Every time we hear from you all, whether that’s in the comments of the A+ Advice box, on one of the A+ Pop-Up Discord Servers, via the reader survey — or anywhere else — you all blow us away with your rich and varied lives! You all are just so cool! The impetus behind this gallery was for us to find a way for everyone to share the projects that warm their hearts and make them feel alive. On top of that, we also wanted to include any social media accounts or websites related to you or your projects so that everyone can follow and connect with each other and geek out over your passions! So, here’s to you and your awesomeness and the things you love to do this Valentine’s day. Thank you for sharing and celebrating part of your lives with us!
P.S. I did my best to double check that all info is correct, but if I made a mistake copying info over from the form, I apologize! Please just let me know in the comments or email me at nicole [at] autostraddle [dot] com and I’ll fix it!
Little Bronx Rooftop
Mae and Nicky | She/her & she/her | The Bronx, NY
Instagram: @littlebronxrooftop
Our garden is nearly six years in the making and really accelerated once we moved in together three years ago. Our scrap of concrete has over 60 types of plants, ranging from fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, and flowers galore! Every year we just keep adding whatever catches our eyes from our favorite seed stores and it’s all been a grand experiment! Neither of us had much experience with gardening but it has become such a beautiful place to engage with nature and grow our own food. The best part is being able to share it with others- giving away chili peppers, figs, cut flowers and seedlings to our friends and community makes us feel so connected in this concrete jungle.
“Talking” Animals
Morgan | Virginia
Instagram: @pawsitivebehaviors
I have been working on teaching Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) to my blind cat Jasper and my border collie Adora since Fall 2020! It’s been so fun watching them learn and they’ve taught me so much in the process too. We use buttons that I’ve added textures to for my blind cat and she is up to 25 words and my border collie has 34 on her board as well.
Deep Feels Embroidery
Sasha | she/hers | Oakland
I never do anything halfway, so when I took up embroidery at the beginning of the pandemic I got obsessed. I’m a psychologist so I got kinda therapist touchy-feels with it and created projects for friends and family that embody them. I’ve run out of people I like enough to make stuff for so now I’m just making things that represent parts of me. Recently been making Wheel of Time fandom embroidery but my current big work in progress is a brain.
History of Rock
Kimberly | she/her | Alberta, Canada
The History of Rock is a non-exhaustive, chronological sample of the most famous/influential/exemplary/impactful songs contributing to the history of rock music. It highlights the genre’s origins in 1940s “race records” and Black-led R&B music, and the subsequent appropriation of the genre by white musicians and Black exclusion from the rock mainstream after the 1960s. Samples from most major rock movements and subgenres are present, and the playlist is an ongoing work.
Park Skating
Allison | she/her | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
In non-pandemic times, I play roller derby on an All-Star travel team. It takes up the majority of my non-work time and is my major source of exercise. But you can’t play a full contact indoor sport in a pandemic, so for the last two years I’ve had to find something else to do. Enter – park skating. It’s still roller skating, but it’s outdoors, and is an individual activity, rather than a team sport. But just skating isn’t enough for me, I need adrenaline and I need a challenge.
So now I go to the skate park and practice tricks – slides and spins and stalls. I’m not quite up to flips and aerials yet, but I have a whole list of tricks I’m working my way through. It’s allowed me to still put on my skates and meet up with my friends and get outside and off the couch. Most importantly, it gives me a sense of accomplishment. That dopamine hit I absolutely crave comes whenever I land a new trick. My therapist thinks that’s a problem, and he’s probably right, but in a pandemic when everything is terrible, I like feeling good about my accomplishments, if only at the skate park. It’s also been a bit of a creative outlet. You can see in that second pic that I painted my slide rail with my derby name and the logos of the two teams I play for!
Great Lakes Ecology / Dune Restoration
cleo | she/her | Chicago, IL
In 2009, I showed up for a work day at a little scraggly fenced off bit of beach 2 blocks from my home, on the far northside of Chicago. It was a newly designated natural area and the volunteer steward put me to work pulling out invasive species. She told me the names of the flowers in bloom and walked me through the area, telling me about the rare in Illinois plant she’d found, that had prompted the park district to create the natural area. I fell in love. I kept coming back and getting more involved. To the point that now I’m the vice president of my local park advisory council, working to bring a nature center to our neighborhood. My first love is still the dunes. I’m still woefully bad at identifying dune grasses but I’m pretty good at identifying the flowers. I’ve weeded out invasive cheat grass and planted native dune plants. I’ve planned free nature events – bird walks and plant walks. I’ve sat through boring meetings. I don’t think I can adequately explain how much I love this stretch of land. I’ve never been this intimate with the landscape before. Every day is different, every year is different. I bring everyone who visits me to see “my dunes” and tell them that if we’re lucky we’ll find the prickly pear cactus that’s native to the dunes. And I’ll tell them why the dunes on the Chicago side of Lake Michigan are mostly flat, compared to the tall dunes in Indiana and Michigan (it’s the lake currents). The first photo is of me standing next to marram grass that I helped plant two or three years previously. We planted it along the sidewalk to prevent sand erosion. The second photo was taken on a very windy day. You can see dune grasses and two cottonwood trees and then the city beach beyond it.
Crazy Quilt
cleo | she/her | Chicago, IL
I am a textiles queer and I’m making a crazy quilt! I started it 17 years ago. For many years it was my low-key side project that I’d pick up when I needed a break from other projects. Over the holidays I realized that I want to actually finish it so my spouse and I can use and enjoy it. My current goal is to finish in 3 years – 20 years to make a quilt sounds like a good goal.
A crazy quilt is a specific style of quilting that became popular in Victorian England and was inspired by Japanese textiles. Scraps of luxury fabrics like silk and velvet are appliqued onto squares of plain fabric and embroidered and embellished. Those squares are sewn together to make the top of a quilt. The top of the quilt is then layered over batting or stuffing and a bottom layer of plain fabric – the layers are tied together with string or thread. It’s a style that has a clear structure but allows for a lot of variety and improvisation, which fits my general approach to creativity well (much better than a lot of traditional crafts like patchwork quilting or knitting).
Crazy quilting combines so many of my loves. I grew up in a home filled with beautiful handmade things made by relatives, including many textiles. We had a framed crazy quilt square made by my great-grandmother and I just loved looking at it. When I was 6, my mom finished a patchwork quilt that she’d started piecing some 20 years earlier and gave it to me. My mom also taught me to sew when I was young. I never cared much for machine sewing or making clothes but I loved hand sewing and embroidery. I fell in love with fine fabrics when I worked at a high end fabric store in my 20s. That was also where I discovered the joy of being part of a creative community and that inspired me to go back to school for art and design.
I started this project specifically because I wanted a portable hand sewing project that I could work on in front of the TV or while traveling. At the time, I was doing a lot of digital design and work on the computer and I missed handwork. I also wanted to use my beautiful fabrics from my impressive stash. My plan worked beautifully. I’ve worked on my beautiful squares at family reunions, in the car and in airports and on airplanes and in front of so many hours of TV shows. I’ve worked on them at stitch and bitch gatherings and virtual crafting sessions. And I don’t think I’ve purchased any fabric for it, except for the white cotton I’ve used as the base. All of it has come from my stash.
In the photos, you can see me standing in front of 4 finished squares pinned up on a bulletin board and holding a 5th square that’s in progress. Each square is 17″ x 17″ and they’ll be 15″ square when sewed together to make the quilt top. Each quilt square is a different color scheme which is kind of unusual. I haven’t seen any other crazy quilts that use my approach to color. Looking at these squares, I can see how my style and interests have changed. I started making traditional looking squares with overlapping rectangles and triangles and later got interested in experimenting with more deliberate patterns – abstract rays of light for the yellow square, hill shapes in the green, and kind of a tunnel effect with the grays. My embroidery changes from square to square, determined by the square colors and design and also my mood.
The other photo shows two squares in progress. I always start by auditioning my fabrics – something I learned from my mom. I lay out my fabrics (and I may coo over how pretty they are) and arrange them until I have a sense of how they should go together. Then I bravely cut my fabric down and fold under the edges and baste it onto the base fabric (this is called applique). Once everything is basted down (sewn with a loose stitch that’s intended to be removed later), the fun part begins and I start embroidering and embellishing it. The embroidery is what actually holds the two layers together – so it’s pretty and functional, which I like. I usually do the piecing and basting in my studio and start traveling with it once the square is basted.
Writing a Queer, Japan-Based D&D Setting for Self-Publication
Chris | she/they | Hawaii
Discord: larg_soel#4870
The pandemic shutdown was a great time to play tabletop RPGs with friends, so a group of us started playing D&D 5e. My character was Mu, an intersex, nonbinary halfling monk (and former feral child) hailing from a distant country in the East. Of course it was only a matter of time before the other party members started asking Mu about the place they were from.
Now Dungeons & Dragons had an official setting based on Japan back in the 1980s called (sigh) Oriental Adventures. It was written entirely by white dudes and featured some super cringey conlangs, creepy misogynistic portrayals of women and locations named literally after Chinese restaurants. Yeah, no, I wasn’t going to use that, so I started making stuff up. I have Japanese ancestry and grew up in a bilingual, very Japanese community, so the ideas came pretty easily. My friends asked me if I was getting this from a book, and I when I told them I wasn’t, they kept telling me I needed to write this down. I had a lot of free time so I started doing that.
In 2020, an indie publisher released a nonofficial D&D setting based on the Philippines, written by a group of Filipino creators. I was inspired by it and added more to my little document, which soon grew to over 100 pages. I shared it with friends for additional feedback, and they shared it with other D&D players that they knew. I’ve looked into self-publishing and illustration options (including open-source ukiyo-e and doing my own drawings) and hope to get this setting out there in the next couple of years or so. I’m still looking for reviewers and later, playtesters (I love my friends but obviously they are a bit biased, haha). This project is a labor of love, made more for myself than money or exposure – I love D&D and fantasy, and I can imagine a world that’s not Eurocentric or straight, and I want others to play around in this world too. If you’re interested in helping, please contact me!
Clay Commune
Michelle lim | she/her | Singapore
I run a ceramics studio in Singapore, where we produce small batch handmade ceramics for top restaurants and homes. But my passion project that I call ‘Clay Commune’ is curating a space where students new and old can enter, feel safe, share, explore and create with this material we bond with, clay. It is still growing, and I am always findings ways to make the ‘space’ more condusive. ‘Space’ because it is not just physical space but also emotional and creative. Prior to Covid, I managed to squeeze an exhibition, poetry readings, gigs and even a folksy dinner party once. Its harder now to do those things now, but I am still trying. I realise my passion project isn’t exactly tangible.. so im not sure if this passes the topic!
The L Word pottery
Sarah | she/her | Las Vegas, NV
Over the fall I began pottery painting nearly every week and found a real niche in painting The L Word: Generation Q inspired merch. I ended up painting several Gini mugs for friends and other fans who found me on twitter. The pottery painting store I go to knows me as the person who paints all TLW things and I’m okay with that.
Collage Art
Julie | she/her | Oakland, CA
Contemporary collage art with a modernist-vintage vibe & lots of sapphic themes. Colors & shapes & symbolic ladies! All analog/paper–made mostly from 20th century magazines, books, wallpapers, ephemera, dried flowers & plants, etc.
Embroidery
Sam | he/they
I started doing embroidery in 2020, I think, and it’s become one of my favourite new hobbies. Some of the projects take a long time to complete, but the predictability of the patterns is a blessing in an uncertain world. Also, they make for great gifts.
Stress Baking as Emotional Support
Carmen | she/her | Detroit, MI
I first got into baking when I was in grad school, as a way to take my mind away from a very stressful (and honestly, depressing!) work situation. The thing that I’ve come to love about baking is that you don’ have to think while you do it. You just have to follow the very specific, often a little finicky, steps. But it does require that you stay in the moment and focus on the task in from of you!! That kind of mindful distraction is so useful for me, so calming for my always present anxiety. I suppose that’s why I’ve stuck with it all these later. I’m not a Master Baker, but I’m above average and the joy it brings me is unmatched.
Fountain Pen Collecting
Heather | she/her | NYC
When I was in the third grade I came into school one day to find my desk flipped over, my paper and pencils and scissors and glue strewn all over the floor, half the kids in my class standing around waiting for me to show up. I didn’t ask who did it; I was a favorite target. I didn’t cry; it made picking on me even easier. I turned my desk upright and collected my things and tucked them underneath my chair. At recess my teacher asked me to stay behind, and as soon as everyone was out on the playground, she told me she was the one who’d knocked over my desk and scattered my few possessions everywhere. “I’m tired of looking at your mess,” she said. “I’m tired of looking at your sloppy handwriting.”
By the time I realized I had ADHD and started trying to manage it, I was an adult. I’d given up on my penmanship decades before that, and even though I was able to learn how my ADHD manifests itself and implement strategies to combat it effectively in every area of my life, I never tried to get any better at handwriting. I didn’t even remember how to do joined-up letters. I never forgot that upside-down desk, though, or that teacher’s promise to keep knocking it over if I couldn’t tidy myself up.
A couple of years ago, I received a fountain pen as a gift. It’s beautiful and elegant and queenly and just a shade darker than Lady Vols orange. I started using it in my journal. And I started using it in my planner. And then, I thought, well, but what if that teacher was wrong about more than just the fact that I was disheveled on purpose. So I started practicing writing in cursive, every night, copying down the quotes I underlined in the book I was reading the night before. Slowly, methodically, like a child. I had to look up some letters — always the uppercase K.
I fell in love with fountain pens. I love the way the nibs feel against a nice piece of paper, the way the ink shades in different letters in different ways, the look of my very childlike cursive writing, the way it feels to go back and revisit all my thoughts I took time to write out so methodically, with such care and precision. I love cleaning out my pens on Fridays, and trying out new inks. I have about a dozen fountain pens now, mostly entry-level starter pens but and very nice gold nib pens too. I watch pen reviews on YouTube, follow pen-fluencers on Instagram, and even browse fountain pen Reddit every day.
I also collect stickers, but that’s always been true!
Samson the Van
Karalyn | they/them | Michigan
I got a large covid unemployment settlement in June, and then my three year marriage-focused triad relationship ended, and I lost my dog in that, so my life felt completely pulled out from underneath me. So partially to follow a dream, partially to have something to do, and partially to figure out what my solo life can be, I bought a 2003 Dodge Ram cargo van in July and started building it out to travel in. It is not instagram level #vanlife, but it is my first project that is so physical and at this scale. It’s had an unbelievable learning curve and felt really challenging at times–shoutout to teaching myself how electricity and batteries work! But Samson the van has reminded me that I am so much more resilient than I give myself credit for. And that I can do things just because I want to and it feels good to.
I always say that I don’t want my van to be the most interesting thing about me, and it’s not, but I also don’t see very many solo trans people doing vanlife and there’s a lot of reasons for that and I do want to be a part of a more public discourse about it. I have a whole bucket system so that I never, ever have to set foot in a public bathroom ever again, so at the very least feel free to DM me about that.
Playwriting
Anya Richkind | she/her | Brooklyn
I love the process of writing plays. It usually starts with an idea I can’t get out of my head — something I keep turning over and over in my mind, whether I really want to or not. I guess, really, my plays grow from obsessions that I need to process through the action of writing.
This idea for my last play originated during my younger brother’s college graduation weekend. My girlfriend, my parents, my brother’s girlfriend, and her mom were all in New Haven going through these events that would become Memories Of Big Moments. At night, my girlfriend and I squirreled away into our small room in the AirBnB, and watched the reality TV show Hoarders.
What does it mean to hoard memories? I found myself wondering one night before falling asleep. How does a memory hoarder sound? What do they look like? What do they do all day? How do they feel about the memories they hoard?
A few weeks later, I remembered this moment in an essay my idol/mentor Deb Margolin wrote and shared with me recently. (I’ve been putting together this book over the last year, where I ask playwrights I love and admire to write a scene between them and a dead person.) In her piece, Deb pointed out that experiences don’t really go away; rather, one “just has to keep adding on experience on top of experience, like a stack of pancakes or a card house.”
Then I pictured a memory hoarder whose memories are literalized as pancakes. Every time he wants to tell the story of a memory, he must eat that pancake. Every time he eats a pancake, another falls from the sky to replace it. Every time he experiences a moment, which will become a memory, another pancake falls.
This is typically how plays occur to me — in little flashes that, if I have the wherewithal, I write down somewhere. Then the script grows.
I write intuitively, which often means that exercises I do for one play I never really do again. For example, for this play, I found myself drawing a lot of piles of pancakes (one of these included). I wrote a monologue shaped like a pancake pile. I filled a page with little handwritten memory snapshots. At some point, a little deeper into the process, I realized I knew the shape of the play was a spiral, so I wrote the outline (picture included!).
My friend told me that I write about the accumulation of life in a way where the heaviness of living creeps up on the audience, but is danced around, celebrated, and honored. With any luck, I’ll keep doing that for the rest of my life.
Colourful Cross-Stitching
Kirsten | she/her | Germany
I am an academic, and cross-stitching gives me an opportunity to make something tangible and switch off my brain for a bit. I love doing flowers and tropical birds. My fiancee even made me a custom-made box for all my gear for my birthday!
Creative & Critical Media Fandom
Jaye | she/they | Seattle
I have been writing fan fiction now for twenty years, and writing about film for longer, a fact which is appalling to me because how am I this old? But because I am incapable of loving anything in a normal way, things like this also happen: a Star Wars cardigan I designed and knitted myself when I couldn’t find one I liked, or these zines I wrote when I accidentally got hooked on queer Thai soaps in lockdown.
Which hyperfixation will be next? Who knows, but this really began when I embroidered The X-Files logo on my backpack in high school, and I’ve met the best people in my life through fandom (through bands, through books, through film) so probably I won’t be stopping any time soon.
Handcrafting Leather Harnesses
Estelle X | she/her | San Francisco
I’ve been making leather harnesses for myself, my girlfriend, and our friends. Next up is opening my own online shop!
Journal Spreads
Nic | they/she | Boston, MA
I must’ve interacted with a journaling video immediately after joining TikTok, because the mystical algorithm began regularly serving me journal spreads. Although art therapy always sounded good in theory, I’d get frustrated whenever I tried to draw or paint, but making journal spreads (basically mini collages) seemed more doable for someone of my artistic aptitude or lack thereof. So, in March 2021, I grabbed an unused notebook and an Attempt was made. My first spread wasn’t the best, but it WAS relaxing and cathartic, so I kept at it. These days, I work on spreads for a couple of hours on most weekends while listening to podcasts, and although I don’t film the process in real time like the big-name creators on TikTok, I do post flip-throughs on TikTok from time to time. It’s fun!
Visible Mending Experiments!🧵🧶✨
Rue | she/they | Australia
I absolutely hate buying clothes! I’m the sort of person who will keep wearing the same small number of ancient t-shirts not just until they have holes, but until the holes have expanded so much that my shoulder sticks through. A lot of my older clothes feature ugly repairs, done with very little sewing knowledge and a general attitude that if mending isn’t invisible, it’s ugly. I’m proud to announce that I have thoroughly moved on from this attitude! The first picture I submitted shows the front and back sides of two darning projects – on the left is the first darning I ever attempted, then a gayer rainbow “surface darning” experiment on the right. They both turned out well, despite my absolute lack of experience, and this sort of delightful success has motivated me to start reading up a lot more on mending and hand sewing techniques. The “visible mending” movement has a lovely combination of anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist hippies who are in it for the slow fashion values, and fibre artists who make stunningly beautiful inspo and enthusiastically infodump to help out the newbies like me, and I’ve been learning a lot.
The second picture starts with my first experiment at using an arrowhead tack. I had to sew the jumper seam back together, and also reattach the stripy fabric at that corner; but when a jumper is designed like this, to have a bit of a split seam at the hem, it becomes a weak point so it’s still at risk of coming apart again over time. I think the arrowhead tack might have looked better with thicker thread, but it should help improve the strength of that seam.
Then we come to my jeans! I adore these jeans because I found them in a charity shop, went to try them on, and discovered not only that they fit, but they fit because the previous owner had raised the hems and modified the waistline. We must be exactly the same size, and with the same preference for loose, baggy jeans that have to be modified to fit in other ways. Somewhere out there, I have a twin. After I owned them for a few years, a hole formed just underneath the belt loop at the centre back. So I unpicked it, sewed a patch over the top using backstitch (stronger than running stitch, and less likely to pull through if the thread ever snaps) and then re-attached the belt loop with a bar tack.
Next there’s a t-shirt that I haven’t finished mending yet, which looks brand new but was only $3 at a charity shop due to having five tiny holes in it. I was astonished to discover when I got home that I actually have a pale pinkish thread that precisely matches it – which is funny, because I have a LOT of blues but only two pinks. What were the chances.
Last but not least, I’ve recently been modifying a new set of undies. I’m picky about waistband comfort, so I’ve folded down the top – just at the front – so the elastic sits lower on my belly, and then I pinned it and sewed it in place with two rows of (wonky) herringbone stitch. Zigzag stitches are best for stretch materials, like knit t-shirt fabric, so if I can get in some practice at doing nice herringbone stitching without buckling the fabric, that’ll be a good skill for t-shirt mending in the future. I’ve got two more pairs to go with this same modification, so I’m going to play around with entertaining thread colour combinations for those.
Not pictured is my other pair of jeans, which are these really faded chambray hipster flares that I’ve had since approximately 2011 – and they were second-hand from a friend of a friend back then. I’ve been cutting up a blue woven shirt to make patches, and hemming the patches, and pinning them to the insides of the jeans and sewing them roughly in place. I’ve got the big areas done to that stage, but there are a bunch of extra little threadbare areas that I want to reinforce as well. Next, I’ll trim away some frayed threads from the rips, and start properly securing the patches with some sort of decorative sewing. I was originally looking at sashiko, but then I went down a rabbit hole of geometrical embroidery styles of the world, and got deeply distracted by Tudor English blackwork embroidery. So maybe I’ll end up with blackwork on my jeans, at this point there’s no knowing. Then I’m going to cut up a pair of patterned green shorts to use as patches to go on the outside, mainly at the heels which have rather large chunks of fabric ripped out after being walked on for years when I’m barefoot, and also some parts of the waistband that I think need to be replaced entirely. If there’s ever a second Passion Project gallery, say in maybe 2 or 3 years’ time (lol), I might have finished my old jeans by then! Next up, I’ll show some of my many unfinished bookbinding projects…
Bookbinding
Rue
So I thought about sending pictures of books that I’ve actually already finished binding. Some of my older ones do actually look really cool and I normally enjoy showing them off. But – and I know I won’t be alone in this – since everything went to shit in 2020, I’ve been struggling to actually face working on long-term projects that require a lot of decision-making and doing different steps in the correct order. And I think having a bit of perfectionism about my cover designs in the past makes it harder to accept that I’m too burned out to make the same sorts of things at the moment. So instead I will give you a tour of these stacks of paper which are not yet books!
In the back on the left we have two volumes of reading notes – where I collect poems, my favourite bits from library books in case I don’t get around to borrowing them again, and many quotes from Autostraddle pieces of course. I used to just have a notebook where I listed the titles of all of the books that I read in a given year – but I read a lot of things that aren’t just books; and I like to have quotes, and notes to self and a bit of journaling about what I thought, so this is a much more flexible and forgiving way to keep my records. There’s a 2019 volume, a 2020 volume and a few scattered quires from 2021, when I burned out far enough to stop collecting the notes entirely. I’m not happy about this, because I love going back through and finding the things I’ve kept. Hopefully I’ll find the energy to start it up again.
Then in the back on the right is my journal from 2021. In the front on the left, with the black stitching, is my planner diary from 2021 (think an extremely ugly and illegible version of bullet journaling), with a few extra random quires piled on top.
In the front on the right, we have an unfinished novel! I’ve been working on it for fun, forever, and it may very well never see the light of day, but I am having fun. It’s set in a fantasy world, and involves magic, climate disasters, a sapphic romance, and a lot of rejecting plots of heroic adventure in favour of journeys of recovery and healing. I got up to 31k words last year (woo!), but stopped work on it for a while when real life got overwhelming again. So hopefully I’ll manage to restart that project as well. We’ll see how we go.
Fun and Challenging Word Search Puzzles
Katie Jane | she/her | New York, NY
I once made a sexy (and very hard) word search puzzle for a partner (BY HAND – pen, graph paper, and ruler style). They kept it on their night stand, unopened, for weeks…and then we broke up. I’m not sure if they ever even saw it! In a fit of “I’m not at all bitter about this” I decided to monetize it. Turns out I had a blast digitally recreating it – it really combines my love of organization and paper work, so much so that I just kept going! Now I have a growing Etsy shop that I’m obsessed with.
Fruit Vulvas
Bridget Woodbury | she/her | Baltimore, MD
One night while we were laying in bed, my fiancé asked me to draw them a strawberry vagina. They promptly forgot about this, but as an OCD-American, I am blessed/cursed to remember all of their little whims, so a few weeks later I was like “hey, is this what you wanted?” and they were like “yes, but I did not know that until now.” Pretty fun party trick, TBQH. Anyway, I finished the strawberry after I dropped my most recent product line and it hit me right in that sweet spot where I never want to perform another administrative task again, so I’m building out a series of rainbow vulvas.
Fever Dreams EP
Cynthia | she/her | Ottawa, ON
Instagram: @pomegranateparablesstelle
This is a bedroom EP. I friend-sourced song topics, genres, and some voice recordings, and my challenge was figuring out how to write and record each one.
The mixes are definitely imperfect, but there are also plenty of things I’m happy with – the trippy outro for Cough Drop, the shoegazey texture of Aunt May, the fire sound effect in Bonfire (no fire was involved).
Making this thing was fun and messy and frustrating. While I’m not sure I’d like to do a full solo EP like this again – I mostly experiment with one-off songs – I’m always open to collabs!
How We Keep Us Safe: a toolkit for community safety without cops
R. Starling Medusa | they/them | Brooklyn, NY
How We Keep Us Safe is a zine full of information, tips, and tools for different aspects of building community, engaging in mutual aid, and preventing and responding to crises without state force. Some things you’ll find include steps on how to build a phone tree with your neighbors, suggestions for Covid-safe events, a worksheet for making a safety plan, de-escalation tips, and more. My organizing collective, Abolition Action, curated, edited, and in some cases created these materials, and I am really proud of it.
Birds Made of Flowers
Jorie H | she/her | Berkeley, CA
I love birds, I love dried flowers, finding a way to combine the two is my proudest artistic accomplishment
Laura Lethe
Laura Lethe | she/her | London, UK
I love making zines, because of the many forms it can take. Unique hand written mini-zine made out of a single A4 sheet of paper? Intricate Indesign file printed on beautiful glossy paper? You can pick everything in between and more (even if to be honest, I’m more on the very DIY got-to-the-office-before-my-colleagues-to-secretly-use-the-work-printer end of the spectrum). I’m currently preparing my very first collaborative project called BURNING WORLD // TENDER HEARTS, around what gives us hope in a collapsing world. If the theme inspires you, check the call for submissions on my website! x
Pole Dance
Erin | she/her | Maryland
Instagram: @baltimorebouncebeast
I’ve been pole dancing for three years now and I absolutely love it. All of the bruises, struggles, and frustrations are absolutely worth it. It’s badass, beautiful, and sexy, but also fun and with a great community too.
Aerial Dance / Yoga
Erin | she/her | Maryland
Instagram: @baltimorebouncebeast
I love the challenge, excitement, beauty, and creativity of aerial arts. Yoga is a practice that’s important to my life, and aerial yoga adds another dimension to it. I started teaching it last year at a local studio. I post about it a lot on Instagram. If you have a chance to try aerial yoga or circus arts, go for it! It might seem intimidating, but instructors will generally meet you where you’re at, and intro classes are very safe. You might fall in love with it like I did!
OnlyBans Game
Maggie Oates | Pittsburgh, PA
OnlyBans is a game by sex workers and allies that digs into the experience of doing online sex work. This project has an amazing team of collaborators, including Lena Chen and Goofy Toof. I’m really excited for that my next round of coding will focus on improving accessibility in the game.
Street Cats of Vis
Little Shiva | she/her | Vis, Croatia
I’m from the US but live on the island of Vis, in Croatia. When I first bought the old stone house in town where I live in the winter and which I rent on airbnb in the summer, I became aware of the plight of street cats. They were everywhere, since there was no vet on the island at the time and there was no spaying and neutering going on to speak of. I started a project called Street Cats of Vis to try and fix that situation, so to speak.
I was eventually joined by a professional cat lady, my friend and cat partner Francesca Walker, from New Zealand. She worked as an animal welfare inspector there for seven years before coming to Vis, and she still works for them remotely. Having her on the team really raised the bar, and I’ve learned so much about helping cats. It’s way more work than I ever imagined: good thing I was so naïve when I started, or this project would never have happened!
I’m really proud of what Francesca and I have done: we’ve cultivated a small team of volunteers who help us with cat catching, feeding and occasionally fostering. By making our project visible, we’ve helped reduce the stigma of being seen as a “crazy cat lady”, which is still quite strong here on Vis. We’re always in need of donations to help with the cost of feeding, fostering and veterinary care other than sterilizing: it’s not too late to order the 2022 calendar, and the 2023 calendar should be printed by May, just in time for tourist season.
There’s now a vet on the island one day a week, and the town pays for sterilizing: that’s something, at least. If you’d like to help spread the word about this project, please follow us and share on social media. It takes a community to help community cats!
Amigurumi Octopi
Emily | she/her | Qatar
I taught myself to crochet amigurumi birds in April 2021. I made some other stuff but then I wanted to make an octopus. So I made one and gave it to my mom. Since then I have made over 40. It’s a great crochet project because it can be completed in a little over 3hours. While my hands are busy, my mind can drift. After they come into existence, they bring me joy. I’ve given many as gifts because I like the idea that its 8 tentacles can hold you even when I’m not near.
Queer Jewish Musical Theatre Writer
Rachel Kunstadt | she/her | New York City
I am a queer Jewish musical theatre writer. I write the book (story + script) and lyrics to musicals. My writing almost always deals with the following themes: queerness (especially through a sapphic lens), Judaism, mental health, and parent-child/family relationships. My work is psychoanalytically informed (talk Freud to me). I’m all about using musical theatre to ask challenging questions, inspire exploration and passion, expose the taboo, and give voice to the underrepresented (which also happens to be the mission statement to my theatre company).
I am currently working on and looking for a composer/collaborator for (email me at rachel[at]rachelkunstadt[dot]com if you’re interested!) PRESS PAUSE, an autobiographical memoir musical about growing up and choosing life.
PRESS PAUSE Elevator Pitch: It’s March 2020. Lisa Schwartz is a 30 year-old travel writer living and loving in New York City. When the COVID-19 pandemic hits New York, Lisa’s life is halted, as she is forced to quarantine alone in her small Manhattan apartment, away from her new girlfriend and her ever-growing world. Lisa begins having flashbacks to her sixteen year-old self, when she realized she’s a lesbian and subsequently became completely housebound due to agoraphobia. As the quarantine rhetoric greatly echoes Lisa’s agoraphobic thoughts as a teenager, Lisa worries her recovery will end in relapse, as she is forced to become housebound again. When the greatest roadblock in Lisa’s life was herself, what happens when an external force mimics her inner demons? In this memory musical, Lisa must recall why she became agoraphobic and how she overcame the toughest struggle of her life, which is the key to learning that she has the strength to move forward, not backward.
Astrophotography
Anna Grunseth | she/they | Green Bay, WI
Astrophotography is one of my greatest joys and creative outlets in recent years. I started roughly 4 years ago using online, remote-access observatories, and that’s how I still take most of my photos (including the ones shown here).
Briefly, I research deep-sky objects and determine how to image them based on the season, their location, and my equipment’s capabilities. Once I make my observations, I carefully process the data to balance scientific accuracy and my artistic goals in the final images.
It’s a challenging workflow that takes a lot of time, revision, and patience —but the results are SO rewarding when something new (or very old!) and beautiful takes shape out of the raw data.
Lately, I’m getting more hands-on experience with nighttime photography. I bought a refurbished DSLR camera and lenses, which I use for wide-angle shots of the Milky Way galaxy (when it’s not cloudy, anyway). I eventually hope to add a tracking mount and telescope for deeper views of my local night skies.
Follow me over on Instagram for my latest photos and nighttime adventures!
A painting Too Large to Fit in the KIA
Angela Davis Fegan | she/they, her/theirs | Asheville, NC
Since the pandemic, I have started working on much larger surfaces and mainly paintings because I feel very differently about time than I did two years ago. This specific piece I started working on at the start of September and finally finished (for now) last week! It’s 60×48 inches and is covered in years worth of handmade paper and studio scrap beneath the image itself.
Novels Exploring Queer History & Identity
Katrina Carrasco | she/her | Seattle
My first book, THE BEST BAD THINGS, is about a bisexual spy who goes undercover among opium smugglers in the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s. It has historical/mystery/crime fiction elements, but mostly it’s really queer! My new book is set around the same time and place and digs deeper into the public and private spaces where queer people found each other and formed communities. Writing and researching for it has been a joy. Writing has always been my passion and was also the first place I explored my own queerness. I’m really proud and happy that I can share my passion projects with readers.
Making Friends as an Adult
Lauralee Benjamin | she/her | Queens, NY
Ok I don’t know if this qualifies and I won’t be offended if it doesn’t! I’m a 34 year old woman with no friends. I had friends but they were childhood hand-me-down friends who I had nothing in common with, didn’t really like or value me and we all finally gave up on the 20 year long friendship charade during lockdown when it was easy to do so. So follow me as I attempt to meet new people who aren’t racist or heterosexual (ew), through CrAzY means like bumble BFF and idk, the mall?
The Promise
Candace Lee Van Auken | no preference | Connecticut
Every 30 or 40 years, I like to write a novel. Wrote the first one for my 30th birthday (_Kite Maker_, New Victoria, written 1983-1984, published 1991). I just finished a second one, _The Promise_, now that I’m 68yo. I wanted to produce a quality novel that featured a butch heroine in a complex, interesting story. I had long thought, due to health issues, that my writing years were behind me, but I’m doing better physically, and now I’m back in harness, pouring my passion onto the page.
Gay Lil’ Fiction Podcasts
Andrea | they/she | California
I got really into fiction podcasting a few years ago because a) no one can tell you not to make things as queer as you want b) it’s a surprisingly good way to meet other people who also think doing theatre via Zoom on Sunday mornings is fun.
My last project was a short series about two queer women who meet through shared enthusiasm for a fake Canadian TV show (and writing slash fanfic for said show). This year I’m writing a podcast version of Selkirk — the fake Canadian TV show. Someone else described it as “gay Canadian Supernatural” and… yeah, basically that, only with more stuff about paranormal wildlife conservation.
Rainbow List Project
Kerryn Pollock | she/her | Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
Kia ora! I have a rad queer history project going at my work, New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, the equivalent of the National Parks Service in the US. The Rainbow List Project tells the stories of queer people and their lives through the history and heritage of place. Queer history projects like this are so important because they give us a genealogy, tell us about our queer ancestors and show we have always been here. You can read more about it here.
Home Baking Project
Stacey | she/her | NJ
So for my library I took up virtual programming during the pandemic and I started doing bakealongs, and lately it’s been bread leading up to our bread-themed STEM event in March for Makers’ Day, a statewide STEM initiative. So I’m paid to wfh and make bread, one of my favorite activities!
My Blog!
Evi | she/her | East Coast USA
I started a blog in 2022. There are already four posts. The topics have ranged from my peanut butter and jelly sandwich obsession, to memories of my time with my dad in the last year of his life, to a breakdown of my bedtime reading in 2021 (it was very queer!). I plan to post about other creative projects and my thoughts about things that happen in 2022. I am really enjoying having a personal creative outlet and a place to share my writings with the world.
Family Lamps
Mariana | she/her | Portugal
This was my Christmas passion project!
I saw these friendship lamps at someone’s house and thought they’d be great for my parents and my two sisters, as we all live in different cities/countries. The price point was too steep so I decided to make my own. Over the course of November/December I made the 3D models, programmed the lamps and then soldered/connected all the parts.
It’s not a new concept but the beehive design is based off my mom’s similarly designed window (and the fact that she beekeeps as a hobby) and I’m very happy with the outcome!
We each have a lamp, and when one person touches theirs, the others light up with their color, so we know they are thinking of us. Everyone loved them and uses them daily!
Fashion & Sewing
Erin Wilaby | they/them ey/em | Wanderer, currently in Hamburg, Germany
I started sewing my own clothes a bit back in March 2020 when quarantine for my area hit. I really fell in love! I love using fun patterns, and I love making clothes that are exactly how I want them – good pockets, right length, colorful and fun, comfortable and yet look great. I love the creative possibilities and the ability to make and wear things that I would not be able to find to buy!
One picture is me wearing a black sleeveless hoodie with a bee fabric front pocket. The other is me and my spouse on our wedding day, and I made my dress and their skirt! Yes those are insects on my wedding dress and it also has pockets!
Ceramics
Erin Wilaby | they/them ey/em | Wanderer, currently in Hamburg, Germany
I took a ceramics course my senior year of college and I fell in love! I’ve now been doing it off and on for 3 years. I move about every 6 months or less, so it’s hard to find a studio and create anything in that time, so I haven’t done as much as I’d like since college. I like to create high or medium fire ceramics with intricate detail that feel really good to use. I like to make mugs that fit perfectly in your hand, or have handles that are just a stub of clay perfectly molded to grab on to, or a bowl that nestles in your cupped hand perfect for slurping broth out of! My career in being an outdoor professional & environmental scientist, so I work with a lot of environmental themes, as well as queer ceramics and geometry and sculptural ideas. I split my time between Hamburg, Germany and various small towns in the US (primarily the Midwest) and am willing to take orders and ship domestically if anyone is interested! erin.wilaby@gmail.com erinwilaby.carbonmade.com
Vegetable Gardening
Nicole | they/them | Pittsburgh, PA
As you might know from my writing about on it on Autostraddle, I love to grow veggies, herbs, and some fruits like raspberries, huckleberries and ground cherries. My partner, Sadie, also gardens and heads up the herb and flower situation. My grandmother had a very serious vegetable garden and would can and preserve a ton of food from it. My family also grew vegetables like zucchini, tomatoes and corn when I was young and we lived out in the country. Having a vegetable garden is just something that makes me feel like I’m home, and it’s been really important to me to just get outside and touch dirt over the past two years. I put on an audiobook or a podcast, and during spring, summer and fall spend hours in the garden several days a week if I can. (It got kind of dicey during the fundraisers last year and some things ran wild but you do what you can, you know?) Each of these photos represents a day’s worth of vegetables during peak times for these plants. I love to go out in the morning and gather a bunch of things to have with breakfast — and a favorite of Sadie’s and mine are the sugar snap peas of early spring, usually one of the first vegetables from the garden we have every year. The unexpected winner from my garden this past year, though, were the beans! They just LOVE whatever is going on in the garden and so a big thing I’ll be working on this year is upping my homemade trellis game and trying some new varieties. I’m also not starting seeds this year (skipping tomatoes, peppers and leeks) because of the work on the house Sadie and I are doing, so the garden is going to be much more legume-centered than it has been in the past because you sow them directly in the soil. I also want to grow more huckleberries this year though I am thinking I may not need to try too hard because they started planting themselves after a certain point last year.
Novel Writing
Nicole | they/them | Pittsburgh, PA
I’m in the like, DON’T ASK ME WHAT IT’S ABOUT stage of writing this book, but after a few finished trunk novels, I can say that I’m delighted by the different direction this current work is headed. In an attempt to capture the project visually, here is my laptop, where the draft lives, the notebook where some notes live, and here is me with a pen which I also sometimes use, along with voice memos, for notes!
Second Firsts
Elle Wickenden | she/her | Boston, MA
I wrote my first novel during the pandemic, and it’s an f/f romance. I was very excited when it reached the top 100 in Lesbian Romance on Amazon. I’m halfway through writing the second book in the series and have gotten tons of beta readers and wonderful feedback on Lex, of all places.
Video Game Fanfic Novel
Wenda Rose | she/her | Portland, Oregon, USA
Among my friends, I am unashamedly “that nerd.” When a piece of media speaks to me enough, it can sometimes become part of me. Even so, back in 2016 when I randomly dusted off a used copy of Final Fantasy XIII and stuck it in my partner’s dilapidated old Xbox 360, I really wasn’t expecting it to change my life! I barely even considered myself a gamer. Now, it’s 2022 and I have a l’Cie brand tattooed on my arm. Don’t judge me.
The reason? 70 game hours later, I had gone through a harrowing experience alongside six characters whom I had gotten to know as if they were real, and discovered that this often criticized and overlooked entry in the Final Fantasy series contained an unintentional trans parable, an ostensibly asexual protagonist, and IMHO the greatest lesbian love story never told.
The criticisms are valid, as the gameplay is extremely linear and often counter-intuitive, and the story doesn’t make a lot of sense until you dig into the menu and read a bunch of lore entries that aren’t explained in the dialog. But my imagination had been captured, and I felt like this story deserved better than to be passed up because it wasn’t well-presented.
So, late last year when I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, I started writing my own unofficial full-length novelization of it, adding in the backstory needed for it to make sense from the beginning, and (most importantly) giving “gal pals” Vanille and Fang the queer love story that Square Enix insisted on downplaying!
My Independent Music
Wenda Rose | she/her | Portland, Oregon, USA
I was raised as an all-around creative, and I was already playing classical pieces on piano at the age most kids learn to read, thanks to my overzealous mom! So it was little wonder one of my biggest passions has become music. I think I wrote my first “proper” song when I was 14 years old (“Wild Wood Canyon,” released on my 2018 album “Cynefin”).
The lyrics sat in an old journal mixed in with a lot of teenage angst, and I forgot all about them for years until I met a fellow trans woman who recorded her first album with vocals during the time she couch-surfed at my apartment. She and I are no longer friends, but she inspired me to take the plunge, stop worrying about whether my voice sounded “too deep” and start recording my music for release!
Now, I have released 5 self-produced folk-pop albums, and will hopefully be collaborating with my partner on a symphonic metal album once we feel up to it (we both have been sick with Long COVID for over 2 months currently).
Wrathful Cats
Chris | they/them | Seattle
I enjoy painting my cat and other cats like wrathful deities, protectors of good and smiters of evil. Hanging them around the house makes me feel better about watching horror films.
Yalls projects are so cool!!! Thank you all for sharing, I love finding otherwise to celebrate “passion” this Valentine’s Day :)
AAAAHHHH! I’m so impressed by everyone!
Holy cats, y’all are the coolest people on the planet! Every one of these projects is AWESOME and I wish I could sit and listen to you each talk about them and show them off for a whole day EACH!
This is one of the coolest galleries we’ve ever done.
Wow, the talent.
This was SO GOOD
This makes me so, so happy. I’m so happy to be a part of this community and gallery. Now I want to sit down with everyone and pepper them with random questions about their projects.
I’m not actually on the market for more projects but I felt that familiar “oh I want to do that!” tug reading some of these. I did not know that visible mending is a thing and that sounds right up my alley. And those family lamps, that light up when some one else turns theirs on. OMG, does that sound cool.
I’ll reply to any random questions about the family lamps :D
whoa so many talented people!! beautiful and inspiring work and i’m just thrilled to have the privilege of being part of this community.
These are all so cool that I could cry! All of you and your passions are amazing.
SHUT UP EVERYTHING HERE IS BRILLIANT AND WONDERFUL AND I’M OBSESSED WITH EACH OF YOU OH MY GOD
this is so incredible!! i completely ADHD-ed the submission deadline because of grad school/work/birthday kerfuffle but please know that my coin collection is featured in spirit (if anyone has the maya angelou quarter…)
I love this so much. Seeing all of this passion has brought some much-needed light to my Valentine’s Day.
THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY COOL
YOU ARE ALL SO INCREDIBLY COOL
But ESPECIALLY the person creating D&D worlds
BUT ALSO EVERYONE ELSE
AAAAAAAHHHH THE D&D ONE IS ME! THANK YOU!! It took a lot for me to post that here and I’m kind of freaking out at the reaction!
Would you like to read it? You can contact me on Discord and I’ll be happy to share a link to the draft.
omg so cool I love that not everyone’s projects are perfect and smooth and polished but are like, actual projects that are ongoing. what a beautiful idea to share the things people love :) <3
I really like that this gallery got some of the stories as well as the photo!
Also I want hobby how-to articles about all of these ;)
I love how creative everyone is! So many cool things to see or check out.
I would love to playtest that D&D setting!
I’m the person writing the D&D thing! It took me a couple of days to get up the nerve to even log in here! I’m still kind of freaking out!! The negative part of my brain kept saying that the only reason people tell me this setting is interesting is because they are my friends so to have strangers go “hey this project sounds cool” is… AAAAAAAHHHH!!!
Right now it’s still mostly a draft but I’d love some feedback on the world building. Please contact me in Discord and I’d be happy to send you a link (it’s a massive google doc plus a map)
This is so cool!! You are all amazing, thanks for sharing!! DANG!!
I love this! There’s so much variety and cool stuff! Rue the mender, thank you for sharing your work. I have a jacket with a sleeve seam coming undone that I’ve tried to fix up without adding any thread because I don’t have the right colour but it doesn’t look very neat. Now I’m thinking I’ll sew it properly with bright colours and turn it into something cool. Thank you for the inspiration!
wooww love this!! everyone is so cool and passion projects are the best!
Oh I’m so annoyed I forgot to submit to this! I blame the crippling depressive episode I’m going through. I’ve been knitting since 2008, crochet since 2013, starting sewing last year. Been drawing and painting forever. I also sing and write. I’ve recently decided I’m going to start writing erotica. My long distance partner says I’m very good at it. I really wanted to submit a photo of me and my puppy in matching items, I sewed her a bandana and myself a headband with Mandalorian fabric. And a photo of one of my more elaborate knitted creations.
Also I meant to say, I am incredibly impressed by all of these creations and I want to be friends with all of you.
I tried crocheting and I am GARBAGE at it so mad props to you! I noticed a comment below that suggested making this a regular feature, like monthly, so who knows maybe you’ll get your chance to show off your work sooner than you think!
Ahhh this is all so cool! (Alex, I’m a sock knitter too, but I usually save my ambitions for, well, things like my sweater up there; socks are more my walking around knitting. But you have me rethinking that!)
Your sweater is so well-designed and unapologetic and I love it. That yoke. It looks warm, too.
I’m glad you were inspired by that pattern, because it’s incredible – true cables over brioche ribbing. I’m almost exclusively a sock knitter because I love being rigorous about fit and construction, then when you add complex patterning on top of that it gets really exciting. Or maybe it’s that they’re tiny and portable.
Alternate theory: crafting an elaborate pair of socks elevates the mundane, adorns our feet and the feet of our loved ones, creates a warm, private little celebration.
Unapologetic! Yes! I am trying to embrace that in my old age. It is very warm; excellent for chilly movie theaters.
I haven’t tried brioche at all yet, for all it looks so cozy. I like all of your sock theories!
THIS IS AWESOME! If the editorial team wants to make this a regular feature I would LOVE that (and also I would be motivated to finish my projects and share them too lol!)
I love the wide range of projects but also how many of us were drawn to similar creative passions!
Time for an autostraddle sewing circle!
Wow y’all are so interesting and cool and amazing!
Cleo, your quilt, I love your color sense!
Chris, my husband and daughter (age 11) do an occasional podcast of actual play + review of RPGs (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/almost-bedtime-theater/id1543611697) – if you think your setting might be a good option for them, contact info’s at that link.
Heather, I thought your anecdote was going to end “my teacher said she was the one who had knocked it over, and she was sorry but she hadn’t had time to pick it up right then, and she helped me get it all put back together.” The way it actually turned out made me want to punch her for you! I had a fountain pen once, given to me by my best friend, and I loved it.
Starling, thanks for your work making that zine. I haven’t read it yet because it is bedtime for my brain, but I plan to discuss it with Kiddo once I do.
Laura, I want to try to write something for your zine, we’ll see what my brain lets me get done.
Anna, your photos, swoon! The Horsehead Nebula looks gorgeous!
Candace, “Every 30 or 40 years, I like to write a novel” is a fantastic opening sentence. Are you going to publish The Promise? Would read it!
Erin, pockets on a wedding dress is brilliant, A+.
All you bakers and vegetable-growers: Yes. I’ll be right over.
I would comment on everyone else’s too, but my immediate passion project is going to bed. (Today I did two rows on a scarf I’ve been knitting for Kiddo off and on for, um, maybe five years? Don’t worry, I know how I am with craft projects, so I’ve planned from the beginning to make it adult-sized. It’s using up odds and ends of yarn so the color scheme is pleasingly queer, and really I should have submitted it here so I could yammer on about it, second whoever had the idea to make this a semi-regular feature, would love to see more projects/progress to cheer on.)
Hi, it’s Chris! Thank you for the link! So… the original official source material had some stuff in it about sex workers (it was the other job option for women besides “wife”). I opted to rewrite it in a less dehumanizing way instead of removing it. Both this and the chapter about gender and sexual orientation (yes it’s a whole chapter) are in their own separate sections and are prefaced with content notices and suggestions for DMs on how to remove or modify the contents for younger players. Maybe not recommended reading for an 11 year old in its current state, but I’d love to maybe get some feedback from your husband on whether my suggestions are any good. None of my friends who are reading it now have any experience DMing for kids.
I love these so much! Following SO MANY NEW INSTAS right now.