Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 32

The Corvid Meeting

[image error]Border or no border? I can’t decide. I really like it like this, but I’m worried it looks unfinished.

Normally, we have a dozen or so crows in the neighborhood, but every autumn, there’s a big crow family reunion up on Lloyd. Hundreds of crows.

This morning, the crows were all in the process of moving from the trees that line the field behind my house to the trees behind the houses closer to the Fontanel. They were all hollering at each other and a few of them were flying back to check on the stragglers.

One group of stragglers came with a whole army of grackles. It looked like two or three hundred grackles escorting ten crows. (We always have grackles in the neighborhood and it always seems like a lot, so I don’t know if this is more than usual or not.) Once the straggler group of crows got situated in the trees with the rest of the crows, the grackles flew back across the road and settled in the trees on the south side.

At first, I thought maybe the grackles were running the crows off? But then three or four crows flew over to the grackle tree, spent a second, and then flew back to the crows, and no one chased them off. They didn’t treat it like some kind of act of aggression.

So, I really do think those crows and the grackles are friends and hang out together frequently. Maybe those straggler crows were the locals that are here all the time so they know the local grackles? “Come, meet the whole family! It’ll be fine. They’ll love you. We love you. Just come.” But then the grackles got to the reunion and were like “Oh, oh, wow. That’s a lot of strangers. We’ll just stay in our own tree. But we support you! Don’t let Aunt Judith’s passive-aggressive comments sting.”

I don’t know.

At the end of our walk, too, Sonnyboy turned back to me with such a silly grin on his face and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was so funny, but I was sorry to have missed it.

Last Big Dyeing Push of the Year

[image error]



[image error]

I’m going to make an afghan for Busy Mom, once I get the one million afghans on my plate out of the way. But I’m running out of nice days, so I tried to get most of it dyed this weekend. These are dyed from the walnut in Busy Mom’s yard, acorns from my yard, and osage orange.

I’m at the moment trying to get a red for the seams out of Kool-aid and food coloring. I think that’s the thing that will prevent this from looking very boring and beige.

We’re tear-gassing children and still putting them in cages and separating them from their parents, possibly forever. I don’t know what to do to oppose this that would actually matter. When suffering is the goal, when being cruel is the whole point, what does any show of suffering matter? What does outrage matter?

I’m outraged and heartbroken and so fucking angry. But I don’t know what to do with it that would make any difference.

Feeling My Feelings

I spent yesterday doing just what I wanted to. I finished up a couple of writing assignments, dyed some yarn, worked on this afghan, picked out a pattern for another afghan, had a fire in the fire place.

I sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, have a hard time figuring out what I want to do. It’s weird to force yourself to practice figuring out what you’d enjoy.

But I do it because I want to be happy and I want to recognize when I’m happy.

The dog ate half a thin mint on Friday. He lived. But it freaked me out.

I have been asked to speak to a community group in February about the bombing project. I’m excited but nervous.

A thing that causes me a lot of anxiety is that I know there are going to be a ton of things in my book that are wrong. I just didn’t have access to the things I needed or the skill to get to them or I’m sure I’m misinterpreting things or just plain old missed things.

And I keep telling myself that I am wrong in the right direction, that at least I’m showing where people need to be looking.  But I fret about it all the time.

The Wrap

[image error]

I’m normally not the kind of person who has two projects going at once, but I wanted to see how my very own yarn worked up and I thought it might be easier to keep spinning if I had an end project that needed the yarn.  So, I started a wrap for myself.

I’m pretty in love with it. It’s amazing how intentional the yarn looks–like, yeah, it’s supposed to have all these thin bits and these thick poofy bits–instead of me just not yet having drafting down. I kind of just want to look at it all day.

But here’s a farther away shot.

[image error]

I don’t know why the cat has decided that, if there’s crochet photography being done, she needs to be in on it, but she ran in from the other room to be sure she was in this picture.

Yarn 3

[image error]

Sure, it’s still a little overspun, but my consistency is much better. I have a pattern for my wrap picked out and more fiber ordered so I have enough yarn for it.

Here’s a question I have, though. I was watching a video where a spinster went through all the different kinds of spindles she has and why she likes them and what she uses them for and she had a floor spindle and she said, “this is great if you want to sit down while you spin.” And I was like “want?”

Should I be standing?

I’ve just been sitting here like a dumbass.

[image error]

I’ve also made some good progress on the blue areas of this afghan. It helps so much to have that filler there, just in terms of getting the afghan to behave like and afghan.

I still can’t decide about this afghan. I wouldn’t say that I like it, but I find it very compelling. I wish I knew what I was going to do about a border. Maybe I won’t do anything though. Maybe it’s fine like this?

It Was Awesome

Joshua Headley was great. His voice is lovely. His steal guitar player, though, man. I just want to say, I saw you. I saw what you were up to and good job.

Margo Price remains absolutely one of my favorite people to see live. There’s just something about her live show that puts me in mind of Barbara Mandrell, or at least how Mandrell made me feel when I was a little girl.

And Jack White was, of course, Jack White. The whole show felt like an encore, had that energy, at least. And the encore was even more of it. I especially appreciated that he encouraged us all to each build a condo, which, I mean, aren’t we all about at that point?

And I could feel the bass drum in my chest and it was marvelous.

Shawl vs. Wrap

Is there a difference between a shawl and a wrap? Now I’m kind of thinking maybe I won’t ply my singles and instead work them up into something I can throw over my shoulders at work.

Tonight I am doing the thing you would hope a person who publishes with Third Man would get to do, even though I’m feeling very anxious about it. I have work in the morning! I hate crowds. I don’t know what to wear.

But you get asked to shit like this, you say yes, or what if you don’t get asked again?

I devote a lot of energy in my grown-up life figuring out how to give myself permission to say yes to things I think are cool and no to things I don’t want to do.

Anyway, I’m excited.

Better

[image error]

Here’s yarn 2. It’s 100% better than yarn one, so it’s only bad, not awful. I love it. I was definitely able, through pre-drafting, to get closer to a more consistent yarn size. If you look carefully on the left, you can see the size I was going for in the whole thing.

I also think I’m overspinning, but I refuse to be too bummed about that until I see how this plies up. And until I get my fiber consistency better. One challenge at a time.

Also, I am sore as shit. My shoulders are basically like “fuck you, we’re never moving again.”

I’m very torn between plying this and working it up, as is, into a hat. Maybe I’ll wait to make a decision until I get the blue done.

The Blue Part

[image error]

I finished all the stars and I’ve started adding sky. All of which, in the original pattern, were flowers. Still are flowers here, if you squint right.

I’m going to try spinning again today. I dyed the plain roving that I bought, so I was waiting for it to dry. I found a handy tip on the internet that said that, when you’re learning to spin, you should use fiber that you find lovely because it makes your mistakes look interesting, not like you’ve ruined something.

I also found a video–I’ve been watching a ton of videos–in which the spinner, who also uses a drop-spindle, said, that, if you’re having problems drafting or getting how to draft, just draft everything before you spin. Like, before you even pick up the spindle. Just work on drafting your fiber first.

And I was like, oh, duh. I’m not being graded on this. I don’t even want to get very good at it. Like, I’m not setting out to become a spinner. I want to continue to be a crocheter who can dye and spin at a level acceptable to me, if I want to.

So, it’s cool if my skills are and remain fairly basic and rudimentary as long as I can get something that is what I want.

I don’t have to do this “right.” I just have to find something that works for me.

Ha ha ha, I’m genuinely not sure I can handle the pressure of there not being any pressure to be absolutely correct.

I’m starting to see why this was the imperative to come out of my latest nine nights.

Muscle Memory, but Whose?

[image error]

I got my spindle and fiber in the mail yesterday so I spent two hours last evening spinning yarn. Whew, I suck at it! And literally every time I would say to myself, “Okay, I think I’m getting it,” I would fuck up again.

That being said, I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to try again. I thought the part that would suck the most is having to stop so often to wind the yarn on the spindle, but really, the part that sucks is that, if you draft wrong, you can’t fix it. Or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, because I couldn’t see the problem until the twist was actually in.

And should I have set the twist in the single before I plied it? I didn’t. But it did come apart on me a couple of times while I was plying and I wondered if that was why. I mean, aside from the fact that my yarn is literally all the sizes.

Okay, but here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about. When I started pulling apart the fiber to make it more manageable, I felt something so viscerally that it surprised me. A feeling of “rightness”? I guess?

And then, when I started to spin, I felt both like I had no idea what I was doing and that I had forgotten how to do this, because it had been so long. But something forgotten is not quite the same as something unknown.

I have never spun before. I know that.

But I felt, through the whole thing, the frustration of not quite remembering how to do this.

There’s been a lot of research into whether and how memories might be inherited–but as far as I know, mostly dealing with trauma and how traumatic events leave chemical changes in the body that can then be inherited and “remembered” by the new body in some way.

And when I think of how many women in how many branches of my family must have known how to spin for how many generations? I mean, really, I don’t think anyone further back than my great-grandmothers wouldn’t have known how to spin

Everyone else, whether good or bad at it, would have known how to do it. And some of them would have done it so regularly as to know it in their bones. The muscle memories would have been shaped since they were little girls. And then passed down and reinforced. For, what, thousands of years?

How could it not be sitting in my muscles, too?

I’ve been trying to suss out the connection–if there is one–between the disir, who are a category of female ancestral spirits worthy of veneration in old Scandinavian and Germanic traditions, the distaff–a large stick you tie your flax to while you’re spinning–and the dizz–which is a little circular thing that kind of looks like a button that you pull fibers through in order to get them off the combs and into a spinnible conglomerate.

Dizz isn’t in the OED. Distaff seems to have a kind of circular etymology. A distaff is a distaff, but maybe ‘dis’ is flax or spinning flax? But also, distaff refers to the female line in a family, so there’s certainly, possibly still, seemingly a link between the “dis” in distaff having to do with a lineage of women and the “dis” in disir having do with your ancestral lineage of women.

Wikipedia seems to think that the “dis” in disir goes back to a proto-Germanic word that basically means “to suck” or “to suckle.” If you look at how a dizz works on the fiber, you’ll see it kind of sucking and tugging on it.

I think they’re all the same thing. But it’s just a guess and a gut feeling. A muscle memory, if you will.