May’s Challenge

Although I come up with a lot of adventures (”I’m going to rent an RV and drive to Alaska!”) during the course of a normal day, most are not enacted.  However, my recent idea about shopping locally for a month, well, that’s going to happen.  In May.  Austin stores only. Althought I’m sure that some things will prove to be a challenge, Austin has that whole buy-local-Keep-Austin-Weird thing going on. There’s also the Austin Independent Business Alliance.  In general, Austin’s pretty independent-business friendly, and the southern part of Austin I live in has that attitude in spades.

Hey look, it’s where I am right now (Austin Java)!  I’ll still be able to come here in May.

Not that there aren’t some spoilsports around here.  College Station (home of Texas A&M) has an anti-Austin program called “Keep College Station Normal” and there are plenty of unweird pro-corporate types right here.  Boo.

Overall, I think it will be an interesting experiment, and my brother (who, in addition to his other pursuits, is something of an economist!) has offered to explain to me some of why shopping locally makes a material difference, as opposed to just being a fruity hippie pointless exercise in anti-corporate bitching.  I think it might also be a very tasty experiment, regardless of the potential economic and ecological benefits.I can definitely shop at the Sunset Valley farmer’s market!

Wild onions and garlic from the farmer’s market waiting to be sauteed with mushrooms and chicken. I love wild onions.  I particularly love onion flowers.

So, we shall see what happens.  I shall also see what sorts of rules to apply as far as what’s local.  I wonder if I’m going to be able to buy shoes…

Meanwhiles, from yesterday some of my favorite Earth Day posts: (and other stuff I found as a result)

From Curbly, we have Bonnie’s Plants in biodegradable pots.  This is wonderful.  I tend to kill plants while transplanting them.  Perhaps this will help my black thumb.  Did I mention I came up with an idea for an indoor greenhouse for herbs & small veggies yesterday?

Scrap Organic Cotton Fabric from Natural America’s manufacturing.  Sometimes they have left over batting, too.

Revisiting the Worsted Witch’s post on cleaning supplies and the cute bottles you can put them in.

Soaps Gone Buy some great classic cleaning products. Not that I like cleaning, but c’mon, it’s Fels Naptha and about 20 different kinds of borax products!  Oh, what, you never made soap?  Well, I can’t help you.  This is exciting.

Re-Nest had a post on a Billion ideas for Using Lemons for Household Cleaning.  Got to try these.  Good excuse to have a lemon tree in my nonexistent backyard!

A billion alternatives to commercial cleaning products at the Ecology Center, clean your whole home with baking soda, and a lot of suggestions for using tea tree oil (I love this stuff, but it’s an acquired smell) from Treehugger.

Interested in the book Clean House, Clean Planet for alternatives to chemical cleaners from a pro.

Ever heard of needle punch embroidery?

Today’s another show-and-tell, this time from Jeff’s grandmother. It seems that Dolly was like many a crafter - she collected stuff, and she held onto what she didn’t use. A couple of weekends ago his mom and I went through the boxes of things she had collected to see what was what. I love other people’s collections of crafting paraphernalia, particularly when some of it is rather old. You never know what kinds of designs and crafts you’re going to find.

So here’s a few things from her collection, a collection not unlike many crafters. It’s not huge (well, her button collection is) but it’s representative of someone with many interests, and it’s representative of several decades, too. It’s it many ways a typical stash, one that brings back memories for the people who know it. My husband remembers his grandmother embroidering with that thread, and she made him a shirt from that blue plaid material with pearl buttons.

I think maybe I like this picture the best, because it has memory for me, even though I wasn’t around for this … Those yarn potholder-type-hotpads are something that Jeff and I got from his grandmother’s friend Lola for our wedding. The fabric is still neatly packaged, very much a project for a busy woman. The type of embroidery hoops there tell me when they were purchased - they don’t actually hold fabric that well, but I’ll tell you, they’re going to make awesome frames. And the Star Trek pin is pure grandson - Dolly saved three of his Star Trek pins

Tools are always great - crafting mostly takes tools of some sort, and so you can really tell what sorta things somebody did by their tools. What they were interested in, what they used a lot, what they thought about and never did. Painting, crochet, beading, tatting, knitting … I’m definitely going to have to learn to tat now.

My favorite of the bunch is definitely this bonnet. Jeff’s mom actually found 2 different bonnets.

This bonnet is the one that still has color in the fabric, obviously a nice, ruffled bonnet for good use. I find it interesting that you can totally take it apart with the buttons. When I tried it on, the brim was so huge that if fell down over my nose.
But you can see the strength of the sun in these babies. The other one has almost no color left.

Each has a wide brim and a long collar to keep the sun off. The other one actually has about 15 little pockets in the brim for cardboard pieces! The cardboard is replaceable, and it keeps the big floppy brim off your face! Ingenious!

These are truly fabulous. Maybe I just used to like Little House on the Prairie a lot, but … it’s a bonnet!

Oh, oh, and needle punch embroidery? I’d never heard of it before, but here it is. I even have a needle and some fabric and designs. I have no idea what this really is, but apparently there’s still a lot of people doing it. You never know, maybe it will be the Next Big Thing.

I should not be writing this post

This morning at 5:30 a.m. when in the grips of an insomnia so irritating as to actually get me out of my warm bed, I decided that I would swear off the internet forever.  I was going to delete every vestige of all my online accounts, and erase every bit of me in the ether!

I think it goes without saying that I am not very at all rational in the early morning before noon. I’m still not really sure why I thought this was a good idea, other than that I was exhausted, grumpy and needed a nice hot shower and a cuppa joe.

I’m not yet over conference-malaise, and I should just go to bed, and that’s not really too far off.  I just want to go to bed late enough that I can sleep for a good 11 hours tonight straight through.

So in this week’s now-typical style, I present various things running through my head:

1)  Remember that picture I showed you of the woman knitting socks in the SXSW panel? Well, I posted that picture to Flickr, and lo and behold she left a comment!  It’s Julia aka Yarn Maven from Bastrop, Texas.  I didn’t get a chance to get her name in the panel because I got caught up talking to the two founders of BurdaStyle, but I’m so glad to meet her.

2)  I do yammer on sometimes about advocating buying handmade stuff.  But it’s only because I really like it.  Fun thing about buying things I might make myself - still useful, but this way I get to enjoy others’ design aesthetics as well.  Here’s my latest purchases.

On the left is the orange Bouquet wall clock for Jeff’s study from Decoy Lab.  He’s been on an orange thing recently, looking for accessories.  Orange is a great accent.  As seen on February’s Poppytalk selections.

On the right is a sewing case I bought for taking embroidery stuff along with me.  It’s from Blue Banana Shop in Singapore, whose stuff is very bright and cheery.

Pay no attention to my strange collection of books there.  I just realized what those were.  This is part of my collection of academic books on the old Testament.  The one on the far left, Paul the Convert, was written by a professor for whom I was a teaching assistant, my favorite professor from grad school, the inimitable Alan Segal.