Author: makerkate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE

Making things from the bottom up

Turning a t-shirt into underpants! 👕✂️👙

I bought this t-shirt in support of the Quinte Museum of Natural History, before it had a bricks-and-mortar home. I really like it, but it’s never quite fit me right — on my torso. Fortunately that is only one place I require clothing…

In this tutorial I found, you take an existing pair of underwear that fits you well (not shown), and use it to make a pattern. Then a little snip snip stitch stitch and, bam! “New” underpants!

+1 for upcycling your old t-shirts, +1 for increasing your stash of well-fitting underwear, and easily +2 for getting to wear a prehistoric fish on your butt.

(I don’t know the name of this beautiful fish-monster. But it reminds me of a coela.. coleaca… coelanct… That special fish you can get in Animal Crossing.)

Hope you had a great day makers!🧵

~Kate

Categories
technology

There was a bug in the network

Back online! Guys… Don’t get too excited yet, but I think I may have developed a super power. It’s reeeaally specific though…

My super power is this: If I’ve been reading about a critter, it nests in our internet connection and breaks it.

Last time I was reading about rodents, we lost our internet due to mice making their home in the utility box. Lately, I’ve been reading up on insect identification, and we just lost our internet for a week because of ants.

I know right?? I CAN SUMMON WILD CREATURES TO MY INTERNET CONNECTION BY READING ABOUT THEM. This is great.

*cracks open a book about mountain lions and waits*

Have a wonderful week folks! So much exciting creating and upcycling and maker-ing has been happening. Posts coming soon!*

*… unless mountain lions.

100% of credit for “There was a bug in the network” goes to the excellent Peter Wills of Word and Data.

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not repair

Thar she blows

Car blower motor, replaced!

Today I changed the blower motor in our car and polished its headlights. Harvested mulberries for jam, picked rose petals to dry, did laundry, and cut wood to build a chicken coop. Some jobs where women have historically been excluded, and some jobs where men have.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

I love to fix things. Though I had pulled out the blower motor once before (to thwart a chipmunk nest in progress), I hadn’t yet replaced one. But the more you repair, the easier it gets, and the more you see the crossovers.

Things are made up of other things, and we humans tend to reuse our ideas. Refilling the spool on a weedwacker is near exactly the same as winding the bobbin on a sewing machine. And a blower motor unplugs from a car just like… well, anything else you plug in. If you have plugged or unplugged anything ever, you’re halfway there!

Grease and solder and thread and metal and wood and seed and wool. Make it from scratch, take it apart, put it back together, love what you love.

Have a great week folks!

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not gardening homestead

Sea(of)scapes

Experiment success! Sea of garlic scapes 💚 Three years to first harvest.

🗓️🗓️🗓️: Year one, we graded and prepped the site (microplastics mistake: we tarped, but should have used cardboard). Year two, we removed the tarp (and every little strand of broken down tarp we could find). Then we built a 3′ x 14′ raised bed from offcut hemlock boards. Then Evie (🚙🔋) and I filled and filled and filled the bed. Finally, planting and mulching. And now, year 3 — garlic!

☀️🧛‍♂️: This area gets a lot of sun, the most of anywhere on our property — and is also full of ticks. As in “I’m going out to Tick-ville to check the fence line… and collect a bunch of ticks on my person.” The bucolic beauty of this place comes with stark realities — flaky power, low water — and ticks are an often unseen part of the picture. (Neil has had Lyme disease, and it’s no joke.) Tick checks and tick management inform our rhythms here. So it was A Decision to see if we could make a garden bed work here, where the wild ticks roam.

🤔💭: This area has only a scrappy thin layer of soil, plenty of bunnies, and no water nearby. So we wanted to plant something that could: largely be left unattended; be unappealing to wild critters; thrive in full sun; get by on rain or irregular watering; and, be harvested in short spurts, not continuously over the season. Garlic!

👷‍♀️💧: We plan to build a rain collector out here, and more beds that fit these criteria (Planting suggestions welcome!). But for now we will make giant bangle bracelets with our bountiful scape harvest, and enjoy the fruits, shoots, of our labours.

…After a tick check, of course. 😉

Happy Thursday folks! 🌱

~Kate

Categories
fungi homeMADE

Magic Mushroom

Magic mushroom ✨🍄✨

…As in I asked @hooked.on.hope if she could make me this mushroom, and then as if by magic, she did!!

🍄⭐: Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric, is the fungus of choice for pop culture. It’s the Mario mushroom, the Smurf mushroom, and the mushroom on your emoji keyboard.

🍄📺: It also grows here in Ontario, though it looks a little different than on TV. The variety that grows here has a yellow or orange-red cap, rather than the bright red found further away from the Great Lakes, and in Mario land. See photos below for the Ontari-ari-ari-o kind.

🧶🧡: I find the yellow-orange capped mushrooms at least as beautiful as the red variety, though I’ve never seen them pictured on mushroom posters and paraphernalia. But if you want something beautiful conjured into the world, ask your local maker if she can make your local mushroom. Thanks Mellie!!

🤮☠️: Though opinions vary, I count the Amanita muscaria mushroom as poisonous. Neither fungal nor crocheted versions are safe to eat.

Have a great week folks!

~Kate

Categories
fungi

So beautiful for something called “slime mould”

Stemonitis! I want to make a joke about getting tubular with fungus but I can’t *quite* bring myself to do it.

They look like mushrooms who forgot to put their caps on, but Stemonitis is a kind of slime mould. These clusters of cylinders are their sporangia — where the spores form.

Slime mould used to be considered a fungus, but now they’ve all been reclassified outside that Kingdom. Regardless of which kingdom they’re a citizen of, slime moulds are fascinating — “they move and feed like animals” (Barron). They *move*. I highly recommend giving them a Google.

Most descriptions I found call Stemonitis “rusty-brown”. I would describe these ones that way, but many of the Stemonitis I saw looked very purple. It was the purple that caught my eye in the woods. As in, “what the heck are those little purple jobbies??”

This Stemonitis was fruiting on a log that is already well colonized by Chlorociboria aeruginascens (blue-stain fungus). So it’s both a log I love to look at, and a log I don’t look at closely anymore, because I think I know its story. Lesson learned… Again.

Only saw these chaps because I was in the woods looking for nothing, which means I can be distracted by anything, and that’s when I see everything.

Have a great Thursday folks!

~Kate

Categories
wild inklings

Sketchy Pigeon, Full of Gall

Painted with plants — a sketchy pigeon, full of gall.

Sketched this pigeon last night, to try out a new oak gall ink! I’ve been collecting oak galls one and two at a time for a few years now, and decided I had enough to make a batch.

(The story of making the ink is even more colourful than the pigeon, and I’ll pop it up here at some point. Spoiler: At one point a mason jar containing 4 years worth of galls shatters…)

I’m really happy with how the gall ink turned out. I may try reducing some of it further, but as it is now it layers to a nice respectable black. Thanks gall wasps!

This pigeon is a mutt of a few different ideas at once. I wanted to try using my inks for something more stylized and a little looser. So his look is a bit conflicted, but I’m going to take some seed ideas from here and make another. More pigeons to come!

Pigeon is painted with all homemade inks. The inks used here are made from wild grapes, oak galls, grapevine, avocado pits.

Make ink, make art, make everything.

Have a great week folks!

~Kate

Categories
turtles

Turtle Power

What a turtle-y awesome day!

A neighbour I don’t know well came by our place this morning for help with a couple of snappers. Apparently she’d noticed our “watch for turtles” sign and our bumper stickers. (It pays to advertise.)

She had one turtle in her pool, and another on her driveway that she thought was about to cross the road. It turns out the crossing turtle was actually laying eggs! Yaaaas!! Later on she had *another* snapper lay eggs elsewhere on her driveway. Word of a good neighborhood spreads quickly…

The pool turtle was a little tricky, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by a willingness to go swimming in your jeans with a pool skimmer… I went on a brief wild turtle chase to the deep end, but in the end I convinced it to get out. (…By lifting it out.)

By wonderful coincidence, we already had an appointment in Peterborough today, so we swung by the magnificent Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre and picked up a couple of nest protectors. Which are now installed over both nests, keeping the eggs safe from diggy little raccoon paws (and mouths).

The neighbours’ kids were amazing of course. Kids just get it. Adults often need help remembering. But kids are like “TURTLES!!” And I’m like “YES!! TURTLES!” Because that is *always* the appropriate reaction to turtles.

Have a wonderful week folks! May we all be lucky enough to see and help many turtles this month. Go team turtle!

~Kate

Categories
gardening technology thinking big

In Seeds As In Software

Some of Maker’s Dozen’s work is in technology. Open source software development. And in open source, you share your source code.

It’s like sharing your recipe. Here, we made you this cake, and here’s how we did it.

It acknowledges the work of the people who came before us, and contributes our work back to the commons, so others can build on it too.

In the early days of computers, this was pretty normal. Most programmers were pretty open about sharing their work with others — so everyone could get the most value from these newfangled machines. But the cancer of proprietary everything has spread so far, that many people don’t even realize the locked in, closed source ideas of technology weren’t always considered normal. Or that open source never went away, and is in fact thriving. (If you are looking at this on an Android phone, you are using open source technology.) That there is a choice. Another way of doing things.

I think about this while I’m in the garden, planting our plants. It’s the ol’ “pull on one thing and find they’re all connected” deal.

Many of our vegetables this year are grown from seeds I saved out of last year’s garden. I love to save and share seeds, to be part of that essential cycle of self-sustenance. But we are miles and miles away from total self-sufficiency, and it’s not really our goal. We can’t grow and save the seeds for everything we plant and eat, even if we wanted to. We don’t have the right conditions here, don’t have the room to isolate plants properly etc etc.

We need others to carry the seeds too. To share back with us. So that there is diversity and abundance and resilience and growth. Plant it, grow it, share it with others. Be a good ancestor.

“Seeds, especially of food and other useful plants, should be taken care of by the people. They are too precious for all of them to be placed under the exclusive control of the few. The more hands that hold them, the safer they will be.”

~Jude and Michel Fanton (Seed Saver’s Network Australia)

Happy Friday folks! Have a great weekend. 🐁🖱️

~Kate

Categories
homestead technology

No power, but not powerless

We lose grid power a lot here. So we’ve learned how to be less powerless about it. The squirrels are all like “hey do you think you have enough dry goods stashed lady?” And I’m like “quit sassing me squirrel! …Are you going to eat that acorn?”

The headlamps are always hung on the hooks with care here… But we also do some things now whenever we know storms, or even high winds, are coming.

Here’s a few of them, in the hopes they might be useful to you too.

  • 💦 Stash water. For drinking and for flushing. My newest trick is to also fill the sink with hot soapy water. Being able to wash a dish during a power outage is wonderful.
  • 🐤 Look after the animals. Baton hatches, fill backup waterers, work out alternate heating solutions. We have options, they don’t.
  • ❄️ Fill a small cooler. Pull essentials we might want out of the fridge and into a cooler with an ice pack.
  • 🧼 Wash dishes — and ourselves if we have time. For dishes, pans that can go on the BBQ or fire especially.
  • 👔 Tie the fridge shut as soon as the power goes. Or put a chair in front of it. Habits are *powerful*! A fridge or freezer can stay cold and foodsafe for ages if left closed. But you throw that under the bus when you go to grab the milk before your brain kicks in…
  • 🔋Charge phones.
  • 🗄️Tidy up. We might be walking around with less or no light. Tripping over that laundry basket you forgot was there is going to suuuck.
  • ☀️Do things that need light while there’s daylight. If the outage was unexpected, that might mean prepping for when it gets dark. But it might be recreation if everything is squared away. Read books while the sun shines.
  • ☕Boil water and put it in a good thermos. There is nothing a cup of tea can’t make a little better.

📝And for next time — make a list of what you’re missing/wish you’d done or have during the outage. You won’t think about how that bathroom has no natural light and could really use a battery powered lamp in it while the power is on, but boy howdy it’ll be top of mind when it’s off.

We hope everyone came through this weekend’s storms and outages safe and sound.

~Kate