I made shoes!

October 21, 2014

...style prevalent in Europe, particularly Northern Europe, from about 900 to 1400AD. The shoe is constructed inside out, and only turned right way around in the final stages. Thus, “turnshoe.”. (The act of turning the shoes inside out takes time and considerable finger strength. We called the turning “shoe birthing” — as it required a good deal of grunting and cursing, but resulted in a beautiful newborn shoe.) The result of this technique is that...

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023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

Mr. Homegrown

October 29, 2014

Domesticus, Podcasts

5 Comments

...icle on the laborers who moderate social media comments. Earth Skills Shoe making classes offered by laughingcrowe.com Sewing classes at Sew L.A. We’ll add a link for Randy’s website when he finishes it–in the meantime, if you’re within striking distance of Santa Barbara and are interested in shoe making lessons, go ahead and shoot us an email at rootsimple at gmail dot com and we’ll hook you up with Randy. If you want to leave a question for the...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

Mrs. Homegrown

January 9, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

36 Comments

...oint we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first read about the book, I understood the gist of it, but...

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Easy Scandinavian-Style Bread

Mrs. Homegrown

October 8, 2015

Food, Recipes

7 Comments

...ough starter, take on the mantle (or apron?) of Household Baker, and start making these loaves myself, but I’m already taking on extra chores with him off his feet, so I’m not inclined to take up this one as well. Yet we can’t live two months without good bread. What to do? Fortunately, I’ve found a solution to our bread crisis: a perfectly good yeasted recipe which makes a dense whole grain loaf with minimal effort. No starter. No kneading. No ri...

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Ghee for the skin

Mrs. Homegrown

January 30, 2015

Body Care, Herbal Medicine

11 Comments

...he way it feels. More will follow, I am sure. I’m going to experiment with making body butter and lip balm with it. Do any of you use ghee for medicine or skin care? (Also, I’ll be making my own ghee soon, and will post on that, but in the meantime, there are loads of recipes for it out there. It’s basically just boiled butter–anybody can make it. You can also find it ghee in many “regular” super markets these days, as well as in health food store...

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