Shoemaking Advice?

September 13, 2013

...ave any of you made your own shoes? I’m looking for good resources on shoe making: books, videos, etc. I’d also love to hear stories of successes or failures or lessons learned. I’d like to make leather, soft-soled shoes as first project perhaps moccasins, perhaps something more structured. I have two books right now. One is Shoes for Free People, by David & Inger Runk, published in 1976 in Santa Cruz. As you might expect, it is highly groovy. And...

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Saturday Linkages: A Mega-Reference for Homesteaders

Mr. Homegrown

September 14, 2013

Saturday Linkages

3 Comments

...oes pneumatic http://hackaday.com/2013/09/13/tooth-fairy-goes-pneumatic/ … Making Nikola Tesla a Saint Makes Us All Dumber http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/making-nikola-tesla-a-saint-makes-us-all-dumber-1308034624 … Let’s really make backyard hens legal in Pasadena CA! http://www.change.org/petitions/let-s-really-make-backyard-hens-legal-in-pasadena-ca?share_id=QwPdcnLXHr&utm_campaign=twitter_link_action_box&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_peti...

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Hoshigaki Season

Mr. Homegrown

November 26, 2013

Food, Food Preservation

9 Comments

...ime to make hoshigaki, a Japanese delicacy made by hanging peeled persimmons up in a window to dry. Hoshigaki are chewy and subtly sweet. The texture of hoshigaki is different than what you would get if you just put persimmons in a dehydrator. And if all goes right the sugar comes to the surface making it look like the fruit has been dipped in powdered sugar. If you can find them in a Japanese market they are extremely expensive. And the ones I sa...

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I made shoes!

Mrs. Homegrown

October 21, 2014

Domesticus

32 Comments

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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Meet our book & web designer: Roman Jaster

Mrs. Homegrown

March 14, 2014

Miscellaneous

2 Comments

Roman Jaster is the gifted designer who designed both Making It and this very website for us. He recently gave a Visiting Designer talk about his work at his alma mater, CalArts and made that lecture public on YouTube. In it, he talks about his childhood in East Germany, the decisions he made early-on which determined his career, his working methods (which are really interesting, combining coding with design) and talks about the concepts behind s...

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