Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 19

Llama, Llama, Red Pajamas

My fiber arrived!

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Most of it’s alpaca, which I’m definitely going to need a skirting table for. But the first one and the last one are llama, which is not something people normally spin. But look at that undercoat. I have half a mind to pull it out and just skirt it on my garage floor. I’m really anxious to see how it works.

Alpacas dirt-bathe so their fiber is really dirty. Hence the importance of a skirting table. I need dirt and stuff to fall through.

But llamas don’t. So, in skirting the llama, it should be me vs. poop, second cuts, guard hairs, and any plants and seeds stuck in there. In other words, it may be more manageable for a newbie.

There’s No Cake

I have so much to do that it’s making me just want to curl up and do nothing. I have to get the invitations sent out for my parents. I need to call Jimmy John’s and talk to them about a million sandwiches. I need a new driver’s license. The dog needs medicine. I need a hair cut.

I have no idea what to do for a cake for my parents’ anniversary.

I need one extra weekday, where everything is open but I don’t have to work, but this is not that time.

Young Evil, Revisited

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It’s been bugging me that the guy on the left looks so familiar to me, but I can’t place him. I think I have a guess on the identities of a lot of these guys, though. See what you think.

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I think the guy on the left could be George Bright. The kid in the middle is Richard Bowling. I’m pretty sure the guy on the right is Ed Fields.

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That’s J.B. Stoner and Robert Bowling.

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I have no good guess on the old guy. The middle guy could be Asa Carter, except Asa Carter didn’t have good cheekbones, except with the picture blown up this big, it looks like that may not be a cheekbone, but some kind of ink spot.

If that is Carter, then that might be Kenneth Adams next to him. Not that I’ve ever seen a good picture of Kenneth Adams.

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Skip the little girl. Who knows who she is. Could the guy in the hat be Wallace Allen? Or, if I’m right about the guy on the right being Emory Burke, could Hat Guy be Homer Loomis? And then, obviously, the guy I suspect is Emory Burke.

If I’m right, then what we’re seeing in this 1954 photo is a half-hearted reunion of some of the Columbians and an early gathering of folks who would go on to be the United White Party.

It’s also a shit-ton of violent white supremacists.

“Olive”

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I’m continuing to dye wool for The Professor’s afghan. This is what I got done last night. That brown is “olive.” I thought it was going to be green. On the other hand, it is a deeply lovely brown.

Shall we go back to the inspiration piece?

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I’m pretty pleased with how on-track I am. I may just have to move the green I’d decided not to use back into the “use” pile and call it good. I might also try mixing some more green into the “olive” and see if that works. There’s so little green in the inspiration piece, though, that I probably won’t worry about it.

I still think my biggest danger with the afghan is that I love really bright saturated colors and I need to be careful I’m not dying up too many “accent” colors and losing the kinds of earthy neutrals The Professor is hoping will dominate the piece.

But I’m also hoping that the alpaca fleece I get works and I can just use that as the main neutral in the afghan.

Young Evil

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I’m trying to find the heirs of the photographer–WC King of Chattanooga–who took the picture above. It ran in a 1958 issue of LIFE, but it was taken in December, 1954 in the aforementioned Chattanooga.

I recognize three bombers in that picture. The guys with arrows over their heads are the Bowling Brothers. The guy in the bow tie is J.B. Stoner. I’m fairly confident the guy standing to Stoner’s right is Ed Fields.

The guy on the far left looks familiar to me, but I can’t place him and I wonder if the guy on the far right is James Bagwell.

Small Things

–I read The Great God Pan this weekend and it is fantastic. It’s really fun, too, to think about how much the shift in culture since it first came out has changed how I read it.

Like, I was reading all these reviews after about how misogynistic it was and it made me laugh because, oh, oops, yes, I guess it probably is. But it’s just so obvious all these men are douchy monsters who tell themselves scary stories in order to feel justified killing a woman that it didn’t immediately occur to me that they’re the heroes.

–My dad’s friend is sending me all the fiber from her alpacas and llamas. Like five boxes worth. For free.

It’ll need extensive skirting, and I’ll have to figure out how to evaluate if it’s good or not.

But why is she willing to do this? Because otherwise they just throw it out.

This seems nuts to me, but then I was watching a video on sheep shearing and the farmer said she just tosses the wool because she can only get about $5 a piece for a fleece from the mills.

Which seems very much like there’s some kind of opportunity here. I’m willing to pay more than “free,” but I’d like to pay less than the $100 a pound alpaca roving runs. And I’m sure other fiber artists would, too.

So, someone needs to connect the people who are just tossing fiber in the trash with the people who would gladly take it off their hands.

–My whole goal for this weekend was to get my parents’ 50th Anniversary invitations sent out. I did not.

Memphis

[image error]Can a person look both fabulous and frumpy at the same time? Yes.

So, I went to Memphis to see Lost Delta Found, a book I acquired a million years ago, inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. It was incredible. Every part of it.

First, I somehow picked exactly the right things to wear. I was so comfortable all night. And the sparkly eye shadow was so much fun. I even put some sparkles on my bottom lashes, though I don’t know if it was obvious to anyone but me. My hair came close enough to doing what I wanted. And, in general, at least it looked like I had tried to do something with it. But please note how one half my head is full of delicious soft waves and the other half is full of frizz that is slightly less pronounced than usual.

So, where to start? The pre-ceremony reception was awesome. I talked for a long time to the leader of Count Basie’s orchestra. Dom Flemon’s wife and I chatted about dresses (her dress was fantastic.) I was trying to find Robert, one of the editors of the book, but I ended up talking to a librarian and, lo, Robert appeared. I told the librarian this was a little like Sun-Tzu’s admonition to wait by the creek for the bodies of your enemies to float by. Wait by a librarian and all book people will eventually walk by.

Robert and I got seated in with the inductees and their families, because we were the book’s family. So, we were in the THIRD ROW! Y’all we sat in front of Bobby Rush! We were directly behind Duck Dunn’s family and in front of them was Joe Morganfield, Muddy Waters’ son. Holy fuck. He was so handsome.

Robert gave a lovely speech inducting the book and talked some about the history of getting it made. He said nice things about my place of employment and my editing skills and then he made me stand up so people could acknowledge me. It was nuts. So nuts and stupid. But wonderful. Sure, yes, clap for me as if I’m in the same league as everyone else. That’s not ridiculous at all.

How is this real life?

I have recently learned that there’s a Jack’s in Jackson and I really wanted that for lunch. But I was about a half an hour too early for lunch in Jackson when I left Memphis. So, I decided I would go see the Elbert Williams historical marker in Brownsville. Only, I wasn’t sure where it was.

So, I stopped at the Delta Heritage Museum and, y’all, not only did they give me great directions, they gave me their number so I could call if I got lost!

Anyway, here’s the Elbert Williams sign.

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I hadn’t realized Marshall had looked into this incident. But holy fuck does it make the police trying to cart him off into the night after the Columbia Riots trials ended even more ominous.

Following the lead of the sign, I went out into the countryside to find the Taylor cemetery. I walked all around it and didn’t find a marker for Williams. I doubt there ever was one. It would have just been too dangerous.

But look here:

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It’s hard to get a sense of just how huge this place is, but the big picture above is like of a third of it. And it’s really isolated. You go way out in the country. Go until it looks like there isn’t a road, go down that thing that isn’t a road until you come to a tiny round about in the middle of the graveyard.

I had a lot of thoughts about it. One was how brave the Taylor family was to put Williams in their graveyard. I didn’t see any other Williamses in their, so I don’t know if Elbert was family or why they did that for him, but it was so brave.

The other thing is that this cemetery is old, even if it’s not obvious by the stones. I think most of the graves were probably marked by wooden markers, but there are a couple of monuments to people buried in there (whose graves have been lost) who died antebellum. Like in the 1830s.

And I keep thinking about this cemetery compared with the Estes cemetery nearby and just how huge they are. And I know that cotton farming was a lot different than the half-assed farming we had going on in Middle Tennessee, that this land just held a lot more black people than over here.

But I can’t help but feel that something closer to this size is what we should be expecting at the Hermitage or at Fairvue or at Wessington. And we don’t see anything close to this.

Anyway, I guess now we’re back to real life.

What If I’m Literally Walking in Memphis in the Rain?

I’m going to see a book I acquired inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Today! I drive over today! This morning I have to pack and put my hair in pin curls and make sure my boa is stashed safely in the car. I even bought sparkly eye shadow!

It may be raining, though, which is a bummer, because my plan was to walk from the hotel to the induction site. I have an umbrella, but an umbrella, a boa, and a purse is a lot to manage.

Still, I’m very excited. And nervous. And delighted.

My Own Handspun Afghan!

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That one row I was worried about with the green border looks fine! My antique moons look better than I imagined. In fact, they all look like moons. A blanket of 80 moons.

And I got some dyeing done on The Professor’s afghan.

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That blue & green might not make it in (probably too bright), but I needed to practice my singles-spinning. But on the right, there’s some stuff I’m hugely excited about. The bottom is just bare fiber, no color added. The two browns are natural browns I had in my stash (and I have one more darker one I’m really excited about spinning). But check out the two on top! Can you see the tiny, tiny bits of color? A little blue, a little gold?

I’ve been studying the inspiration piece and the thing is that it feels like a mostly neutral piece with pops of color, but if you look at it for a while, you see that it’s actually a lot of very, very pale color with pops of that color at full value.

So, I’m having fun trying to get colors light enough to suit me.

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Score one for the blue. The pink and yellow are okay. There are parts that strike me as light enough, but I may end up mixing them with white. I really love that light gray. But how’s this for embarrassing? It took me two tries to get black! From black dye!

Another thing I’ve been thinking hard about is how to mix my colors. The whole thing I love about spinning is seeing how the colors blend and change in a strand. How can I do the thing I love most in a way that best respects the spirit of the inspiration piece?

It’s fun to think about.

More Craft Talk

Not only did I spin my singles and set the twist and have them drying so that I can do a swatch, I worked on my afghan–the one I’m making for myself.

I almost finished, too, but at the last minute, I decided I could just finish it today.

But look!

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I love it so much. It looks even better in person, because you can see all the sparkles, which don’t show up here.

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This is the inspiration piece that The Professor sent me for her afghan. I’m excited about trying to get some of those light colors.

You all may remember my other Bauhaus afghan. I think I’m going to go for that same construction. I’ve given a lot of thought to how I could replicate the long lines in this one, but I’m honestly not that excited about changing the underlying structure of the afghan.