Author: makerkate
Failures: Past, present, and future? I fail all the time. Up, down, sideways. Also, I don’t believe in failure.
That is click-baity though because of course I do. I’m a present day human. I’ve been trained my whole life to believe I fail at every turn. As a female, I fail just waking up as a shape. That is, of course, garbage, but here we are.
⚽🐍: Okay, so here we are. A world of moving goalposts, and impossible ideas of “perfect”. But next comes the choice. The choice to suck the fear of failure right out of it, like a toxic snake bite, and spit it away.*
(*My analogies are getting grosser, and also I think you are definitely not supposed to do this. “Cutting and sucking the wound only serves to increase the risk of infection.” Thank you for coming to my snake bite PSA.)
🥔📺: I believe I failed only when I don’t try again. If something didn’t “turn out” immediately, and I sat down to wallow in TV and potato chips. Now everyone needs recoup time when the seed doesn’t grow, the sides aren’t square, or the code is borked. Potato chips are tasty, and sometimes there’s an inspiring tutorial on YouTube. But fall down 7 times, get up 8.
A bruised ego can heal, and come back tougher. Letting your ego get bruised can be like training for a fight — kicking a coconut tree to toughen up your shin, a la Van Damme.**
(**OKAY THIS IS EVEN WORSE THAN THE SNAKE BITE THING. Don’t kick coconut trees kids.)
🍐: Yesterday I tried making pear jam. It didn’t set cuz there wasn’t enough sugar. Fail… But now delicious goop for my oatmeal.
👩💻: I coded a layout that didn’t resize correctly on every device. Fail? No, just needed some tweaks. Now I know more.
🎁: I’m trying a new way of long-term potato and pear storage. Will it work? Shrug! Today might be the first day of a long slow fail. I hope not. But I won’t regret the fail if it comes. I’ll regret not trying.
Maybe I’ll end up with a box of sprouty spuds, and a mushy mess of pears. But maybe, maybe I’ll be biting into a luscious pear in the dead of winter, savouring the taste of trying.
Here’s to failing and trying again, to correct handling of snake bites and respect for coconut trees.
Have a great week folks.❤️
~Kate
Categories
Junk Art
Junk art! What do a box of cat food, a bit of sumac, offcuts of wood, and a smashed photo have in common? This hummdinger of an art piece!
📏🐈: First upcycled + DIY picture frame… complete! I made the picture frame from scraps I recut on the table saw/by hand, a piece of broken glass I recut, and cardboard from the boxes from Oliver’s cat food + Neil’s office chair…that I recut. Recut, remix, reward! 💚 (See previous post for parts prep.)
🎨🌱: I painted the hummingbird with inks I made from plants: buckthorn, wild grape, avocado pits, goldenrod, sumac, grapevine charcoal.
♻️💪: So satisfying to bring it all together in something more than the sum of its parts. Upcycle for the win!! Have a great weekend makers!
📺: “Junk art” is a reference to Beau Miles’ “Junk” series on YouTube. Highly recommend, two thumbs way up 👍👍
~Kate
Categories
Bending Time
I’ve had to wait years to become a patient person…
🚍⏳: And being a maker can require a lot of patience. Parts take time to arrive, solutions don’t always work as expected, repairs take a few tries, experiments don’t succeed on the first go. It can be a long ride on the strugglebus before you get to that final destination, Euphoria Station.
🧐⏰: My secret to being a very patient person is that I cheat. I can wait years if I have to, but I stuff those years full of many things, with many different timelines. So as one project is rolling off the finish line, I’m usually popping three new ones in the queue.
🔨🍇: Nature goes at her own pace, and so do third-party parts suppliers. So while I’m waiting for a part to arrive, I start a cordial infusing. I might only find one oak gall that morning, but that evening I can add a few more stitches to a repair. Strip the bark for a basket handle, install a faucet, save a seed, start learning how to fix a lamp. Not every day can include a completed project, but most days advance one — or five. It’s all in my new imaginary book: The Impatient Person’s Guide to Making Slow Things Go Fast.
(Though I’m capable of waiting a long time if necessary, it has to be for *good reason*. I once took a personality test whose conclusion included the phrase “Don’t waste Kate’s time”. I’ve never felt so seen by an inanimate algorithm…)
🎨🌳: This is an upcycled picture frame in progress. I don’t have any frames for the wild ink art I make, in part because I’m determined to make them. So I’ve held on to a big piece of broken glass for years — waiting for me to make the time to buy a glass cutter and learn how to use it. And find the right offcuts of wood and rip them with the table saw. Now I’m waiting on the little tabs to hold everything in place. It’s been a long wait, but Euphoria Station is only a few stops away now. I can see it.
🙃⌛: I’ve backed into being a patient person by way of being a determined one. So if you’re a determined but impatient person like me, there’s hope for both of us. We can’t actually cheat time, but we can change how it passes.
~Kate
I don’t trust my gut.
🧠: I mean, my gut is wonderful. And it has a lot of essential and often critical information to share with the group. But it also has a pact with my brain to run their decisions past each other.
🤪: Because when it comes to mushrooms, my gut might be hungry, and therefore not thinking straight.
🍄🌳: I came across these mushrooms in the woods a while ago. They are quite a bit like the oyster mushrooms that grow nearby, but my gut said they weren’t oysters.
🤪🍽️: The next time I walked by, my gut had changed its mind. Y’know what, it said, our regular oyster mushroom tree might be spent. And maybe these *are* oyster mushrooms, and just don’t look like what you’re used to? You don’t have your books with you, maybe there’s some variation or exception you’re not remembering… So I was like, okay gut, let’s settle this. And I brought one back to the house for spore printing. Tag brain, you’re up.
🍄⏳: The photo in the centre of the top row, and the large photo beneath, are the same mushroom. *Exactly* the same mushroom. One day later, but now having released its spores to paper. Oyster mushrooms have a white spore print. And while colour perception varies from person to person, I think we can all agree these spores do not look like newly fallen snow. They don’t even look like snow that’s fallen on a gritty city street, been driven over for several days, and is now compacted in the gutter with bits of asphalt in it. This here, this is a brown spore print.
🍄🌨️: The far right of the top row is a less intentional oyster mushroom spore print that I happen to have right now. An old oyster log I have was fruiting, and I pulled a couple of small mushrooms off it a few days ago, and laid them out to dry. As the mushrooms dry, they release their spores. Their very white snow-fallen-on-a-frozen-lake spores.
🍄⛔: I don’t know yet what the mushroom at top left, top centre, and bottom enlarged is — I’m strongly leaning Crepidotus — but I know for certain what it *isn’t*. And in mushrooming, knowing what isn’t is nearly as valuable as knowing what is.
“Science is magic that works.” ~Kurt Vonnegut
🍄❤️: Take care of your gut. Don’t let it wander the woods alone. 😉
~Kate
There is that beautiful quote that society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.
🍐👵: I don’t think there is an equivalent explanation for what happens when a middle-aged woman plants fruit trees whose pears she hopes to eat sooner rather than later. Though I’m hoping for neutral or better.
🤹⏳: We’re stretched here between the poles of permaculture and practicality. We try to pay attention, and gather good data before making changes to this scrappy scrap of land. With its spring flooding and summer droughts and rocks for soil and shade for days. But it’s always mixed with the urgency of needing to get things in the ground. So they can either start growing, or start failing so we have time to start again.
🤸🌳: Because we’re learning, so one thing we know perfectly is that we have a lot of failing ahead of us. So we try to fail on a worthwhile path, and fail forwards. That way, even when we stumble and fall, we’re still moving a little further in a good direction. 😉
Have a wonderful weekend folks! 💚
❄️🌽: Cold this morning. And the bitey bugs are suddenly quiet. They’ll be back again this evening, in time for corn on the cob, but an intermission. Time to scratch the old bites.
⛵🐿️: Flying squirrels, each evening, clockwork at a quarter to nine. Swoop, land and scurry. From roofline down to the tippy maple. When the sky is still too bright for stargazing. Nautical twilight — time for squirrels to sail.
🐮🌊: One neighbour and then another and another tell me there is a moose nearby. I must watch for sign of this maybe moose!
🦇💡: Big brown bats dazzle and swoop over the yard. They’re well-rested after a day spent dreaming in the eaves. Fireflies fire the starting pistol. Each evening first the fireflies then bats then squirrels. They all know the schedule. But only a few embers of fireflies now. Their season is late. A few blinks in the black.
🐣🏡: Phoebe’s babies have long since fledged from their nest, but we still see Phoebe around the yard sometimes, and say hello.
🧛♂️🐁: Tiny ticks, waving in the grass, moving Lyme from there to here. Biting the disease out of mice and barfing it into our blood. A story of mice and men. Careful of the freckles that walk, the poppy seeds with legs.
☠️🧵: A mourning dove snatched away from under the feeder. A pile of soft down and a few feathers on the ground. Never noticed before these are polka dot doves. A hawk perhaps, that snipped this dove’s thread, but that day the hawk babies ate and their threads spun a little longer.
🥔🌟: Potato plants pulled, spuds sorted. Dirty treasure. Scrubbed and crisp roasted in rosemary.
I wake a deer on the hill. She raises her white flag and bounces away. This uneven slope her velodrome.
Dark clouds refusing to crack, rain refusing to fall. Careful now, with this water.
Fragrant trimmed tomato branches wheelbarrowed to the compost. Food for next year’s food.
Berries jammed and jammed in jars.
Pickles picked and pickled.
Around and around. A season to stretch out and make ourselves long as the days. The bright dark days of summer.
Happy Thursday folks ☀️
~Kate
Categories
Bunnies, bees, and armpits
🐇🌱Bonus bunny! Painted with plants. (Buckthorn, wild grape, oak gall, avocado, and sumac.)
🚁🌻: Before the bunny, I actually started off painting a cool hover fly that Neil photographed in the garden (pics 2 and 3). I noticed it not only looked very bee-like, but it was interacting with the flower in a very bee-like way. So I fell down a whole rabbit hole (hehe) learning about hover flies, and how they are a super important pollinator! Adult hover flies feed on nectar and pollen, and are “often considered the second-most important group of pollinators after wild bees.” (🤯) So they don’t just look like a bee, they be like one too!
☣️💪🐍: Critters mimicry of each other is so fascinating. In Thomas Halliday’s book “Otherlands”, he describes how slow loris, when threatened, imitate a spectacled cobra. They raise their arms up behind their head, shiver, and hiss. From this position they can also access a gland in their armpit which, when combined with saliva, produces a venom “capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans”. (🤯🤯)
I didn’t even know it was possible to have armpit envy, and yet, here I am.
🐇📚: Well look at that, cute bunny, you’ve tricked us into learning about hover flies AND a different kind of “pit viper”. Well played little lagomorph, well played!
Have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend folks. Happy August!
~Kate
Categories
“Junk” Coop
“Scrappy” new mobile chicken coop, check! 🐔🛠️
🐤🐤🐤: We built a “new” mini-coop this summer. Sometimes a few chickens need to be separate from the flock for awhile — introducing new birds, a hen with chicks, too many roosters, an injured hen etc etc. Usually you’d pop them in a barn, but we don’t even have a garage, so by “barn” we usually mean “Kate’s office”. While I like my office to be modular, I also like it not to smell like chicken.
♻️🏗️: There is some fresh lumber in this build — we rip down ungraded/seconds 2x4s for the framing. But also so many scraps!! Including extra fence boards from raised beds as cladding, a salvaged steel roof, and part of our friends’ old kitchen island.
✂️🏠: The ridgecap is probably my favourite part of this build. We had just enough metal roofing to solidly patchwork the roof, but no ridgecap. So I took my tin snips to the extra pieces, and with a little 170lb persuasion (I leaned on them), I convinced the offcuts what they really wanted to be was a ridgecap. They generously agreed.
👩🚀🐔: A separate 4×6′ extension airlocks on to the main building, so the little dinosaurs have access to a larger patch of greens. Dig dig look, dig dig look…
🌱💦: The temporary clear roof on the extension is repurposed from another build, and is ultimately destined to become part of a water collection and irrigation system for our off-grid garden. It’s like a Matryoshka doll of repurposing. Plans within plans!
Have a wonderful week folks! 🐣
~Kate
Solar oven — made from a cardboard box! Is it hot enough to cook an egg out there??
Solar oven side quest: Before work on our new chicken coop one day, I decided to try making a solar oven from our recycling. The heart wants what it wants.
✂️📦: Wired has a tutorial on making a solar oven from a cardboard box, insulating material (like styrofoam), duct tape, tin foil, and some cling film. I have those things!
👷♀️💭: I modified the Wired design a bit, making the front panel more easily removable (bungee handles), and punching holes and lacing string through the outside flaps, to help direct the sun.
☀️🌡️: After a bit of time outside, the oven temperature got up to a whopping 200F! Okay maybe not “whopping”, but… consistent! A slow-and-steady 200F! The black cast iron pot inside the oven got scorching hot. Too hot for bare hands.
🍆☁️: My first “dish” was half a squash. Which was… ambitious. I have to adjust the box to track the sun (cardboard can only do so much), and we had to go out that day. The shade drifted over and absorbed the oven while we were gone. The squash got sun-kissed, but not cooked through.
📦🍳: Yesterday I tried round two, this time with an egg. Once again, the oven stayed right around 200F.
And success! After about an hour the egg was cooked through. I didn’t think to check the internal temperature until the egg had been out of the oven for ~10 minutes. By then it registered around 128F. Safe temperature for eggs is 160F, so I’ll make this a “twice-cooked” egg (heating it up inside) before putting it in my face hole.
🍫🤢: Why mess around with a raw egg instead of just making s’mores you (and Neil) might be asking? You both make a good point, but here we are. Also I wanted to see what would happen. (To the egg, not my GI tract.)
Do you have any suggestions for (very) low-and-slow cooking? I make our granola at 225F, so maybe that is worth a go…?
🌳☀️: Here in the woods, our days of strong overhead sun are only just beginning. Let’s see how toasty I can get this ol’ pile of packaging!
Have a great day folks! ☀️
~Kate