the track is 9 seconds shorter 
alnilam this is beautiful, it's stuck in my head now (in a good way). let's do a duet
very cool!
for my talent, it's 3D. 3d stands for "three dimensions", but what good is it? well you can do all kinds of stuff with 3d, but for byob, i use it to make avatars. i even noticed that one poster in this very thread didn't have an avatar so as a demonstration of my talent and my kindness i made hockey jockey an avatar
 
excellent and I would expect nothing less from you
Many of you are familiar with Madison, the Official BYOB Dog:
My wife and I welcomed Madison (Maddie for short) into our home in February 2014. I still remember posting my first BYOB thread about our struggles to get this nervous newcomer to make her first pee in front of our building, and the encouragement I received from Haam and Dotcom Jillionaire and alnilam and others. My wife and I fell instantly and deeply in love with this fuzzy little tailwagger who had come to us from a neglected home.
One of the things I didn't realize until I got a dog is that occasionally--especially when it's past midnight and the dog is sleeping on the floor next to your feet--you'll look at her and be struck by the realization that you've just acquired a best friend whom you're going to see die (and maybe have to put down yourself). We got Maddie when she was 6 years old, and she's a very healthy dog, but even so...that day is coming, and I can't stop my brain from thinking about it sometimes.
It was around this time that Jimmy Fallon left Late Night for the Tonight Show. I've never really been a Fallon watcher but I remember seeing online his last bittersweet sketch. He had the Muppets on to help him sing "The Weight" by The Band. Something about the mixture of happiness and sadness and wistfulness and other indescribable emotions really resonated with me. I also realized that the chorous--"take a load off, Fanny", etc.--had the potential to rhyme with Maddie, about whose far off but inevitable passing I knew my wife and I would also feel a mix of bittersweet emotions.
That being the case, I took it upon myself to rewrite the lyrics of "The Weight" and make them about Maddie. I also reached out to a couple local musicians I know and commissioned them to provide a backing track for the song. It's my first and only time recording a piece of solo music and it was emotional given the subject matter.
I wrapped production in fall 2014, about two months before our wedding. To this day I still haven't shared it with my wife. The intention was always to have her listen for the first time after Maddie eventually leaves us, but I don't know when or even if that will happen. It could be too painful. It may come a week or a month or a year after, or never at all. It may just be a gift for Maddie and me, something that she and I alone share on those late nights when my wife has gone to sleep, the dog is snoozing at my feet, and I hum a verse or two of the song I wrote for my most special friend in all the world.
All of which is to say that this is overly care and not worth your attention but it's one of the most personally meaningful things I've done so if you want to listen, I will share it. It doesn't have a name since I don't have any other songs I need to distinguish it from. From me and the Official BYOB Dog, thanks for listening.
Love you little dogger 
you sir are a master
phew, out of kitty jail in time to make an entry!
hello byob and thank you for this opportunity to be elected god-emperor of this forum! for my talent I am going to argue that "faking craftiness" is a thing. I am not actually particularly crafty, but with time and a certain amount of research and stubbornness I can sometimes make things that vaguely resemble what I set out to create.
example #1 is some ultralight hiking gear I sewed a few years back. I got materials and patterns from online shops and made a tent (really a sort of tarp-tent with a bug net enclosure and solid floor), a sleep quilt, and a backpack. this involved marking and cutting bolts of material and a surprisingly large amount of sewing, something I'd basically never done outside of a few miserable failures in middle school home ec class.
tarp tent (with just a tiny corner of the quilt visible on the floor):
backpack:
a few things made this harder and therefore a bit more of an achievement (to me). one is that a lot of the material I was sewing was silnylon, which is extremely slippery and thus not the easiest thing to sew, especially with small seam allowances. the other is that the sewing machine I was using was pretty basic/cheap, and thus hardly a precision instrument. this took many weeks. I got to know the seam ripper quite well.
the good news (for me) is that the stuff actually works. the tent tents and the quilt quilts, I have spent a few nights in them in the wilderness, and the backpack has been used on many hikes. All this stuff is ridiculously light and the tent and quilt pack down nice and small.
my other example of faux-crafting is a halloween mask I made a while ago. I got it into my head that I wanted to dress up as the Horned King from the Lloyd Alexander Prydain books (anyone remember those? anyone?), who was painted like this on the cover of the edition I had as a wee lad:
to execute this concept, I bought a book called "how to make masks" by Jonni Good (which I recommend to anyone interested in such things) which discusses a versatile papier-mache technique using "shop towels" (basically very strong paper towels). I made a model of my face and head to build the mask on. I built up the features using modeling clay (and aluminum foil for the horns), then built the papier-mache mask by layering shop towels and plaster/glue over top of the clay. this took a good while, and painting the thing in a way that sort of satisfied me took a lot of coats and a bunch of trial and error.
it went over pretty well on halloween, although I hadn't reckoned on what a huge pita those horns would be. walking under trees and through doorways suddenly became a huge logistical challenge.
in summation, I believe I have effectively demonstrated the talents I set out to illustrate: using bullshit justifications to tie together unrelated things, and waiting until the last minute to do stuff.
good luck to all the other contestants, I look forward to your concession speeches!
that is a very handy talent and I am impressed!
thank you PSP for the beautiful spring sig
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May 3, 2017 03:00
