Author: makerkate

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

Categories
technology

A smart-enough phone

This is my new “smart-enough” phone.

I have noticed that the “smarter” my phone, the less content I am.

I don’t want the New Newness. What I want is… enough.

I want things I can repair. Things that don’t take too much from the earth, that don’t need to be replaced too often.

So when my smartphone screen smashed, after drop 13,478, I looked for something else. The screen was as broken as my relationship with my phone, and it was time to fix it.

I’ve tried digital wellbeing hacks, and while they help, I always felt I was on the edge of a slippery slope, ready to slide me right back to where I didn’t want to be.

The world of endless mindless consumption says friction is the enemy. And, well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Friction interrupts the scroll. Friction prevents binge-watching and binge-buying. The rash reply and thoughtless comment. Friction gives me a moment to think, to decide.

So I’ve added back a little friction, to see where it takes me. When I have to take a little longer to write a text, I think more about what I’m saying. When I can’t just snap a quick photo to look at later, I look harder now.

Having a somewhat-smart phone adds to my life. I mean, we /develop apps/. And I enjoy using apps. To identify birds by song, and ID plants that aren’t in my books. To get my GPS status, and swap photos and ideas with friends. To e-transfer to local farmers, and chat with my mother-in-law about the weather.

But I don’t like carrying an open-faced glass sandwich that I drop 2-100x a day. I don’t like it to beep at me, advertise at me, cajole me, and doom-scroll me. I don’t like a form-factor that screams at my eyes to stare at it more, and the world less.

So this is my new phone. It cost $115 and is unlocked and ruggedized. But it also has a small touchscreen, so I can still use whatever apps I want, including the ones I make myself 😀. I’m not endorsing this particular phone exactly. But the idea that we have the choice to choose something else, when the status-driven status quo isn’t for us… Well that, that I’ll endorse all day every day. 👍

Have a great week folks! May all your devices work just poorly enough to bring you joy.

Categories
homeMADE wild inklings

Painting With Plants Workshop

I do a lot of prep for workshops, so that the day isn’t compromised by something I could have planned for and didn’t. But every single workshop I am taken completely by surprise…

💚✨: Not by running out of paper or not having enough X, Y, Z — that’s the stuff I can see coming and prepare for. But I’m blindsided every time by the absolute joy of sharing raw materials and my experience-so-far with other people, and then watching their own diverse lives and creativity explode all over it!

🌱✨: I love handing a medievalist(?!) a pen I whittled from sumac and watch him illuminate his ‘scrap’ paper. I want to know more about Marigold the cat, and I love seeing someone take buckthorn green and wild grape purple and paint aliens 😂 I can’t hold in my delight at seeing a dozen owls and turtles painted a dozen different ways. From psychedelic to realistic and everything in between. I am chuffed to be told by an actual entomologist that I’m not butchering my aphid story. I’m stoked to be the site of a mother-daughter outing. I want to learn more about the healing powers of plants, and the food forests-in-progress, and what the talented block printers and natural dyers are up to. I’m jealous of that badass vest printed with squirrels and owls, and I’m honoured by the former summer students who wanted to volunteer their Saturday just because they thought this sounded cool.

🏞️✨: Thank you to @lowertrentconservation for hosting this ‘Painting With Plants’ workshop (with a special thank you to Nicholas and Ewa!), and to every single participant for making it as lovely as it was — and supporting beautiful places like Seymour in the process!

See you next time! 💚✒️🌱

Categories
foraging homeMADE wild inklings

Wild Inks

✒️🌱: Testing and bottling wild inks to bring to Saturday’s workshop. This is the scrap paper I put down to protect the counter and do quick checks. Isn’t it pretty??

Every splotch and blotch on this paper came from a plant, and can be made at home. From wild grapes and acorn caps and chokecherry berries and…

Some of these colours last longer and truer on the page than others. But what makes them beautiful isn’t limited to how they look on paper.

🐾🌱: Using wild inks reminds me of tracking animals in the winter. When I come across the tracks of a coyote or a bunny, it’s like hearing their echo. Like they’re there. And when I open a bottle of ink I made from a plant, I see sumac’s red panicle in winter and the sphinx moth I met on the grapevine.

🐞⏳: In searching for colour, I learn about the galls of aphids who have been living between sumac and moss for over *48 million* years. How to whittle invasive honeysuckle into a pen. How to find the pinks hidden in avocado stones and buckthorn bark. It’s adventures inside of adventures.

Wild inks are a little more… wild than what you’ll find in the store. A little less vanilla. They’re wilful and ephemeral and full of surprises. And that’s okay. I’m here for the ride. Besides, nothing gold can stay — though that wild grape purple lasts a good long time. 😉

Have a great week folks! 💜

~Kate

Categories
fauna

Fall babies

It’s… baby season??

🍼🍂: Some critters have babies in the spring, and then again two or three more times before winter comes. Which explains why, when I went for a run the other day, I ended up with this baby chipmunk on my shoe!

🐿️🍂: Coming around a corner in the forest path, I heard a small unfamiliar rustle in the leaves to my left. On closer inspection, I discovered I was surrounded — by baby chipmunks! Their ears and feet too big for their bodies, like little stripey puppies. So a chipmunk, but with the cuteness dial cranked to 11. I’d chanced by a chipmunk burrow just as the babies made their first explorations of the aboveground world.

From Hinterland Who’s Who: “at four to seven weeks old, the young chipmunks begin to leave the burrow to forage. At first they are unafraid, but after a few days above ground they are more wary and escape quickly if disturbed…”.

🌰🍼: It’s a little unusual for chipmunks to have a second litter in the fall, but they’ll do so in a favourable year. And this does seem to be a good year for acorns…

Though this particular baby was very bold — it ran over to me on the path, had a chew on my shoelace, and then ran off again — it didn’t show any signs of distress. A baby critter that is human-clingy or acts in a “are you my parent?” way is showing an unnatural behavior that may indicate they’ve been orphaned.

🐿️🤹: But these baby chippies seemed healthy and rambunctious. I encountered them again in the same spot a few days later, and this time everyone was too busy trying to climb twigs and sedges and check under every leaf to be fussed with me. Perfect.

🐸🐰🦌: In the past couple of weeks we’ve also had encounters with baby tree frogs, baby cottontail bunnies and seen a young fawn with its mom on the trail camera. My own attention may have turned to stacking this year’s winter firewood, but it seems fall baby season is still in full swing!

Have a great week folks! 🍂

~Kate

Categories
QoTD

QoTD: “That makes it beautiful”

It wasn’t so much teaching them how to carve masks, I thought I’m going to teach them how to unlock the creative side of themselves.

So what I did was I went to the art store and I got I think 7 or 8 easels and all these canvases, with the canvas already on the frame, like these pictures, blank canvases, tonnes of paint, and laid everything out, and I told the kids I don’t care what you guys put on this canvas as long as you feel strongly about it.

There’s no such thing as an ugly painting if it’s something that you feel inside of you, that means it’s beautiful. And if you can put that on canvas that means it’s the truth, so that makes it beautiful. So there’s nothing that you can put on this canvas that will be ugly.

So don’t feel weird because you don’t have the right technique. If you feel like painting flowers and you feel sunny inside, that’s good, that’s the truth. But if you feel ugly inside and you want to paint something dark and scary that’s good too, that’s because it’s the truth, so that’s still beautiful.

Eric Schweig, from his interview with Friends United
Categories
D-I-Why Not flora foraging homeMADE news + announcements wild inklings

Painting with Plants Workshop

Join us Saturday September 30th to Paint with Plants at the Seymour Conservation Area!

🌱🎨: Discover the world of wild inks. Learn about foraging for colour, unlocking the secret pigments of plants and, best of all, make your own “Wild Inkling” art to take home! Together we’ll explore the world of pinks, yellows, greens, browns, blacks, and purples hiding in plain sight.

🌳👍: This workshop is hosted by and in collaboration with Lower Trent Conservation, so in addition to making cool art with plants, your registration supports our local conservation areas. Double win!

(Also I saw turtles basking in the quarry right beside the workshop site, sooo…. triple win!)

🔗: Link to register through Lower Trent Conservation is here. Hope to see you there!
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Covid Notes: The workshop will be held entirely outdoors, based in the picnic shelter. Registration is limited.
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🌈🎥: Interested in making ink but can’t attend? The Colour of Ink featuring Jason S. Logan (Toronto Ink Company) — author of the incomparable ‘Make Ink’ — is now available to watch free online here.

~Kate

Categories
foraging homeMADE homestead wild inklings

Checking the Jelly Snares

I made wild grape jelly for the first time a few years ago. Y’know how when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail? Well once you’ve enjoyed homemade wild grape jelly, everywhere looks like a place to grow wild grapes… Old display stand? You could grape that. Extra bit of fencing? You could grape that.

🍇🌳: We haven’t planted any grapes here. They were here before us and they’ll probably be here after. Wild grapes are all over Ontario. Once you start looking for them you see them everywhere.

🧗‍♀️🍇: But we’ve set up a few places here to encourage wild grape to bear fruit in spots we can actually get to. Grape likes to climb, so sometimes it runs right up to the top of a tree. Where it dangles my jelly dreams out of reach. Look up, way up, and I’ll call Rusty… and tell him we’re out of jelly.

🍇🚧: But grape also likes to move side-to-side along a nice fenceline. So a couple of years ago when we installed a new fence, we also coaxed the grape growing nearby onto its wires. I checked it today to find it is very happy in its new home! Grapes on grapes on grapes. Enough for both us and the wild critters to snack on. Jelly is back on the menu boys!

🍇=🥒✒️🧵: In honesty the jelly is mostly for Neil, but I use wild grape to make a couple of other things here too. The leaves are perfect to pop in fermenting pickles, and I use the berries to make ink, and the vine to make drawing charcoal. In a pinch, I’ve used the vine as twine.

🍇☠️: A word of caution — wild grape is all over Ontario roadsides, but so are pesticides and poisons. Many cities (including ours) spray their roadsides, so be very very picky about where you forage wild foods. Toxic lookalikes like Canadian moonseed also exist. There’s no shame in enjoying a nice homemade strawberry jam on toast if you don’t feel you can forage safely. Strawberry jam is delicious.

Hope you’re having a grape week folks! 💜

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not foraging fungi mushrooms wild inklings

Magic Mushrooms


🍄💙: Found these blue-tiful mushrooms in a friend’s forest on Sunday. I ID it as a Lactarius indigo. Lactarius are known as “milk mushrooms”, because when cut they “bleed” a milky fluid. And that liquid can be some fantastic colours! Just look at that blue!!

🍄✒️: I brought home a sample mushroom for some ink-speriments. I used the very technical approach of squooshing the mushroom cap and bottling what came out (bottom right). It’s a lovely colour in the vial, though natural inks sometimes don’t dry as vibrant as the source. But I had a feeling this ink might dry the exact colour of a nuthatch. And it did! Soooo…Lactarius nuthatchii? I’ll keep checking back on this little birb to see how the colour holds up over time.

👩‍🔧🎨: If you’re curious about wild inks, I’ll be facilitating a Painting With Plants workshop at the end of September. (Workshop will be held outdoors.) More details to come, but feel free to DM us if you’d like the full info when available!

🎨🌿: Nuthatch is painted with Lactarius indigo, acorns, oak galls, and goldenrod. Detailed with soot ink and a quill pen.

🍄☠️: Friendly reminder not to squoosh mushrooms you don’t know. Ontario also has deadly toxic mushrooms and some are fruiting right now. Squoosh responsibly friends.

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE repair

I have a handle on it now

SNAP! The handle broke off in my hand.

I’ve been working on this automata in my spare time for weeks. It’s a bit intricate, and has a quite a few moving parts. (Literally.) I had it all working. I handmade wooden gears fercryingoutloud. And during final assembly, as I got it ready for glue-up, the axle snapped in two.

Am I looking for a reason to stop, or a way to keep going?

I ask myself this sometimes, when I get frustrated. It helps me notice whether my brain is helping or hindering. When I’m building something, repairing something, baking something, making something. When something goes wonky, when it gets tough. When the soup tastes like hot garbage or the light won’t turn on or the part doesn’t fit.

Like the Saturday before last, when I hit one too many tool challenges in a row, and decided to handle it by… crying. It happens. I didn’t want to keep going, I wanted to declare everything everywhere stupid and go sulk. But what I know for sure, even while being a grumpy hothead, is that won’t get me where I want to go. Fall down seven times, get up eight.

Okay. It snapped. What I built once, I can build twice. So I exclaimed a few words that would make a sailor blush, and then switched tasks. All that’s changed is what I’m working on next. Take a moment to grieve, then drill out the old glued-in dowel. Source a new one, get sanding. I can rebuild him. Better, stronger, faster!

As much as I’m working on making this automata, I’m also working on my ability to keep going. Every maker I know has finely honed this skill in themselves. They work on it at least as much as they work on their craft. They work on it by trying again. And again and again. And maybe one more time after that.

All the speedbumps I know how to go over, it’s because of Past Me. Sometimes she gives up, sure. Yes, I’m a hothead, and I can bail with the best of them. But everything I know how to navigate today is credit to her. I’m super grateful for every time she kept going. Even and especially when it suuuuuuucked. I want Future Me to be able to look back on Today Me and say the same thing. I want to make her proud.

Have a great week folks!