Friday Feedback

Hey folks! Chris is exhausted after a long, hard day of work at the Fort at No. 4, and asked me to put up a Friday Feedback for y’all.

First and foremost, we went up to the Fort today because we want to warp our new loom. In order to do that, we have to get the warp thread organized. That’s done on a warping rack or warping board. You can see in the video that Chris is winding the thread along a very long pathway over several of the pegs. We figure we wound about 3900 yards of wool thread today, in about 3 hours. It was a lot of work on Chris’s part. What you see him doing in this video is a very tiny clip. Think that, done hundreds and hundreds of times. When all the winding was done, it was tied to keep it organized, and then pulled into a large hank that keeps the threads organized and neat, while making it shorter and easier to carry.

The warping board you see in the picture here is a proper 18th century one. We only wanted to have about 10 yards of fabric when we’re done weaving. I’m sure Chris can explain the math of this one for you later (I still don’t really get it), but three pegs on either side, wound in batches of 16 (not strings, but 16 rounds of all the pegs), basically is the warp for about 10 yards of fabric. I can’t tell you how many batches; it was a LOT. But look at all the pegs. They go all the way to the floor. It’s entirely possible that they would have used the entire board to warp a loom for many, many yards of fabric. It’s truly incredible!

This is the other reason we went up to the Fort today. Chris wanted to work with some of the nice planes, so that he could flatten the sides of these pieces of wood. Now that they’re flat, he can make me an inkle loom from them. Again, I’ll leave that to him. Inkle looms are used for making narrow bands of wool or cotton. Inkle woven bands can be used like twill tape (for strings on aprons or petticoats, for instance), or for binding the edges of blankets, or as a decorative band on a hat, or if you go farther back in history, as pretty trim on dresses. I’ve wanted an inkle loom for a very long time, and this is an amazing Christmas present for me!

Right, Friday recap time.

There was a big flood a couple of weeks ago in the Carolinas, and while not ALL the conspiracy theories were correct, enough of them were right enough that it’s worse than I thought. Briefly, yes, FEMA did seize a certain number of goods, but no, they didn’t take from a church. FEMA is rumored (please note, UNSUBSTANTIATED) to be claiming civilian run charity spots as their own. VP Harris said that a whopping $750 would be available to the people who survived Helene, but I only know of a handful of people who have gotten it out of the literally hundreds of thousands of people there. Currently, FEMA isn’t doing too bad a job in some places, and isn’t present at all in others. It’s very hit or miss. Personal friends who I know face to face went down with a huge truck load of supplies, and the only place they were turned away from was a spot where the road was crumbling and the security people were not allowing anything but foot traffic to go over it. Many of the supply spots right now are quite full, and they are asking people to be generous again in three weeks or so, because this is going to take months or possibly years to fix. Everyone on the ground appears to be incredibly thankful and grateful.

Milton hit Florida on Thursday night, and there are a few deaths and a lot of power outages. It doesn’t appear to have been nearly as bad as they were worried, but there were also tornadoes at the same time, and those caused a lot of havoc. I’ve no idea what all is going on there right now, as I haven’t had time to read any news on it. All I know is that friends of mine decided to stay in their home (they were not in the “zone A” evacuation area) and they got heavy rain, some winds, and are out of power… but nothing catastrophic, thank heavens.

Trump has continued campaigning. The Left are in total meltdowns over much of what he and Elon Musk have done for the Carolinas. Apparently, when billionaires actually help out and donate money, time, and goods, it only counts if they’re leftists… or something. With nothing much else to bitch about, the left decided to make fun of Elon’s jumping, which is just another example of them treating people with disabilities and differences as if they’re garbage.

Harris did an interview with 60 Minutes, and it turns out there are at least two different versions of her answers to the interviewer. In one, she speaks clearly and concisely, and that’s the one they put on television. Then there’s the word salad version, which really doesn’t address anything (to the point where the interviewer had to remind her what the actual question was).

The left is convinced that Trump is a menace to society, that he’s cheating in court, that he’s going to enslave women, and dozens of other things. Meanwhile, more and more people are coming forward, who started to transition gender when they were young and are now de-transitioning. There’s a lot of concern about what the drugs will do to developing bodies. The left seems to freak out if you suggest that an MMR shot will protect their kids from common and deadly diseases, but it’s perfectly okay to use puberty blockers and surgery on them. I got nothin’.

What are you guys thinking of the current format of the blog? Are you still enjoying the articles? What would you like to see more of? I know that the Supreme Court is back in session, so Chris should be doing more legal analysis, soon. I’m going to continue with recipes, prepper stuff, and political commentary in general.

One thing that will be happening in the next week or two is that I’ll be creating a TikTok account for Vine of Liberty. I will do a weekly recap there, and maybe do some verbal meandering about politics. Hopefully that’s of interest to some of you, and will pull some people from TikTok over to here. There’s a very robust Conservative community there.

I leave you with a flame to warm you if you’re cold, and to brighten your day if it was dark, for whatever reason. This was the fire I had going at the Fort, while we were doing the warp threading. It was chilly, in the low 50s, and I realized I had everything I needed to make it warm.