It's the sweater made from Malabrigo kettle-dyed merino Uruguayan yarn I apparently bought April 15, so for those still concerning themselves with the illusion of time, it took less than three months.

No written pattern was used! I wrote the pattern myself based on analysis of a sweater in the actual physical world. This was a big step for me, being as how I am usually enemies with the physical world.

Front. Has a patch pocket.


Back.

I picked up Dylan's latest, Together Through Life today. I think I have to stop buying Dylan albums. Maybe going to Dylan concerts, too, though I'll let you know after July 17 - I'm mostly looking forward to John Mellencamp in that one, actually never seen him, missed my chance back when I was 17 and was most into him.

Bob Dylan reminds me of Woody Allen now. Woody Allen is just old and you can't buy him as a leading man anymore. Likewise I wouldn't be able to buy Bob Dylan anymore in one of his raw fucked-up love songs, or one of his acid-trip motorpsycho nightmares, even if he tried to do one, which he doesn't. I was still interested in Dylan up to two albums ago. On Love and Theft at least we still got some cute lines like

Samantha Brown lived in my house about four or five months
Samantha Brown lived in my house about four or five months
Don't know how it looked to other people; I never slept with her even once

But Modern Times and this latest one don't even give me that. I don't wish his career ill, but it should have ended with Time Out of Mind. You could totally buy that one. You could buy it because it was what an old man could reasonably offer. It ended with the wild rambling "Highlands," semi-coherent including an extended bizarre conversation with a waitress that I'm terribly tempted to quote in its entirety right here. "The party's over," he mumbles, walking down the street dodging "young people in the park." "And there's less and less to say." Sadly, you said it, Bob. Love you.

I made a really good stir-fry! Did you try to make a stir-fry and put chicken breast in it, and the chicken is so dry and takes forever to chew, and you think, "I should just make vegetarian stir-fries from now on. I guess I don't really like chicken after all." No? Oh wait, that's me that thinks that.

There's a few simple tricks.

- 20 minute soak in soy sauce-sherry solution, which functions as both brine and marinade
- toss in oil-cornstarch-flour mixture, which functions as an imperceptible coating
- flat pieces, cooked only 1 minute on side 1 and 30 seconds on side 2, which functions to cook them just long enough and no longer

The Best Recipe strikes again! Did you ever make a recipe and think, "Did anyone even try that?" Best Recipe tries 'em 20 ways from Sunday. And lets you know why you are taking every step that they tell you to take. Let's put Best Recipe up on the big board, Jimmy, of my pantheon of heroes.

It's our anniversary! Now, steel yourself, because the 11th is the steel anniversary. I got some stainless steel salad tongs. Xopher is erecting a steel shed this year and that can be his gift.

It's also aphelion, the day the earth is farthest away from the sun. Happy Aphelion!

Oh and it's Independence Day or something like that.

We're working our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway when in fact we're slip-sliding away

Paul Simon, of course. Those words really struck me when I was young and first heard them, but I interpreted them slightly differently. I thought he just meant that we don't know what the hell we're doing, and that we're blissfully ignorantly doomed.

Now they strike me differently. We think we're gliding down the highway, under our own motive power, when in fact, what progress we make down the highway is more than negated by the fact that the highway itself may be sliding under us in a quite different direction, one which we do not control.

Monk #1: Smells great! What is it?
Monk #2: Split pea soup, Brother Mendel.

Caption: Genetic research is set back 150 years.

Once a year ilivetodye mows my lawn.

I sewed up these pillowcases last night. They look nice but you don't know what a crap job I did. You don't know how badly mismatched the trim was from the case on one of them, or how I burnt the first attempt at trim with the iron, or how crooked they really are. I stink so bad. I am such a bumbler. I cannot negotiate my way through the physical world to save my life. My brain drifts off into algorthimic mode. Now, a + b = c, I start thinking, and somehow the physical reality fades away until it's too late. I know I'm supposed to make adjustments to account for the messiness of the physical world. To paraphrase the song from Oklahoma, "I know I mustn't fall into the pit... but when I start to sewing... I forgit."

Suppose you have two pattern pieces of equal length. a = b. Suppose you cut two pieces of fabric to match. c = d. Suppose you sew a 5/8 inch seam on each one. c - 5/8 = d - 5/8. They should still match. But how many places did you leave room to introduce error? ["Four," says X.] And in how many places do you think I actually introduced error? ["Six," says X.] Right. So adjust, right? Like I said, I forgit. c - 5/8 SHOULD equal d - 5/8 goddammit. It's SUPPOSED TO. Problem is physical reality doesn't know what it's supposed to do.

If I lived in a society where I was judged strictly on practical huswifery, my life would be such a failure. What a crappy cook you are, what a crappy sewer you are, I'd be told. But look! I'd answer. Look how I alphabetized my spices!

Oh, I'd probably be illiterate, but if I'd so much as heard of the alphabet, I'd have been intrigued and learned it. It's so wonderfully.... symbolic.

"Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement. Somehow, every worker in the cutting-edge workplace is now supposed to act like an “intrapreneur,” that is, to be actively involved in the continuous redefinition of his own job. Shop class presents an image of stasis that runs directly counter to what Richard Sennett identifies as “a key element in the new economy’s idealized self: the capacity to surrender, to give up possession of an established reality.” This stance toward “established reality,” which can only be called psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw."

Shop Class as Soulcraft, a long essay by Matthew B. Crawford, and now that I've read the essay, I don't have to buy the book based on it and page through all the filler.

It is a very schoarly essay about how cool it is to make stuff and fix stuff, real physical stuff; and how it uses your brain, sometimes moreso than activities more commonly thought of as "brainy". Like, I don't know, writing an essay with a lot of big words.

This has been gelatinizing in my brain since I read this. I think it might be set now. Bear with me.

Each life is a weaving. The warp stretches over the loom and is as long as the given lifespan. Each day a single weft thread is laid. The weft is time. The weft is laid automatically, and it will be laid no matter what we do, as certainly as time marches forward.

You can pretend to control it. You can pantomime the act of weaving and say, "OK, over this warp thread, under that warp thread, over this, under that..."

You can worry about the time itself. "OK, I have to get another weft thread laid down today. What time is it? How far along am I? I think I can get this done."

You can worry about the details. "Today I want this particular color, not too much that color and not too much the other color, I don't want to clash with this color I did before, now is this color quite what I wanted?"

You can try to see patterns. "See that red splotch? Doesn't it look like a rose?" Or make patterns. "This looks like a red splotch right now but I'm making a rose - see how it's turning out? This here is the stem."

You can lament parts already woven. "Look at that sick green spot. I wanted it to be a little froggie, but it looks like a toadstool, dammit."

Or you can do practically nothing at all. And the weaving will happen anyway.

And when it's done, regardless which approach you took, you'll end up with the same thing... a weaving. You may have thought you were controlling it, getting it done, but it would have happened anyway. You may have tried to make 'things' on it, but you don't actually end up with a rose, a froggie, or a toadstool. Those were just your own chosen perceptions, illusions. It's all just weaving, one thread going under another and over another. The stuff of life.

Sexuality is a gift from god.

Thus sayeth various religious outfits tending towards the abstinence-only crowd... Well Miss Manners will be the first to tell you that when you receive a gift, you can do anything you want with it and it is no longer the donor's business. He's not supposed to be poking around, like, hey, how's my gift? Or like...

God: Hey, how are you enjoying that sexuality I gave you a while back?
Person: [thinking: Well it sure beats that mug you gave me year before last...] Oh, it's great. We use it all the time. I know it says, "To be used only within the context of marriage for the purposes of procreation," but we just take it out any old time we feel like it.
God: Good, good...
Person: I mean, it's too nice a thing to just keep for special occasions like that, ya know?
God: Yes... so... how come I don't see it on display anywhere?
Person: Oh it's right here [flash]
God: [I wonder if she's just being polite, and wouldn't prefer something like a nice mug next time...]

2 pounds of Rembrandt, on the right is Grasshopper, on the left is a mix of Grasshopper and Paprika and I think the best way to combine those words is to call to Hossenpfeffer which I know I am spelling wrong. Today I also made lasagna and orange sherbet. Sundays I like to just keep going and going. I got up and started washing mohair and I just polished off my orange sherbet and there was barely a break in between.

The above is a junior mint with colored frosting sandwiched between two mini vanilla wafers. I'm not responsible for it. Below, I am am responsible for once again spinning straw into gold, or rather spinning yucky goat hair into something you wouldn't mind having in the same house as you.

I think next time I want some black mohair I'll just find someone with a black goat.

There was a headline yesterday about somebody's Xmas card photo showing up as a grocery store ad in Prague unbeknownst to her. It made me smirk without much thinking about it. Then it was covered on NPR where they interviewed the chick, and it turns out she had posted the photo online here and there and "on a couple of social networking sites," and my interest plummeted.

Jee, how did my photo end up in Czechoslovakia? I only posted it on the frikkin World Wide Web.

I totally need a goat tower.

Today my big stupid buck got his horn stuck in the feeder. I think it took me a half hour to free him. I often look at this guy and marvel that I own such a big, gangly, thoroughly dopey creature.

This is only of interest to ilivetodye and myself, but hey, ilivetodye, check out the results of my 'black' dyeing. Did you ever see anything so frankly purple? This was 9 tsp Jet Black, about 2 hours simmering and another 22 hours or so sitting in the dyepot. The dyepot is still inky dark so I guess I have to dye some more stuff in it. I'd like to go for a slightly different color by throwing in some other dye with it, but, what's in there is already so thick, I despair of any material ever absorbing it all as it is.

It's my two-year-old little fighter Mick Fleecewood, or half of him after shearing day.

I'll link back to this page when it's become a neat bobbin of shiny black yarn.

"All over central Europe [in the Neolithic] women were inventing more and more elaborate textiles, regardless of modern economists' models. One of the key issues to understanding this 'extravagance' is time. Not only were there infinitely fewer entertainments tugging at one's attention in a pre-industrial rural setting, but expenditure of time was viewed very differently from the way it is within an industrial economy. To us, time is money - to be 'saved', 'spent', 'budgeted', 'invested', or (horrors!) 'squandered'. For them, money was irrelevant because it hadn't been invented yet, nor would it be for another twenty-five hundred years. So there was nothing to weigh time against; it simply was what it was. Furthermore, it was an automatic resource, unlike food or material goods (including money). Time was constantly available for use to promote survival, whether directly (e.g. by preparing food and building shelter) or indirectly - that is, by trying to elicit symbolically what was wanted. The latter is a use that many of us have forgotten." Elizabeth Wayland Barber - Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years (Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times)

"In years gone by, spinning was a necessary, daily part of life. The question of having enough 'time,' if it came up at all, was either rhetorical or in response to a local crisis. The textile arts might be temporarily halted by harvest home, roof fire, or High Holy day. Otherwise, spinning (and its many related tasks) continued at every opportunity." Alden Amos, The Big Book of Handspinning

"How long will it take you to spin up that pound of wool rolags? Well, the task will take as long as it needs to, and not a moment longer." Alden Amos again

"In such [pre-industrial] societies, time is not a commodity to be 'saved' or 'spent': days are not divided into so many hours for work, so many for play, so many for the pursuit of art... The finished product is an exquisitely delicate fabric that holds value and meaning within the weaver's culture, but not by the standards of judgment used in an industrialized society, where the number of hours of work is given a cash value. In pre-industrial society, the process of making the textile, regardless of how long it takes, is simply a part of the artist's life." Kate Peck Kent, Prehistoric Textiles of the Southwest - quoted in Alden Amos

If you participate in industrialized society, or have people depending on you who do, you can't escape the clock. But when you are off the clock, I encourage you to put it away entirely. Look at your creative endeavors; they take as long as they take and their value is not in hours. Your value is not in hours. Weave your productivity and industry into the warp & weft of your life. Leave the clocks out of it.