Wooly Bully: Oh, the Jacket!

24 May 2025

If an individual is a libertarian conservative, living in California requires the patience of a saint.  I fail miserably, and often, at attaining that celestial level to which any sane and civilized human being — seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness —and justice — must aspire in Gavin-ville.

Yesterday, Dear Husband reinforced my opinion that, while the rest of America is enjoying gas-recovery, We the People in California get nothing but smelly hot air from the Idiots-in-Charge.

Forking over the Golden State to non-citizens has long been a lewd and uncontested tradition among the Socialists who dare not utter their identities.  It must be a hellish life, having to live behind petrified, phoney faces, but America has developed entire industries dedicated to the proposition that Anyone, and Anything, can be prestidigitated into a fake reality, Anywhere.

California has become the epicenter of egregious fraudulence, but, hey, when you’re a virgin paradise, and eternally virtuous, you can do anything, and at least try to get away with it.

I contemplate the fate of Attention-Whore Gavin, not in my dreams, but in real life.  The fitting finale is one of having his fraudulent face peeled away, one layer at a time, to reveal the Picture of Dorian Gray, in a slow, agonizingly slow strip-tease of his smug pug.

The process truly is his punishment, cause the peeling of this obnoxious onion shall take the remainder of his lame-brain term-in-office.  He’s not worthy of a quick and merciful exposure of his aberrant and abhorrent Getty-oil-bratness.

Some of the benevolent sunshine upon the darkness of his deeds shall be provided by the truly good Do-Gooders of DOGE.  The rest of it, well, Karma, Jehovah, Yahweh, the Creator, and the King of Kings shall all get their turn at justice-on-earth.

I’m not one to believe strongly in justice-on-earth when the guilty parties have rigged the legal, legislative, juridical, fund-raising, media-twerking, dark-money bundling, and Hollyweird systems in their favor.  Governor Gruesome, though, is too narcissistic to even be able to figure out that he’s being left — holding the bag.

“Holding the bag” is currently the deserving reward of the traitors who played a wicked game with Americans who, for the most part, wanted to get out of debt, get ahead, get the kids raised, get a break, a fair break, any break, even get off the couch.  Promising, and never delivering — for decades, has finally come a-cropper to the abject and rotten Ruling Class in the U.S.A.

And we really don’t have a Media to report the final results and the tallies of who gets taken out by his own tacky treason.

I’m okay with that reality.  I didn’t used to be.  I wanted the Fourth Estate to function in the service of the citizens.  It was an idealistic dream.  I am, by nature, a dreamer.

I’m also a realist, a pragmatist, and a passionate woman when it comes to right-and-wrong.  It’s been said — only by those who had wished to deceive, degrade, and delude me — that I love the truth.  Indeed, I do.  There are worse things to love, like malice, money, fame, social status, power, material possessions.  The lust for mammon runs deep in America among the underbellies in Congress, and in the s-hole cities.

In the country, though, life is different, very different.  We are not the lambs to the socialist-slaughter.

About eight years ago, whilst researching images for my essay, Shopping the Classics, I came across this stunning piece of apparel.

This cape-jacket was being worn, with ultimate elegance, by Slim Keith Hawks (1917-1990).  I saved digital images of it in a file entitled Oh, The Jacket!

I thence waited, and waited, and waited, and waited — with the patience of a saint — to purchase wool Not Made In China.

Sometime during 2019, I found some Italian wool, online, at a cut-rate price, in a hefty weight of a warm camel shade.  I purchased several yards, then packed them in a storage box with mothball sachets (not yet Outlawed in California).  I was, at that time, living in the rental dump (from 2018-2020) while my Dream House was constructed.

I then discovered during the covid-craziness of 2020 that Italian factory hands were not necessarily creating Made-in-Italy products (fabric, purses, gloves, apparel, shoes).  It’s possible that sneaky scenario had produced my yardages of camel-colored Melton-like wool.  I’m keeping them, anyway, for future creations.  The quality is good, even if the intent might have been malodorous.

There’s a very valid reason to wash your incoming materials, garments, scarves, and woolen gloves!

I’ll not make use, however, of that Italian wood for the Oh-the-Jacket! design because such a thick wool lacks any drape.

The wool that made the cut for Oh, The Jacket! is of unknown manufacture, sold by a favorite e-tailer, Crazy Crow Trading Post.  This Native American business brings out the Cheyenne in me!

I purchased several yards of this lighter-weight wool that is definitely not Melton.  It’s soft, and lovely, in a sumptuous shade of dark navy blue.  The drape is divine, which fills my bill for making Oh, the Jacket!

My other sewing project goes back quite a distance, to the mid-2000s, when I bought some aqua-and-ivory houndstooth plaid wool from an e-tailor no longer in business.  That material was, most definitely, not made by Italians.  Scratchy, bulky, rough, it had a terrible hand.

I did put my hand to making a cape from it, and my skin itched all through my first — maiden — wearing of it.

Sometimes a woman, such as I, will put herself through a grim gauntlet, a grievously grim gauntlet, of spellbinding, or just binding, ethics, merely to be able to say:

“I did make use of that fabric.  It did not go to waste.  There’s been no waste, fraud, or abuse in this house.”

I can’t decide whether it’s the Calvinist Dutch in me, or the penny-pinching Scots, or both, but cutting loose from the prime directive that I must cut the fabric that I purchased to make use of it — it’s a mountain I’m still climbing!

Although I think I might be getting off of that mountain, which is starting to feel more and more like Old Smoky.

For those people outside of the U.S.A., and for probably even more people within the U.S.A, who are ignorant of this rather weird traditional nursery rhyme (which, in the tradition of nursery rhymes must be rather weird):

“On Top of Old Smoky” hails from the Smoky Mountains.  That outback, settled by the Scots-Irish, is located along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.   This song, like any true Appalachian folk song, dates back to the 1840s, and was hi-jacked by the Anti-American Anti-Social Liberal Hypocrites, starting in the 1960s.

I’ve not been able to familiarize myself with the real lyrics of this song, because my introduction to it, in the mid-1970s, was a rather bawdy version from an electronics engineer:

“On top of Old Smoky, where nobody goes.  I left my poor Annie without any clothes.”

It’s hard to dispel, or top, that rendition of On Top of Old Smoky!

This past spring, I hunted down some mid-weight wool from Lochcarron of Scotland.  The economy Over There must be calamitous because the Scots in charge of running this world’s leading manufacturer of tartan sent me — a Discount Code!

Actually, this website now spouts Semi-Annual Tartan Sales!

Of course, I’ve already purchased, at full-price, most of the tartan fabric that I’ve needed, starting in 2018.  I did, however, spring for a couple of yards of houndstooth wool in anthracite gray and ivory, probably for a cape or cape/jacket.  I’m keeping the manufacture-sticker as a memento, and manifesto, of such marvelous weaving by the Scots.  They clearly have bragging rights!

This textile is not scratchy. It is supple, superbly woven, and washed well, as did the Crazy Crow wool.

Simply use a small amount of Orvus, in cool water, to hand-wash the woolen art form.  Rinse in cool water until the fabric no longer bleeds pigment-dye.  Rinse once more with a generous splash of white vinegar to set the color.

To set the color means:  “this color wont’ run.”

Wooly bully!