Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 28

The Plan

[image error]

I found a sheep farmer west of town. On Sunday I’m going to bring all this shit to her and she’s going to look at it. Hopefully, it just needs to be run through a drum carder, but she’s going to help me end up with something I like and want to spin.

Two pounds of wool I hate. It makes me sick to think of it.

Manx Loaghtan

[image error]

So, like I said, as it came out of the package, it was a very uniform, but cool-tone brown. I wanted it to be a little warmer and not so solid in coloring, so I gave it some red, yellow, and orange highlights.

And then I still had the problem of the relatively short staple length. But Rivikah made me feel brave, so I stuck some silk to it. You can see the results of my silk-sticking experiments here. Some places have a lot more silk (it’s the blue, shiny stuff) and some places have a lot less, but there it is.

Silk is really weird to spin and I wouldn’t say that I’m very good at drafting it with the wool, but I’m practicing.

As for the other fiber, there was so much dirt–literally dirt–at the bottom of my bucket after washing the first batch. I can’t even tell you. But the other thing is that it’s just a huge amount of fiber. Like, whoa, I didn’t pay enough attention to the description. I’ll probably overdye some of it. So, that’s nice to find I have fiber to dye. I’ll probably do like I did with the Manx Loaghtan here and dye it different shades of the colors it already is. So, instead of one yellow, I’ll give myself four or five different yellows.

So, there’s a plan. An extension of yesterday’s “What the fuck, fiber?!” plan.

This is My Displeased Face

[image error]

So, I got this fiber on sale for $5 a piece. I thought, “What a great deal!” It’s normally three times that and it’ll be fun to play around with.” And it’s my yarn boyfriend, BFL.

I… I don’t know what I expected. But when I opened it up yesterday to do said actually playing around with it, it was full of dander and plant stuff. Plant stuff doesn’t really bother me. It’s a sheep. But the dander seemed weird considering this has been dyed. I mean, sure, a little bit can make its way a long way in the process, but this is a ton. If you soaked the fiber to get it wet to dye, you’d think most of it would have floated away.

Also, it’s really coarse, at least compared to the other BFL I have, and the fibers aren’t very parallel. If I had a drum carder, I’d just run it through and not worry about it, but I’m trying not to invest hundreds of dollars in a hobby I’ve had for four weeks.

I’m pissed. Basically I’m pissed because I don’t know if I have the skills to make this usable to me. My plan–and please holler if you have a better one–is to wash everything in a long, soaking, soapy bath, like just give each length of roving a huge amount of room to float around and let loose any dirt and crap.

Oh, yeah, because this is what the water looked like as I started my trial of this plan:

[image error]

Again, how could you have dyed this fiber and it still be this dirty? It makes no sense to me. You have to get the fiber wet to dye it. You have to rinse the fiber when you’re done dying it. In most dying methods, it sits in really hot water for at least ten minutes. How could this possibly be the fourth time this fiber has touched water? I’m not even accusing anyone of wrong doing.

The fiber is dyed and the dye job is uniform and nice, so it clearly must have happened. This is more like a physics issue.

Okay, anyway, back to my plan. Everything gets a long, long bath and then a good drying. Then I’m going to pull everything through a house key, like some rudimentary dizz, to encourage more of the fibers to lay parallel. They’re fairly parallel now, but I would like to encourage more.

And then I’m never going to buy this again, no matter how good the sale.

Opposition

Okay, well, I started out intending to write this post, but I wrote about wool instead. I also intended to do more research for the book this weekend, but I mostly spun wool instead.

Here’s what I’m avoiding thinking about: there is an organized, long-standing, ongoing, highly-influential, white separatist opposition movement in this country.

Racism isn’t just some bad habit of white people we can educate ourselves out of. It’s not just an accidental structural remnant left over from worse times. It’s not even just your embarrassing family member’s terrible beliefs. I wouldn’t even call it a conspiracy, because it’s not a secret, not hidden. We can’t just sit around and wait for it to die off, because it’s not a superstition. It’s an organized, self-replicating movement.

That most of us do not see, at least, not the full scope of it. We see parts of it, some people see a lot of it, but you can’t say the truth–that we, as a nation, are in an ongoing civil war that started in 1776 and continues to this day that regularly flares into violence and once flared into a military war–without sounding like a conspiracy theorist nut job.

It’s a stark question: do you believe that everyone here, in this country, is your equal and deserves the same consideration as you or do you believe that equality is for those fit for it? Because the people who believe the former are in a vicious fight where people get hurt and die with the latter.

But also, and a part that I find the biggest mindfuck about it, is that the carrot dangled in front of white people in order to get us to ignore that the civil war is ongoing is the privilege of forgetting. White people are allowed to have myths instead of history or to have nothing, no past at all, to be born afresh every day with no stain of history, no dirt from yesterday.

But it’s the same thing–some people have to have their pasts and the actions of their fellow community members and what happened three states over fifty years ago scrutinized and constantly judged and others start every moment an innocent lamb. And a lot of us are scrambling for innocent lamb designation.

And part of that innocence is playing The Fool. Even when people get caught being active agents of this white separatist movement, even if you can show their long history of it, their ties to other white separatists, etc., they just act like they misspoke or, worse, they don’t defend themselves at all, but other folks rush forward to explain it away as a misstatement or them just being ignorant.

I don’t know how to explain it, because I don’t know of an analogy from another country that loses the nuance of what was going on in that other country.

But it’s making me feel sick to my stomach, over and over, to see this evil in plain sight and to watch how easily it gets people to pretend it’s not as large or central to things as it is.

Wool Review

Merino–not in love with it. Which, apparently, puts me at odds with 90% of the internet. I feel like I’ve finally gotten a feel for how to spin it, but I feel like, when you fuck up, it isn’t very forgiving. Like, if you don’t get enough twist in a length of fiber, the whole thing disintegrates into infinite pieces and I end up crying.

BFL–my fiber boyfriend. It’s got a nice, long staple. It’s soft enough for me. It spins pretty easily and, when you fuck up, it’s like “Fine, just stick me back together and make sure you get a decent twist in there this time.” I want to try dying it before I know if this is a long-term commitment, but so far, so good.

Peduncle silk–I got this in my Paradise Fibers monthly box. I mixed it and the other two fibers together and spun up a sample. It’s nice. It’s not wool, obviously, but I’m not changing the name of this post. Silk doesn’t have the same boing as wool, so it’s a little weird to spin it. What came in the box was a kind of silvery-gray. I overdyed mine with blue. It’s drying in the bathroom.

Manx Loaghtan–I guess you’re supposed to keep this naturally brown? But it’s kind of a cold-tone brown and I wanted something a little warmer, so I added some reds and oranges. It’s got a medium short fiber and, though that’s what I hate about Merino, for some reason, I guess because the Manx Loaghtan lacks pretension, I don’t mind it. Though we’ll see how I feel when I spin more of it. In dying it, though, it kind of reminded me of a friendly dog. It did just fine in the pot. I don’t see any felting issues. And it’s hanging in my bathroom urging me to do something nice and weird with it.

Kent Romney–They claim that this has a staple length, on average, of 3.15 inches. They also claim the Manx Loaghtan has a staple length of 3 inches. The Romney staple length is easily half again as long as the Loaghtan in real life. I’d believe something much more like 2.5 for the Loaghtan and 4 for the Romney, though I’m not getting up to measure anyone. I hippie dyed the Romney.

[image error]

and I’ve spun up some of it.

[image error]

It dyed up really beautifully, though I have to learn to keep my yellow under control, better. I feel like I had a mildly hard time spinning it, because it… I’m not sure how to explain it. On the one hand it’s not very grabby. It doesn’t just pull in loose fibers as it spins. You have to go grab them for it which lead me to some overly thin spots, which I’m worried are going to come apart on me when plying. But, on the other hand, when you put that yarn someplace, it sticks. Another weird thing about it is just how much fiber it wants for a single. Like, what I’m used to being able to draft out quite a bit with the BFL, that amount the Romney just wanted for a little bit.

I’m curious to see, after it rests and is plied, how much it’s going to expand, because there’s a lot of fiber.

Gaze in Wonder

[image error]

I have changed my plans today from whatever I was going to do to “gaze in wonder at this yarn.”

I love everything about it. I love how purple it is. I love how curly it is. I’m really proud of how the strands are almost a uniform width.

I’m going to make myself an afghan. It’s going to take a long while, but I want to do it. I have a few afghans I’ve made, but they’re in closets. Nothing on display. I want to make something beautiful for myself.

I also just kind of want to wear this yarn around like a necklace.

Am I Messing Up?

I missed so much in the Hattie Cotton file when I first read through it, because I just didn’t have the context to make sense of it. And now I’m a little stressed about whether I should read through the other FBI files I have (and thought I was done with) to see what pops out there.

Writing a book is hard.

Well, writing this book is hard.

BFL

[image error]

I bought myself a bunch of BFL (blue-faced Leicester), which is supposedly and apparently an easier yarn to learn to spin because the fibers are really long. I am enjoying the shit out of spinning it. These last two evenings, I didn’t even work on my afghan, because I’d just rather spend a couple of hours doing this.

A thing, though, that still irritates the piss out of me is that everything having to do with spinning is so expensive. How can this thing that used to be so ubiquitous–that multiple people in every household would have known how to do–cost so much to do it?

It’s like there’s a level of the craft missing. There are all these things that clearly are solutions for the time/labor intensive but cheap as fuck way to do things, but it’s not clear what those cheap things are/were. Like, I got a really, really great deal on some solid color fiber and I’d like to blend the four solid colors I got together in some ways, to give me more variety of yarn. A blending board costs $150.

Which… I mean, Jesus Christ. It’s a prickly cutting board. But, hell, it’s not like I know how to make a prickly cutting board, so more power to you, blending board makers of the universe.

But there’s something before this, clearly. Some thing spinners did or do that would make them exasperatedly say, fine, fuck it. I’ll shell out the $150.

But what is that?

I’ve watched a couple of tutorials on making “fauxlags,” which I think might suit my purposes. I wanted to test it out last night, but I don’t have a free flat workspace, because I have so much other shit started.

More Yarn

[image error]

I bought myself a bunch of BFL, on the advice of spinners who said it’s easier to spin when you’re just starting out. But I wasn’t going to start it until I finished the merino. This weekend, I finished the merino.

It’s not great yarn, but it’s good yarn. And I love it.

Forward

I know I said this, but it remains true. I love how the Turkish spindle just spins forward forever. It really seems like, once you have a spindle that spins so long, the invention of the wheel is inevitable. Once you know how nice it is to have something you’ve set to spinning just continue to spin, you start to daydream about how nice it would be if you didn’t have to stop and put it all on the spindle.

I went to the grocery store yesterday, so today my to-do list is dishes, ply this merino, walk the dog, water the plants, and crochet some.

I feel pretty decadent.