Category: homeMADE

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE technology

That Flipping Game

Free game! Homemade by us! Exclamation points!!!

Our little homebrew card matching game — “That Flipping Game” — is now live on the Play Store and ready to be play tested. Would you like to play test it?? Here’s the link to try it!

Several years back I got it in my head that I wanted to make my own mobile game. But like, all of it. ALL OF IT. I wanted to draw the draws, code the codes, music the musics, animate the animations, effect the sounds, and back the grounds. I even wanted to learn how to font the fonts.

AND I DID. And because I married a code wizard, he built me a game engine for my game code to sit on top of. Boy I love that guy. (Some girls like diamonds, some lean towards a reliable and loving code base…)

This project has taken years, squeezed into the corners of Real Life and Real Work. An hour here, 10 minutes there, a day off now and then. And for several years there, it wasn’t touched at all. It got packed up in a little digital box marked “please don’t forget about me”. And I didn’t. Because (as discussed previously) I can be a stubborn little squirrel. In the intervening years we completely rearranged our lives, lived through/are living through *many things* and etc etc etc. You’re alive. You know how it is.

But here it is! IT EXISTS IN THE WORLD! (And if I seem a bit shouty here, you should see me in person. )

It is free. Totally free. And a version of it *will always be free*. It has no ads, no upsells, no chatter. It is small and chill and endlessly replayable. It is a respite and designed to be just a simple, easy, no sweat, no stress game.

Link to download from the Play Store is here. Have a go, lemme know if you see anything squirrelly (besides the squirrels), and most of all, have fun!!

w0000000000000000t!

Happy Friday folks!

~Kate

Categories
art D-I-Why Not flora gardening homestead wild inklings

Fresh Asparagus

Asparagus with a side of asparagus.

Wild ink painting of asparagus, now 5 or 6 years old. Made with wild grape, dandelion, buckthorn, horsetail, acorn, sumac, and a bit of help from avocado pits.

Painting posed in front of the forest of baby asparagus that’s currently under lights in my studio. These asparagus babies are growing from seeds I collected from our micro-patch last year, hopefully headed to start a much larger patch elsewhere.

From time to time these wild ink paintings do get sold or gifted, but I’m always nervous to do so. Not because I can’t let them go, I love to create things and have others enjoy them. But because some of the wild inks change so much over time. (You can see how different this painting looked like several years ago — here) Fortunately there are many kindred spirits out there who not only accept the paintings will change, but find joy in that they do.

Nothing gold can stay, but who knows what new beauty might arrive next.

Have/make a great day folks!

~Kate

Categories
art flora

Watercolour Woodland W..ephemerals


I couldn’t decide which spring ephemeral to paint yesterday, so I painted them all. This quote has been rattling around my brain lately, and inspired me to just dive in and play:

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very quiet if only those birds sing there that sang best.” ~Henry Van Dyke

It’s an embarrassment of riches in the forest right now. The sweet spot where everything overlaps. The bloodroots are just beginning to drop their petals and reveal their seed pods, the trout lily are still blooming in force, there are still tiny spring beauties to be spotted, and the white trilliums are popping open all over, while the mayapples explode up from the ground

I snuck a couple of science-y easter eggs into this painting. Like a tiny nod to — and buckle up for a five dollar word — myrmecochory: seed dispersal by ants. A process that’s very helpful to the spread of trilliums and other ephemerals. And the different shades of trout lily anthers, from bright yellow to brick red. A variation which, last time I checked, we still don’t know the anther to.

…Yes I do make that joke every time.
//
Exploring watercolours thanks to our dear friend Robertson, whose paints I am using. Rob was a soulmate and one of my all-time favourite humans who died of lymphoma at Thanksgiving, so many decades too soon. Love you Rob. Thank you for all your brilliant colours.

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE

Dovetails… assemble!

Turning that fail upside down. ⚡🔨

Late Sunday afternoon I found a “don’t be afraid of dovetails” woodworking video that inspired me to pop downstairs to the shop and face my fears. I take care with my cuts, and am always trying to be a better woodworker. But somewhere along the line I decided I would always be a rustic carpenter. Why? I have absolutely no idea. I like to pay attention to the grain, love a freshly sharpened chisel, don’t mind taking my time, and enjoy a good dose of precision. So why had I built this fence around myself? Dunno. 🤷‍♀️ I contain multitudes.

Things in the shop (aka the workbench beside the hot water tank) were going shockingly well. My pins and tails would not be winning any awards besides a pretty Participation ribbon, and if my joints told a story, it would be full of holes. But, like magic, it also held together!! I was so excited I made another set on the other side. Dovetail box, here I come! 🧙‍♂️✨

On the left, you will see what I saw when I put it together. Instead of three sides of a box, I had lovingly crafted… a lightening bolt.☁️⚡☁️

But this is the moment that matters, much more than the one when I decided to go downstairs and give it a try. The moment when I didn’t throw it into the fire (tempting), but instead tried to focus not on what I didn’t have, but what I did. Cut that lightening bolt in half, flip the right side over, and instead of being a complete failure, I could be halfway to success!

The dovetailed rectangle on the right is the same project, one session later. Determination fleeeeeeeeeeeeex 💪

I try a lot of things, and fail plenty, but there’s one skill I have in spades, and that is persistence. I am a determined little squirrel. Sometimes I have to put a project down for awhile, and stamp my feet in petty frustration, or cry an ugly cry, or take a lap. (Red squirrels aren’t really chattering at you in the woods, they’re just muttering to themselves about a carpentry project gone wrong.) Of all the skills, the ability to try again — that’s the one to hone. Fail often, just don’t give up easy. 🐿️❤️

Have a good rest of your week folks! ✨

~Kate

Categories
baking D-I-Why Not homeMADE

Snow (Pan)cake 2023

Our first proper snowfall here this morning, and you know what that means — it’s SNOW CAKE DAY!

❄️👩‍🍳: A longstanding tradition in my family — the day of the first real snowfall, when the ground first snuggles under a full blanket of snow, you bake a “snow cake”.

🎂⚗️: A snow cake doesn’t require a particular recipe. Any white cake with white icing, made to celebrate the first snowfall, will do. A specific cake is not the assignment. The icing can be slapdash or meticulous, whatever you like. The project of snow cake-ing is just about taking time to notice and enjoy the season. If you’re like me, and run around the house calling out “it snowed it snowed it snowed!”, you may already be a fan of winter. And if you’re not, well, eating a fresh piece of cake might just take the edge off. 😉

🎂🎂🎂: I’ve made so many snow cakes over the years, all different shapes and sizes. Decades of them. Vegan, layered, single cupcakes, you name it. Since neither of us is doing great with gluten at the moment, this year I made gluten-free snow pan-cakes: fluffy gf pancake mix topped with simple icing sugar icing, finished with the best sprinkles (<-fight me).

🎂🍩: And… it might be my favourite snow cake yet. It tastes like a donut. 🤯 But without losing valuable icing real estate to the hole. I shall call it… The snow-nut.

Wishing you a beautiful wintery day folks!
//
🎂🔗: If you’d like a tried-and-true snow cake + icing recipe, you are welcome to use mine, posted here.

~Kate

Categories
birbs D-I-Why Not homeMADE

3D Cornstarch

Compost-aments! 🐦♻️

Ornaments made with just cornstarch, baking soda, water, and… a 3D printer? 😉

🐦🔧: Everyone and their brother sent me Woodlark‘s cornstarch ornaments — and I’m glad they did! 😂 Beautiful DIY ornaments made from the pantry?? Count me in! But instead of making a star garland, I fancied bird ornaments. Only trouble is I didn’t actually have bird-shaped cutters…

Yet.

🐦🧠: I like to say Maker’s Dozen’s favourite place to work are the places where art+tech+nature intersect. There’s nothing I like more than smooshing different parts of my brain together… Sooo let’s do this!

🐦📝: I started by drawing a few bird silhouettes in Affinity Designer*, imported them as SVGs to Tinkercad, did some tinkering and extruding to make them 3D cutters, then exported them as STLs for my Prusa to slice, dice, and print. Perfect! Time to make some cornstarch birds!

🐦👩‍💻: Bonus — My office is far from the woodstove, but the dehydrator lives in here, and running it makes the room nice and toasty. So instead of baking the cut ornament shapes in the oven, I dried them in the dehydrator. Whipping up a nice batch of ornaments, while also keeping your computing fingers good and toasty — win-win!

🛒📏: I love working with raw materials that are solid enough to be real, but ephemeral enough to go back to the earth when their time is through. And to let my brain cross-pollinate between what can be computed, grown, baked or built. It makes sense the lines between all these endeavours are more porous than they first appear. After all — as maker Felix Schelhasse once so beautifully put it — the kitchen is actually just a workshop for groceries.

Have a good one folks!
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*I left Adobe in favour of Affinity a few years ago. Subscription model software is often unnecessary, frequently insidious, and rarely in the customer’s best interests. Fortunately solid alternatives are still out there, if you look for them. 👍

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE repair

Re-duce, re-use, re-fill it with chocolate

Upcycled-recycled chocolate calendar adventure! 🍫
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🔎🦌: I love searching for things and finding things. Back in our Toronto apartment, Neil would hide quarters around the house for me to find. Like, the same quarters, over and over. Under books, on my nightstand, around my computer.

He’s a good egg.

🍫🤢: Enter chocolate calendars. I still like them, even now, happily knee-deep in my middle age. So I still get them for myself. I like searching for each day’s number. Although because of the middle age thing, I am *much* less tolerant of calendars containing terrible chocolate. (As a child, I didn’t believe such a thing existed…).

🍫⛽: Last year I got a calendar that was really and truly awful. The graphics were great, the ethics were there, but the “chocolate” was like nibbling a candle. A cheap one made from oil industry effluent. Pass.

What it had going for it though was great little shapes. So I saved the box and insert, thinking perhaps this year I could give DIY a go…

🍫🛠: Fast forward to last weekend, when I made simple coconut oil chocolates and froze them in the tray. And… success! Ingredients in the photo below: equal parts coconut oil+cocoa powder, plus some sweetener (homemade maple syrup), and good salt — mislabeled here as “vinegar dill pickles”. The cabbage was just also there.

🍫🧙‍♂️: So the calendar of daily disappointment has been remade as one of daily DIY joy, filled with yummy little homemade chocolates.

📝: Improvement recs welcome! I hadn’t made these chocolates before. And while they *taste* delicious, I got some unexpected clumpage and separation in the cocoa powder/coconut oil. Perhaps because my cocoa is dutch processed? Anyone who knows more than me about chocolate (so pretty much everyone), please send me your tips for next year 👍👍

There are some things we should probably leave behind in childhood. Pettyness, selfishness, hitting people when you’re angry… But I submit that if you left things behind that once brought you joy, well, go look for them again. I bet they’re still there waiting for you.

Have a great one folks! ♻️

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not gardening homeMADE homestead

Unwrapping the greenhouse experiment

Well that’s a wrap — maybe unwrap? — on the Great Car Tent Greenhouse Experiment 👍
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🎪✨: The verdict is 8/10, would-do-again. We had an excellent year (for us) in green peppers and eggplants. Chiles and jalapeños did well. And an unexpected bonus of two pawpaw seeds germinated in there! Those are now planted on the hillside, with chicken wire protection against the wild roving rabbits of winter…

🌱🥉: The tomatoes did meh, though I’m not sure why. We got fewer in the greenhouse than from the much shadier raised beds. The lemongrass was fine but not riotous. The carrots hated it. The basil was content and industrious.

🌱✨: I try to be like that basil. These efforts are not about being perfect. Or self-sufficient. I don’t think either of those things really exist. Like it or not, we’re all tied to each other to survive. So it’s not about off-grid, but a better grid. Fewer trips to the grocery store for world-weary produce and packaging. More trips to a farmer, or the garden.

💚♻️: And to do my part in that grid, I figure I have to try and pitch in with what I’ve got. Which means trying and learning and failing and trying again.

🍓❄️: When I’m in the garden in the summer, it’s hard not to just stare at everything going “wrong”. Seeds that don’t sprout, produce that doesn’t produce. I had loads of failures this year, as always. From peas to beans to lettuce to carrots. Some even resown so I could fail twice (or more) in one year. Fail fail fail fail.

🐿️🌰: And yet…here we are. Heading into winter with a freezer partially stocked with our own fruits (mulberries + raspberries) and veg (beans, beets, green peppers, tomatoes). And other goodies literally draped around the place. Chile pepper garland, braids of garlic. A little pile of potatoes. Willow dried for Abbie. Teas and herbs for us. Seeds.

And a whole growing season of trying and learning under our belts, with more ideas germinating for next year.

🐿️🔥:I think those ideas need to be cold stratified though, so I’m gearing up to wind down with some glorious hibernation, nestled by the fire till spring.

Have a great weekend folks!
🌬️🌱🍃

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE

Bunnies all the way down

Bunny from bunny! It’s rabbits all the way down 🐇♻️🐇
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🐇🧶: This bunny is needlefelted with homegrown angora fur, courtesy our rescue rabbit, Abbie. The chilly temperature declared an end to my maintenance work on our log home for the year. So I celebrated with a bit of impromptu fireside felting, to kick off these long dark crafty nights.

🐇🔥: I love all the critters we live alongside, but I’m probably *in* love with Abbie. Which is probably why we’ve persevered in caring for an *angora* rabbit who *doesn’t like to be groomed*. (Two different vets described her as “…spirited”. That’s my girl.)

🐇🌿: Not grooming isn’t an option for an animal who will, y’know, die if you don’t do it. (That isn’t hyperbole either. See ‘wool block’.) But we have a system now that Abbie finds acceptable. It involves two adult humans with soothing/fast hands (me) and steady/sure hands (Neil), plus yummy dried willow leaves as a thank you snack.

So Abbie stays healthy, and I have bags of her wooly extras. Some of which we donate to the birds for nest building, some we use in the gardens, some for felted bun-ception fun.

🌿🧪: And fun with invasive species too. The pink used for the ears and nose — technically known on a bunny as the ‘floppity-loppities’ and the ‘wigglesniffer’, respectively — is wool dyed with fermented buckthorn bark.

🐇☁️: I felted the body quite firm, but then added a topcoat of floof. Next time around, I think I might go full floof. It’s the Abbie way.

Have a great week folks!

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE technology

Automata: The Scrappy Flying Machine

The scrappy flying machine! 🐦🛠️

🛠️💔: I first posted about this automata in August. When, after months of 5 mins here and half an hour there, it was nearly complete. All I had left to do was glue the handle to the axle… And then the handle broke, along with the axle.

And I asked myself the question that makes or breaks many projects: “Am I looking for an excuse to stop, or a way to keep going?”

🤕♥️: I gathered up the broken pieces — of both me and the automata — and got to work on it again the next day. Because my heart wanted so bad to build this beautiful little frankenbird…

🐦⏳: I still needed to fit this project into the corners of my day, so in one 5 minute block, I cut off the broken handle. In another, I drilled out the broken axel. In another, I started shaving down a replacement… etc etc until a week or so later I glued the new handle onto the new axel onto the old gear and… LIFT OFF!

🐦♻️: It’s the details of this automata I’m most proud of. Because it is scrappy in materials as well as spirit (I like to think it takes after its mom…). It’s made from buckthorn branches, and broken cedar coathangers, and a glue-damaged board, and offcuts, and offcuts of offcuts. The gears are handcut. I bought the screws and washers, but everything else is found, foraged, and upcycled.

🐦✈️: I’ve been wanting to share it in motion for awhile now. It’s got quite the wingspan though, and I couldn’t work out how to film it. But when I came in from chores today I realized the stepladder I was carrying might be a serviceable tripod, if I propped my phone against my hat, and cleared the sunscreen and chicken treats off the front hall table… Success 🙂

🐦💪: I’m super proud of how these scraps of time and wood alchemized into more than the sum of their parts, and built the stuff my dreams are made of.

🐦💡: So I guess my lesson to myself is don’t give up on your dreams when they break. You never know… in the end, they might still fly.

Have a great one folks!
//
Automata design and instruction by Eduardo Salzane.

~Kate