Search Results for: label/art of memory

140 results

Indigo 101

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Gardening, Herbs
5 Comments
Graham stirs the vat with his “witchy stick” –which is tinted many beautiful shades of blue. One of the primary lessons of gleaned from my Shibori Challenge is that cotton is difficult to dye with natural dyes, whereas wool and silk take these colors beautifully. Know your materials! Building on that, I’ve also figured out that the reason indigo dye is the favored dye for shibori techniques is because indigo ge...

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Birds on a Wire

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus
10 Comments
A neighbor told me this morning that when the house next door to him was for sale the owners asked him not to hang laundry on his clothesline because it would, “bring down their property value.” And, of course, many housing developments have the same anti-clothesline restriction. Is it some distant cultural memory of 19th century tenement buildings, an id-based Ralph Kramden, an intense fear of anything urban? Maybe this clever desi...

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Revolution: A New TV Series About Extreme Suburban Homesteading

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
35 Comments
es, primarily coal and natural gas. And we use a lot of oil, of course, to grow our food. Our technology, especially the internet and smart phones has radically externalized what used to be  collective and individual cultural memory. It’s notable that this story places so much value on a flash drive as a repository of knowledge that used to be inside our own skulls. The delusional aspects of the pilot episode gives me great pause for the fu...

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Emergency water storage

Mrs. Homegrown
Preparedness, Water and Power
24 Comments
: If you suspect that your water is contaminated–for instance, if after an emergency you doubt the cleanliness of the water from the tap, you should take steps to purify it before drinking. These are things to commit to memory, or maybe pin on the fridge, because in an emergency, you probably will not be able to check the internet. Boil it:  If you have the fuel, you can purify water by bringing it to a rolling boil for 1 to 3 minutes.  Ble...

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Summer Urban Homestead Failures: Exploding Beer Bottles

Mr. Homegrown
Beer, Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
Somehow in last week’s roundup of the summer’s failures I blocked out of my memory the most exasperating: exploding beer bottles. I think I may have had a contaminated siphon hose which passed on some nasty, yeasty bacterial bug to every single bottle of two batches of beer I had made this summer. Three of those bottles over-carbonated to the point that they became beer grenades and exploded. One blew up on the kitchen counter and...

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Thoughts on Samhain

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
10 Comments
ead, the sainted dead and the faithful departed, respectively. And All Soul’s Day is better known around here as Dia de los Muertos (and celebrated in style). Face it, this is the time of year to deal with mortality and memory. Halloween is lots of fun. (I love the genial anarchy of both Halloween and Fourth of July–they’re my favorite holidays.) So I save Oct. 31st for trick o’ treaters and parties and celebrate Samhain o...

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Everlasting Flower for Colds

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Foraging, Herbal Medicine
5 Comments
n doing anything but riding it out. The one I have this week is more of a typical head cold, and  a good chance for a field test. And I can say that I think they helped. But I’m not sure how. My confusion is a result of memory vs. notes. I remember James saying he takes this tea instead of Day Quill whenever he has a cold. So, having the flowers on hand, I took the tea expecting it to act like cold medicine. Because the effects are so subtl...

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Out Of The In Box

Mr. Homegrown
Design
6 Comments
id. Dwell Magazine did an interview with Isaacs recently: After I complained about hippie aesthetics in a previous post, an astute reader countered that hippies are the only people who have done grassroots building in recent memory. Good point. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, during the “great recession”, we’re revisiting books such as this one rather than heading to Ikea....

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Avatar: I’m not lovin’ it.

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
34 Comments
ed veteran, now fully smurfed-out, uses a spear to tip over the corporate general who is walking around in a top-heavy robot thingy. Sigourney Weaver dies and gets sucked up into the Gaia Hypothesis Shrub. Or, that’s my memory of it. I got kinda distracted by the 3D Imax Sensurround experience. As for Avatar’s ideas about nature, one of Cameron’s workers must have done a brief one page summary of Paul Stamet’s mushroom wri...

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