Sunday, August 12, 2018

Learn by doing

Andy George asks some stupid f'k'n questions. I found his channel by watching videos on pickles in which he explores and makes the dumbest possible mistake of confusing brine fermented pickles with regular acid canning. Then seeks help from a pro pickler (who oddly refuses to reveal her exact ratio to her solution, succeeds with real pickles then challenges the claim that anything can be picked by pickling the most ridiculous things imaginable like bread and sandwiches. Then actually tastes each one. Fascinating. As hangglider crashes are fascinating.

Here he makes a man's suit from scratch. The effort is poorly conceived, hemp pants, wool vest, cotton shirt, silk tie, and alpaca jacket. Visualize that. It's already a mess before even starting. And even imagining it, the suit is too hot. For Inuit inside the Arctic Circle.

But along the way some twenty videos are combined into one. George sheers a sheep. George goes to Texas and picks and combs cotton. George harvests hemp with hippies in Colorado. George sheers an alpaca and felts its wool. George grows silkworms and unravels their cocoons and spins their silk and weaves fabric and sews a tie. George spins and then weaves the cotton and hemp. George sews his suit.

We see again all of the things that we already know from a lifetime of exposure and explaining and films, being rediscovered by a new generation: the brilliance of specialization; the things that people spend their lives perfecting pulled together in unimaginable ways, delived to us in their profound excellence, and cheaper than possible otherwise and far better than anything we could ever do. Andy George learns economics the hard way, and it's entertaining as all get out.

6 comments:

Dad Bones said...

Very interesting.

XRay said...

Yes, I enjoyed that too. Reminds me of Mike Rowe in a way, learning how stuff is done.

The Dude said...

I have been around and involved with most of those processes all my life, I would have preferred flax to hemp and linen to hemp cloth.

Little known fact - here where water power drove cotton mills for a century or so the shuttle cocks were fashioned out of dogwood. It is a dense, long wearing, fine grained wood. Pink, too, from what I hear. I turned a large dogwood bowl - something like 16" in diameter and sold it to a member of a cult. She paid in cash so I was good with that sale.

XRay said...

I didn't know dogwoods got that big.

deborah said...

I heard the phrase 'bespoke suit' recently for the first and second times within days of each other.

MamaM said...

Oh deborah, don't tease. Be a doll and let us know how and why and what you learned about it after hearing the phrase "bespoke suit" be spoken.