I made shoes!

As regular Root Simple readers know, I’ve been obsessing on making shoes for some time now, but was not able to wrap my mind around the process without help. Help arrived this weekend in the form of the wonderful–and wonderfully patient– Randy Fritz, who taught me and four other intrepid souls how to make turnshoes over the course of the last 4 days. Lesson 1: As we have all suspected, shoes are not easy to make. Seriously not easy. Four full day...

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023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

...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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2014: The Year in Review

...eatly reduced my sugar intake overall and I’m more conscious of sugar when making decisions at the grocery store (it’s in everything!). Personally, I plan on revisiting the sugar issue. My new fresh, homemade muesli habit (thanks to the Komo FlicFloc) has allowed me to completely eliminate sugar for breakfast. June Hipster Compost and How to Make Stock In June I pondered local sources for compostable materials (but did not compost hipsters, as som...

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Worth Doing From Scratch: Corn Tortillas

...f that’s easy and economical. Now you should be suspicious of any tortilla making advice dispensed by a gabacho. Let’s just say it’s easy and the results are way better than those dry tortillas you buy at the store. Some things I’ve learned: I have a cast iron tortilla press that works great but my Mexicano friends in the know suggested a wooden press. Making masa from scratch is a huge amount of work and I’ve done just fine with supermarket masa...

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William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

...l dazed at the thought of the immensity of work which is undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an instructive day’s work for any one of us who is strong enough to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants...

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