Sure! I have a YouTube channel, Lucytowne Designs, and my Ravelry handle is Lydia C. Heckathorne. Lucytowne got started for a few reasons: I have my great-grandmother's diaries from the 1920s and then the 1950s to when she passed in 1995, and she was a major crafter. When she was first married during WWI making clothes by hand was normal for her generation, and I like to say she taught me posthumously how to knit, crochet, tat, and sew. I do love historybounding the Edwardian and 1920s eras as well. My Ravelry page has some of my designs that have been easy for me to write down. Fun fact, a friend who is an archaeologist professionally recently came across some textiles on a dig site they were working, and I ended up being able to really help them figure out what the remains could have been, what it was made from based on the context and the geographical location, and even the time period of patterns to look for based on the site context. I was very excited that I could help because that was precisely one of the reasons I started really learning how to work with fibers; so I could have that knowledge for archaeology sites and museum work. It's been useful in other ways as well. At a site I used to work at pre-Covid as an archaeologist we found quite a lot of black machine knitted material in what we *thought* was a post hole--only to have it end up being a cat burial! Whoops! Identifying a modern ritual burial of a cat was definitely not on the bingo card when I started the fiber arts, but there we are. And it's generally a really practical skill when you can hem pants too long for people barely 5 feet tall like me, sew on buttons, fix blown out seams, put in sleeve gussets because companies decided a weird cut was ok but it's really not, etc.

My mental health self care looks a bit different these days. I have pretty severe depression and anxiety as a result of dissociative identity disorder (DID), so I do weekly therapy. That's pretty much a non-negotiable right now, and I have been doing really well lately with the help from therapy and meds. Before I found out all this about myself it was really hard to self regulate, but having DID (best examples I can come up with for what that is like is Lews Therin and Young Bull combined with the Warder bond, oddly enough!) has made me a lot better at figuring out how to manage and regulate things. For self care, I do at least one blanket fort day a week where I don't really bother doing anything important at all. I also have some physical therapy stretches and PT yoga I do that helps, and fiber arts always help as well. Also, cuddles from my cats! Cats are the ultimate weighted stuffies.

Brown, you say? Perhaps. Definitely book Brown! But that surprised me immensely on another site where I ended up in Red, of all places. As for channeling...........well. I cannot channel here because I am not yet Aes Sedai in these ranks.

Read and understood!

I am Catt. I started reading WoT back during fall of 2004, and received the rest of the entire series at that point for Christmas that year. So as of this year, 2024, I've been reading WoT for the entirety of my adult life. I decided to finally take the plunge here on Dragonmount after hearing about it for most of that time in passing. Professionally, I am an end of life social worker. For my hobbies I enjoy historical costuming and pretty much anything experimental archaeology in the fiber arts field. I also have recently entered the world of academia writing and have published some articles and have others in the works. I used to do archaeology during the summer before my body finally said no more. I am from a farming community on the shores of Lake Erie that has a population of around 85% Old Order Amish (Troyer sect), so it's a LOT like the Two Rivers. Well met, all, and I look forward to my time here!