Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 27

The Bombing Talk

It went well. Really well. The audience was super engaged. I wish I’d had more photos, but the photos I had were good. And people seemed to get my points and be along for my inferences.

One woman told me it was the best presentation they’d ever had, which, frankly, I find hard to believe, but it’s super sweet.

I’m starting to feel like this could be a big deal. Like everything is coming together in a way I don’t quite know what to do with. The topic is good and interesting. My writing is informed, but engaging. I’m knowledgeable and engaging.

This could be something.

That’s thrilling and terrifying.

My Talk

If you have an hour or so, you can listen to it here:

Freedom

I spent six hours yesterday with a Civil Rights leader and Freedom Rider, Rip Patton. He was delightful. We talked about everything from drums to how to foster hope in people.

How is this life?

He sang. He quoted scripture in ways that moved me to tears. He listened so intently to the students he was supposed to be speaking to. He asked them such interested questions.

He spoke only obliquely about trauma, but I think I’ll be thinking the most about that, about the things he couldn’t remember and his decision to not try to remember them, assuming his mind was trying to do him a favor.

He was charming and funny. It was great.

Merino, Revisited

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So, as you recall, I wasn’t in love with merino when I first tried to spin it–and it’s everywhere. Every cool fiber prep in all the neat colors–it’s all merino. And I’m just like “ugh, why do people like this? The staple is short. Sure it’s soft, but it’s not light and airy.”

But, y’all, in mixing the merino with this mystery crappy fiber, I am beginning to appreciate the wonders of merino. It sticks to everything. It’s like the cobwebs of wool. And it helps make everything it sticks to smooth and soft.

With my woolfriend, BFL, when you grab the end and pull the fibers apart, the fibers kind of poof out, like you’ve done the magic trick where you get a bouquet of flowers out of your magic wand. It’s like a fountain of long, soft fibers.

Which is great for spinning! It’s just one clump of long fiber after another. But they’re not particularly grabby. If you get a fat spot, you can kind of tug on it until the fibers slide apart and thin out.

Whereas when you grab the end of the merino and start pulling, if you pull slowly, fiber keeps coming. The individual staple length is short, but it holds onto its buddies.

So, mixing the BFL with the crappy fiber worked okay, but it was, in essence, just twisting the BFL and the crappy fiber together. You could still feel the scratchiness of the crappy fiber (though much lessened).

But the merino sticks to the crappy fiber. Pulls it along into the drafting zone. You’re don’t have to make sure that you’re also grabbing the crappy fiber. It’s right there.

I still love the shit out of spinning the BFL by itself. But I’m starting to come around on merino. And I can see why it was so valuable in the past. It’s not just that it, by itself, has the softness or whatever. It’s that it makes your other wool better.

Weekend

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I finished a draft of the bombing presentation. I have a few images and a powerpoint to show them with. I’m nervous.

Saw this booger on Saturday. I think he’s starting to realize that’s him on the screen.

Then I took his sister on a spoooooooky adventure. We went to Hail, Dark Aesthetics, which is a shop where you can buy tarot cards and fetal pigs and coffins and t-shirts. I feel like I was watching her become goth before my very eyes as she wandered around the shop looking at everything.

She was, of course, attracted to all the witchcraft and Satanism stuff. I tried to give her Baby’s First Lecture on Alistair Crowley where I told her that he had a really fun, bad reputation and had written a lot of books people are afraid of, but he was actually an annoying douche who used magic mostly to get to have sex with people.

“That sounds great,” she said.

So, I guess I’ll visit her in England when she buys Boleskin House and shacks up with a demon and runs a sex cult. Oops. Sorry, The Butcher. Turned your step-daughter into a Crowleyite by trying to warn her away from Crowley.

Then we went and wandered around the grounds of the old Masonic children’s home. Which doesn’t have a reputation for being haunted, but totally should.

Then we went and had hot chocolate.

Then I took her to the cemetery to learn to dowse. Y’all she sucked at finding dead people. I felt so bad for her. I would walk across a grave and the rods would cross. She’d walk across a grave and nothing.

Finally, she got a little movement in the rods and I said, “Well, let’s just walk where they’re pointing. And we walked and walked and circled way back to the far end of the cemetery and they crossed really hard.She looked up at me confused. I looked around at the obviously graveless thicket we were standing in front of.

And then I saw it: the fire hydrant.

I was like, “Ha, guess you’re a water witch.”

Which probably didn’t slow her decent into becoming Crowley’s avatar and spectral bride, or whatever happens to you when your aunt takes you for a spooky day.

Then I carded the shit out of the crappy fiber and mixed it with some merino and made this yarn:

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But this is how much crappy fiber I still have, so there’s a lot of fixing left to do:

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The First Real Doctored Fiber

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This is some of the bad purple and the bad yellow mixed with yellow and purple BFL and a little silk. It kind of looks like antique Mardi Gras, so I’m happy with the color.

But it spins like a bear. You have to do a really short draw to get all those tiny fibers (otherwise, you’d just be pulling out all the silk. And when you come to one of the second cuttings, it just makes a blob in the yarn that you can’t really pull thin.

But next up is some straight up BFL so that should be nice. It’s a broken purple I hand-dyed earlier this month.

Sorry

Sorry I haven’t been around much lately. I’m using my time in the mornings to get my bombing talk together.

I’m excited but super nervous.

And tonight I’m going to be reading from JESUS CRAWDAD DEATH at the Vandy Barnes & Noble, if you want to come on by.

And Now There’s a Drum Carder

I went to the fiber expert yesterday. She analyzed my fiber and said that the problem was that the staple was just way too short–maybe only an inch. She also showed me all the places the fiber was full of second cuttings, really short fibers caused by the shearer taking a second pass over the sheep in that spot.

She said that it could be spun, but it needed to be carded. Even still, it was going to be very fuzzy because of how short the staple is.

The easiest fix, she said, was to blend it with longer fibers.

Then she sold me a bunch of merino off her personal sheep and lent me her drum carder. Go forth and mix my crappy fiber with her merino.

Literally, all I want to do is stand around carding fiber all day. It’s so much fun.

And look at this yarn I got just from blending the crappy fiber with some longer fiber I’d already dyed.

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I’m still not the greatest at spinning on the wheel yet, but I’m going to have a shit ton of fiber to practice with.

Moving Up

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I bought something off Craig’s List for the first time in my life. I don’t even know what to say about it. There was a moment, last night, when I really started getting it, getting into the groove of it, and I felt something in my brain relax in a way I don’t think I have every relaxed before in my life.

This may be the best money I ever spent on myself.

I hung out with the nephew, too, and he somehow made my phone play Muddy Waters and my heart filled so full watching his delight. He wiggled. He kicked his feet. He clapped. He sang along with the harmonica.

There’s so much cool about watching a baby experience music to remind you about what is awesome about it. Del doesn’t have any preconceptions about what’s the most important part of a song. He just enjoys all the components of it. And it just reminds me that music is awesome.

Today I’m going to get help fixing the fiber that vexes me.

I should probably also do some dishes.

Mapping the Klan

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It’s a little like trying to make sense of the innards of a lava lamp. But basically, I think there are two philosophical questions driving Klansmen at this point: 1. Are you willing to do violence that might get people killed? 2. Are you only pro-segregation and anti-black (in which case Catholics and Jews could be Klan members) or are you pro-white protestant (in which case, they can’t)? Groups break up and reconfigure based on the answers to those questions at any given moment.

As a side note, the Jewish Klansman appears to have been the Bigfoot of the Klan. You see people claiming they knew someone who had seen one and maybe you can’t rule out all the claims, but no one has conclusive proof. Plus, and not kidding here, this Jewish Klansman was said to have been either in south Georgia or south Alabama, down in the swamps.

That a skunk ape and the elusive Jewish Klansman have the same home is hilarious to me.